A profound, honest reflection on COVID-19 and our mortality. Written for Leonard J. DeLorenzo’s students at Notre Dame, but applicable to all:
The call in this season is to throw off the illusion of invulnerability and live …
'What man needs is silence & warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.' ~Simone Weil
Reading
The Power Broker
Robert A. Caro
The World's Best Virtual Art Galleries
A follow-up to last week’s post: for those who don’t want to sift through 2,000+ options, here are the Financial Times’ picks of the world’s best virtual galleries (the article’s behind a paywall, but here are the links):
Current listening: Pat Metheny, *From This Place* 🎶
I’ve been listening to Pat Metheny’s outstanding new album From This Place.
From the compositions, through the arrangements (Metheny called in Alan Broadbent to help), to the musicianship of drummer Antonio Sanchez, bassist Linda May Han Oh, & …
Singers, among many others, have had their livelihoods cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to COVID-19.
But it turns out you can still make beautiful music together virtually. Here’s my sister-in-law singing Mauricio Duruflé’s Ubi Cartas, as part …
In my extra reading time these days, I’ve been taking @ayjay‘s suggestion to read essays and short stories to heart by reading Chekhov & Montaigne. Also revisiting an old favorite, The Imitation of Christ. 📚
🔗 2,500 museums you can visit virtually
I’m planning on visiting many museums in this way with my kids in the days & weeks to come. 🎨 🖼
Learning to play the piano without a piano 🔗🎶
This is a remarkable story, though disappointingly brief.
“Chelsea are back in fashion – but Roman Abramovich is out in the cold” 🔗 ⚽️
Speaking of Chelsea FC, here’s a fascinating essay by David Conn on owner Roman Abramovich’s rise to oligarch status, purchase of the club, & influence on the EPL:
It is a stretch now to remember how alien it was to England’s traditional …
The Poverty of Economics & The Wealth of Religions: an essay on the limits of the economic analysis of religion. Unsurprisingly, when you struggle to define the object of your analysis, the analysis isn’t particularly illuminating. 🔗
Nothing too surprising in MNUFC’s contract-deadline-day decisions… other than the club unceremoniously cutting loose Miguel Ibarra, one of our best & longest-tenured players. At the very least, letting him go for nothing seems like bad …
Money & Government: Against Economics 🔗
From a long, but very readable review by David Graeber of Robert Skidelsky’s new book, Money & Goverment: The Past & Future of Economics:
Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say …
Andrew Delblanco on Rethinking the Puritans 🔗
From a review essay in The Nation entitled (brilliantly) “Vexed and Trouble Englishmen”:
Rodgers’s book is not only a close reading of the reception and history of Winthrop’s speech but also a rescue operation for Puritanism itself. Rather than …
Wendell Berry’s essay “The Pleasures of Eating”—beautifully illustrated and with a new introduction by Alice Water—has just been republished by Emergence Magazine.
Two Views On Art and Politics 🔗
Will Arbery:
It basically boils down to a dissatisfaction with the ending, on both sides. People want a clear thesis, or they want to know what my diagnosis is. On both sides, you hear, like, Clearly, he’s still confused and doesn’t know where he …
Hjemkomst
Spent the morning at the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead. It’s a history museum centered (literally) around a large ship, the Hjemkomst, built by a Moorhead man and sailed to Norway. It’s a remarkable place; we all loved the story and were fascinated by …
Ethan Iverson's ECM Artist's Choice Playlist 🎶
I’ve been exploring the ECM Artist’s Choice playlist curated by pianist Ethan Iverson (available on Apple Music & Tidal).
It was cool enough to have these ECM tracks hand-picked by him. But then I discovered that he has also annotated …