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,…
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The Washington Post shocks too easily
17 fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot, the Washington Post announces, in a long piece by reporters Faiz Siddiqui and Jeremy B. Merrill. What does Tesla dude Elon Musk have to say? Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that cars operating in Tesla’s Autopilot mode are safer than those piloted solely by…
Yo, Fareed Zakaria! Biden administration national security advisor Jake Sullivan is not “fiercely intelligent”! Unless by “fiercely intelligent” you mean “totally stupid”!
The good news is that we have a “Biden Doctrine”, says the WashPost’s Fareed Zakaria. The bad news is, it’s a Biden doctrine. Innocently spelling out the bad news for us is Biden national security dude Jake Sullivan—“fiercely intelligent”, Fareed tells us, fiercely, as though a little afraid that Jake might punch him out at…
Yo, “conservatives”! Haven’t you heard? You’re totally f*cked!
Yes, it’s schadenfreude time around the Literature ‘R Us corral once more, and, yes, it is morally lazy in the extreme to snicker at the other side’s weaknesses without considering one’s own, but life is short, after all, and we’ll soon be in the clay, so before we submit to the clammy embrace of viscous…
Why, oh, why can’t we have better UCal Berkeley Economics Professors?
I agree with UCal Berkeley econ dude Brad DeLong maybe 75% of the time, though I almost always confine my comments about him to the 25%. Well, this is one of those times. Like so many of the cool kids, Brad has a substack blog, Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality and recently he took what struck…
Is Ross Douthat smarter than Joe Biden? Probably.
I have, in the past, beat on poor Ross Douthat so lustily that the poor man recently moved to have me declared a public nuisance. But now I feel compelled to admit that, despite the appalling mendacity of his pseudo “Never Trumper” posturing/apologetics, Ross can still serve an occasional winner, and he did so with…
This is why we can’t have nice public toilets
Well, actually, we can. This is an existing public toilet in San Francisco—note the charming pumpkin tile to match the fall foliage (when it’s, you know, fall). It’s just that we can’t have too many of them, because they cost about $1.7 million apiece and take about three or four years to build. Slate’s Henry…
Is the Woke Post waking up just a little? Well, north of the Potomac, yeah!
Okay, I’m impressed. Last week, the Washington Post ran the following editorial, Another promising charter school is wrongly rejected by Montgomery County, in which the Post rightfully complained about the state of affairs regarding charter schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, which supposedly have been kosher in MC since 1998. Said the Post But more than…
Burning the Bonfire: Vanneman does Salamon does De Palma does Wolfe
(Editor’s Note: In 1987, Tom Wolfe published a novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. In 1990, Brian De Palma directed the film version. In 1991, Julie Salamon published The Devil’s Candy, her chronicle of the making of the film. In 2022, I read her book and wrote this article.) The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom…
Socio-political notes from all over
God Bless Niall Ferguson! (Pretty much) It’s hard to think of anyone I have trashed so consistently and so contemptuously as Niall Ferguson, whom I once grudgingly praised with a thoroughly uncivil leer as a Thelonious Monk-loving slimeball, while also urging readers not to read his then most recent book, whose title will go unmentioned…