The attack on Pearl Harbor came 84 years ago today. We remember those who died that day.
My most played albums in 2025. A pretty typical assortment, I guess.
This little girl would’ve been 102 years old today.
Stoppard was the author of the greatest (imo) English-language play of the last 50 years, “Arcadia," and in “Leopoldstadt," his last play, one of the most wrenching last scenes in the theater.
Happy Thanksgiving!
An up-to-date list from one of my first micro.blog posts.
We live in a world where violating taboos is monetizable and confers enviable status. I like taboos— not all of them, of course. But I respect the role of taboos in society. Good taboos are the guardians of settled questions. They sit like gargoyles at the mouth of dangerous caves and warn against spelunking in dark and dangerous places. …
The riot of taboo-violating and dogma-disinterring is an invitation to consequences few have the courage or the basic knowledge to apprehend.
If … you conjure a world where there is no external truth, only a riot of competing, equally valid perspectives, then you create a Nietzschean world where the only arbiter of “truth” is the one with the will and the power to impose their truth on everyone else.
Hamnet. Lots of ideas told in a happy, sad, and lovely story. Recommended for people who like that kind of thing (of which I’m one). 🍿
Wonderful, from The Public Domain Review: Henri Rivière’s Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1888–1902).
In the coffee shop,
I saw a customer reading a big thick book,
It looked serious, printed on heavy paper, hardback with a jacket.
I tried to see the title, but he packed up
Before I got a look. Now I’ll never know.
A woman sat in the same seat after him.
She also brought a book. This one,
I could see the title.
Comfortable With Uncertainty.
… I am a small-government, traditional conservative who thinks the Constitution is a deeply moral expression of liberalism.
And that’s why I like it.
Unlike the common good constitutionalists and postliberals and many of the nationalists, I think its liberalism is the most important thing about it. Postliberals like to argue that it is simply a morally neutral “procedural document.” Sure, it lays out some procedures. But it does so to codify some of the hardest-learned moral lessons in human history. A fair trial is procedural. Your right to one is a profound moral statement and commitment. Your right to worship, speak, move, and associate as you please may come from God, the author of our rights, but the commitment to recognize and protect those rights is not morally neutral at all. Just because people take these rights for granted doesn’t mean that they’re just the natural landscape. They are hard-won moral victories.
Starting with The Crying of Lot 49; any thoughts before I get very far into it?
James Thomas Watts (1850–1930), Watercolour with scratching out, c. 1885–1895. British Museum
Do you know Dust to Digital? Its Instagram feed of worldwide crowd-sourced musical performances is one of the few good reasons to use IG.
Hot in 1925: “Moonlight Memories” and “Oriental” - from the Library of Congress' National Jukebox
Watched: Past Lives 🍿 Very tender. Excellent acting. I’ll remember it.
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns. My mother shades her eyes and looks my way Over the drifted stream. My father spins A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
I was going to say that my faith, like my doubt, mostly involves my mind and not my stomach. Basically that’s true. I can’t really imagine what it would be like to behold the Lord and not as a stranger. I’m not a saint, so I haven’t had that experience. And yet, even as a not-saint, I get glimpses. I think we all have, and may there be many more of them for all of us.
The Remarkable Ordinary (2017)
Jonah Goldberg:
The kinds of things one might say in private, to close friends, for shock value, as a joke, or out of a shared hateful anger at this group or that, are now welcome or at least tolerated in the public square.
This is but one of Trump’s (and Twitter’s and Reality TV’s, et al.) malignancies: it’s now OK to say nasty things out loud that once were hidden or, at least, circumscribed.
… the stars shone in their watches, and were glad;
he called them, and they said, ‘Here we are!’
They shone with gladness for him who made them.
Who knew tarragon flowers? Not I.