Reading Anthony Domestico’s review of Timothy Murphy’s latest book of poems, I was saddened to learn of Murphy’s stage IV cancer. He’s one of our great poets; the fact that he’s from my hometown, Fargo, has given me a …

I recommend this conversation in Democracy on whether political parties are dying or strengthening, though its conclusion—that parties are essentially content-less platforms—shouldn’t surprise anyone who lived through the last presidential election.

Robin Sloan’s Sourdough: like Mr Penumbra, simply delightful. I’m half done, and can’t put it down. Highly recommended!

Alan Jacobs makes a powerful and persuasive argument for the open web in The Hedgehog Review:

We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls.

A wonderful essay in the TLS on Arnold as poet—his (deliberate) awkwardness, off-rhymes, and the “poetrylessness” of the Victorian age.

Robert Caro’s responses in this NYRB interview are profound, fascinating, and inspiring—as is the portrait of him at his typewriter.

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of …

The Iliad of peace began when this girl agreed. Now goats in trees, fish in the valley suddenly feel vivid.

Swallows flit in the stable as if a hatching of their kind, turned human, cried in the manger showing the hunger-diamond.

Cattle are content …

Samuel Moyn calls for Democrats to restore the liberal internationism that formed the core of its foreign policy, prior to Clinton and the rise of neoliberalism:

A foreign policy based on expansive militarism and endless war is neither liberal nor …

B.D. McClay’s review essay on Mary McCarthy is excellent, homing in on precisely those qualities of her writing that make McCarthy so simultaneously worthwhile and difficult:

If neither God nor political ideology could be counted on as firm …

This delightful essay from Sven Birkerts describes his time with a trio of poet-pals who lived & taught in Boston in the 80s: Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, & (especially) Derek Walcott.

More from that essay on Paul Thomas Anderson:

Such restorative attachments are one response to the epidemic of spiritual hunger and spiritual crisis in Anderson’s American West, where the promise of Manifest Destiny had trailed off into the sea.

Wonderful essay in The Point on Paul Thomas Anderson:

Anderson describes himself as shaped by a casually Catholic upbringing, and in his films ideas about sin and expiation jostle against his distinctly Californian passion for the panaceas of …

Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough.

~ Christian Wiman, quoted in …

I still think the greatest gift you can give your kids is easy exposure to interesting things. Not compelling them to go see things, but making them feel that art and literature are just parts of the world.

~ Adam Gopnik, in a thoughtful profile

Imagine if the New York Review of Books had hired a slightly stoned Edwardian fop as art director and you’ve got … Rolling Stone at its point of highest development.

~ Andrew Ferguson, on Jann Wenner

Very proud of my sister-in-law, Krista Costin, who is performing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the MN Orchestra.

Snack time, listening to and imitating Auntie @kristacostin live on #classicalmpr. Sounds wonderful! #auntikrista #bach

This interview with Sonny Rollins is amazing.

The idea of jazz is so spiritual, and it has such great qualities, that it will always withstand whatever the larger culture is.

I loved fishing and silence. Walking in the hills…. I didn’t talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I’d stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed …

Tonight’s listening: Emerson String Quartet, Chaconnes and Fantasias: Music of Britten and Purcell. It’s beautiful and mysterious music, highly recommended.

Two exceptional recent Commonweal essays:

• David Bentley Hart demolishes an attempt to defend the death penalty
• Samuel Moyn reviews Jeremy Waldron’s new book on equality

While you’re there, go ahead and also read Anthony Domestico on …