Modernity

Looks like a nice place to be, Amtrak in the 70s.

Articulating the obvious re the Facebook: it’s a menace.

“Yesterday we had a fight about whether I’d been dismissive about him saying his feelings had been hurt by my dismissing his feelings during a previous fight…” From the amusing but very dark Narcissism: a reflection by Laura Kipnis in Spiked.

Headlines say 2016 hottest year ever. Yes, 0.01°C hotter than 2015. But working from statistics that claim a margin of error of 0.1°C! Ah, truthiness.

The world’s most (only?) prescient columnist takes a step back to show us where Russia and China are similar and different to America. This article is one for these new times, to be sure.

Ian Buruma on Brussels. I found it a pretty exciting city so when I saw this article I jumped on it (plus I vaguely remember being impressed by something else this fellow wrote) and it’s pretty sweeping and fun.

Francis Fukuyama coins and explains vetocracy. The intricacies are bamboozling—which is the point. Seems to me that fixing this is the first domino.

Witty, prescient pre-mortem by the mendacious documentarian Michael Moore on 5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win.

“The press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.’ Salena Zito in this September 23 article in The Atlantic. What a thing.

Also Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept.

And What I learned after 100,000 miles on the road talking to Trump supporters by Chris Arnade in The Guardian.

Video and transcript of Peter Thiel’s speech to the National Press Club on his support for Trump.. Government isn’t the problem, pisspoor government is.

Visiting Poland, George Weigel articulates the current civilizational crisis.

Now that I’ve joined eyeem.com, I was attracted to this article on Instagram and art history. “Today, we look at Instagram feeds with the same level of scrutiny as the Renaissance merchants who converted their Madonnas into ducats.” He argues persuasively and enjoyably that we are being just like Amsterdam burghers.

Dali’s Destino for Disney.

The Guardian interviews Brunhilde Pomsel, Goebbels’ secretary, now 105, who retired in 1971 as executive secretary to the director of programmes at Germany state broadcaster.

Nicholas Dames’s Publications page. The man is Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and a mine of gems.

On “the Weimar aspect of our current moment”: I haven’t read Andrew Sullivan for a long time, but he seems to be hitting it here, Democracies end when they are too democratic, in New York magazine.

Life meets Goblin. Franky Zapata flies his Flyboard Air in Monaco during the Grand Prix on May 29th, 2016 [via my Dad].

A recent primer on how society can handle religion.

Nice piece on poetic military language with examples from the Israeli, American and British experiences.

Good point: Islam has already had its reformation: Wahabism. So what to do? Nice article at patheos.com.

Possibly the world’s most important story at the moment? American middle-class impoverishment, or as the author—himself afflicted—calls it, financial impotence.

The Weekly Standard again. Trump as Burr, and what Hamilton did.

The Weekly Standard visits Jerusalem’s new Shalem liberal arts college.

From this BBC article: “It’s surprising how often the UK seems to be more like the Scandinavian countries than anywhere else.”

You owe it to yourself and to the rest of us to watch and listen to “Bohemian Rhapsody” played on a church organ by blind organist Bert van den Brink.

A professor of medieval history laments the contemporary propensity to be surveilled just as Europeans were by the Church. [Via aldaily.com]

Quite the sentence, this, from Walter Russell Mead: “Products of meritocratic selection who hold key positions in the social machine, the bien-pensant custodians of post-historical ideology—editorial writers at the NY Times, staffers in cultural and educational bureaucracies, Eurocratic functionaries, much of the professoriat, the human rights priesthood and so on—are utterly convinced that they see farther and deeper than the less credentialed, less educated, less tolerant and less sophisticated knuckle-dragging also-rans outside the magic circle of post-historical groupthink.”

A week in Berlin, where all anyone can talk about is refugees, and the author observes: “All this moral unction reminds me of the reality-challenged 1920s in Europe, which gave rise to the very ugly 1930s.”

Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, talks to Die Zeit about Germany’s own debt relief and the proper way forward now.

On decoupling homosexuality from gayness, and more interestingly, vice versa.

In case it’s of interest/relevance, a translation of Hamas’s charter.

By looking the other way and unconditionally supporting and arming Maliki, President Obama has only lengthened and expanded the conflict that President Bush unwisely initiated, argues — nay, explains — a US official who saw it all. A must-read.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about this much-lauded essay on America’s post-WWII hegemony is that it was written at all, that our world order is receding so far so fast that we, or at least Robert Kagan, can see outside it.

The squat, the perch—a reminder that we are not designed to defacate in seating position.

Devising tailor-made rules of international law for application only where Israel is concerned undermines international law and can have an insidious and corrosive effect on the rule of law in general.

Sorry, but more David P. Goldman, this time at Tablet with “Dumb and Dumber” (not his title) on recent US Middle East policy. He begins: “Errors by the party in power can get America into trouble; real catastrophes require consensus.” Like liberals, neocons got mugged by reality.

The horror, the horror. Spengler looks at Syria. What we’ve seen so far, he says, are merely the preliminary skirmishes of Sunni-Shi’ite war.

Cary Grant’s 1963 op-ed in This Week magazine on dressing well.

Peres and the Pope as covered by the Voice of America (Reuters). This meeting has not gotten much coverage.

Older parents like us are perhaps a severe problem.

Adam Garfinkle at The American Interest waxes catholic and sensible on the runaway American health care system — or, more accurately, disease repair system.

All 8 Kraftwerk shows at Tate Modern, £60 per, sold out quicker than the museum’s servers could handle.

Loudness, pitch and timbre: in a study, newer pop music really does all sound the same.