Finished reading: Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts 📚
Finished reading: Bells In Winter by Czeslaw Milosz 📚
Bill Russell, Track & Field, & Learning to Learn 🏀🔗
R.I.P., Bill Russell—an amazing athlete and man. Tributes to Russell reminded of an essay by a former professor of mine, Edward Griffin, entitled “Hoops & Hurdles: The Unlikely Story of How I Learned to Learn,".
It’s an absolutely delightful, astonishing reflection on Griffin’s time on the USF track & field & JV basketball teams—while Russell (on varsity basketball, of course) was dominating the NCAA.
There is a wild cameo about halfway through the essay that I guarantee you won’t expect. It relates to Russell’s fiercest competitor when he walks onto the USF track & field team.
In life and work alike, his contradictions are pressed together like layers in metamorphic rock. It is in the nature of monoliths not to grow old.
~Alex Ross on Thomas Mann, in the New Yorker. My favorite Mann is The Magic Mountain—it speaks with clarity to our world. 🔗📚
Finished reading: McGilchrist, *The Master & His Emissary* 📚
I finally finished Iain McGilchrist’s The Master & His Emissary this morning. It’s taken me about 6 months, but the time was well spent—the book is as rich in neuroscience and psychology as in historical and cultural analysis, & a profound guide to our current cultural dislocations.
It’s earned a place in my personal pantheon—one of the best books I’ve read, and one I will return to often in years to come. 📚
Thanks to MinnPost for publishing this rich, illuminating portrait of MSP drummer Dave King (of The Bad Plus, Happy Apple, & Julian Lage’s current trio, among many other groups & projects). 🔗🎶🥁
Tanner Greer on substance, not procedure 🔗
The trouble is that the national problems that the extremists fixate on are, for the most part, real. Their solutions are, for the most part, coherent and emotionally compelling. Those who believe these solutions are nevertheless wrongheaded must come out and prove them so. Someone who has determined, for example, that woke politics is destructive should use his wisdom and intelligence to demonstrate why the woke program trends toward disaster—and to provide saner solutions to the problems that wokeness purports to solve. Unlike procedural reforms meant to shore up the control of a passing demographic, these arguments might provide us with the intellectual tools needed to fight off the radicals even after boomer centrists exit the scene.
~ Tanner Greer, “Our Problems Aren’t Procedural”
Max Richter, giving Auden pride of place in his Recomposed Four Seasons headshot. (The album is very good.) 🎶📚
“The Technocrat’s Dilemma” is as concise a framing of our current “misinformation” crisis as we’re likely to get: “The technocratic response to misinformation and conspiracy theory only exacerbates the problem and further validates the most extreme reactions.” 🔗
I basically agree with Gruber’s take on Netflix: Netflix would be better-served by focusing more on quality, less on quantity.
But that raises a question Gruber’s not too interested in exploring (and I’m not really, either, if I’m honest!): what is “quality”? 🔗📺
I relished Roy Foster’s Conversation with Tyler on Irish history, economics, and culture. I read Foster’s Modern Ireland years ago, and I’m eager now to read his books on Yeats and Heaney. 📚 🔗 🎧
“We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes.”
~ Michel Houellebecq, from an excellent profile by Justin E.H. Smith 🔗📚
Glad to see a third-party candidate enter the MN governor’s race. I don’t expect I’ll agree with the whole platform. But I agree with the principle: our current parties are broken beyond repair. 🔗🗳
Put the Oscars out of their misery 🔗 🎞
Most of the ceremonies feature flickers of genuine emotion amid hours of sanctimonious, self-serving or scolding speeches.
~“Opinion: Put the Oscars Out of Their Misery”
Yes. Oddly, this op-ed doesn’t touch on the main reason to get rid of awards shows: we don’t have any agreed-upon aesthetic standards for deciding what’s deserving of awards—so what’s the point?
My rule would be that you’re only allowed to hold an awards ceremony if Ricky Gervais hosts it. There’s nothing better than seeing the looks of horror on the faces of our self-satisfied celebrity class as Gervais relentlessly roasts them.
The world needs more Cavafy 📚
On the absurd counter-productivity of cancelling Russian culture. 🔗
The last thing we need is to assume that once we are confident in our position, there is no more thinking to be done.
In order for people to use social media responsibly—i.e., not get addicted—we essentially have to use these platforms in ways that they were not designed to be used.
Finished reading: Tradition and Apocalypse by David Bentley Hart 📚
Unsurprisingly if you’ve read much DBH, this is a very strange book. I’d highly recommend chapters 1, 6, & 7 for a compelling vision of Christian belief & practice oriented not just to the past but to the future. The middle chapters on Newman & Blondel? Quite dry by comparison.
Finished reading: London’s Fields by Mark Waldon 📚 ⚽️
A delightful oral history looking at some of London’s football clubs: their histories, rivalries, grounds, & fan bases. I most enjoyed chapters on Orient, Millwall, Brentford, Wimbledon, Fulham, & Charlton—clubs that don’t get much attention state-side.