If you have not read Louis Menand’s massive, 857-page study of the arts in America from 1945 to 1965, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, you are missing, not an intellectual treat but an intellectual feast of the highest order. A more accurate title might be New York in the Fifties,…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Mats Öljare—“Played Twice”
Posted by Mats, aka “Adolf Hedgehog”
Israel versus Palestine: When Dreams Collide
“What a dreary compromise is life!” exclaimed the hero of Norman Mailer’s abortive magnum opus, The Man Who Studied Yoga.1 And so life is a dreary compromise for most of us, which is why we go to films to see people who do all the things we don’t do in real life, like punch out…
Donald Trump not a nice person, Clive Crook discovers.
No, he’s not. It took Clive awhile to figure it all out, but now it’s all coming into focus. Says Clive, a British chap who hangs his hat at Bloomberg after previous stints at the Economist and the Financial Times, The country should be terrified by this looming absurdity [a second term for Trump], as…
Michael Brendan Dougherty, bending the knee. And moistening the lips. At both ends.
Sure it’s tough. Those old knees don’t bend easily. But when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Over at the National Review, old Michael Brendan Dougherty is gently but persistently massaging those knobby and obdurate joints in preparation for November 2024 in a pithy piece entitled Not Trump Again / Only Trump, describing…
Takeshi Fukushima—“Played Twice”
Posted by Takeshi Fukushima
The Republican Party: Now with 6% fewer murders!
Back in 2006, right-wing Republican panjandrum Ramesh Ponnuru published The Party of Death, a book aggressively attacking the Democratic Party for its embrace of “abortion rights”, or, as Ramesh, and the Republican Party, described it, murder! For if, as the Republican platform claims, every human fetus, from the moment of conception, is, or should be,…
Democracy dies in the darkness, and the Washington Post just turned off the light.
This is the truth the Washington Post thinks you can’t handle. Does Hamas use civilians as human shields? Uh, yeah. Does Hamas indiscriminately murder civilians as a way of making a political point? Uh, yeah. Should this be said out loud? Uh, no. “Explains” WashPost editorial page editor David Shipley, “Our section [of the Post]…
There is some good in all of us, some of the time
Today is Mea Culpa day at the Literature R Us corral, when I pause to stop making vicious fun of people I generally don’t like, like Eugene “Jan. 6? Wasn’t that a Tuesday?” Volokh and Ross “Yeah, I think it was a Tuesday” Douthat because, well, because they impressed me. I’ll talk about Gene first,…
Greg Grisbert—“Played Twice”
Hard to find videos of “Played Twice” for some reason. Greg on trumpet, and featuring Chris Potter, tenor, Steve Wilson, alto, John Campbell, piano, Peter Washington, bass, and Billy Drummond, drums. Posted by Greg Gisbert Sextet.