Tuesday, August 11, 2026
From "Amusing Ourselves to Death"
In television teaching, perplexity is a superhighway to low ratings. A perplexed learner is a learner who will turn to another station. This means there must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount.
- Neil Postman
Monday, August 10, 2026
Bring Them Back!
Natalya Murakhver on how the best children's history books were allowed to go out of print.
When I was a child, I read the Random House history series. All of the books were excellent.
Mr. Peretz and His Constellation
From The New Criterion in 2023:
Myron Magnet on The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left, Right and Center by Martin Peretz.
I can recall when Peretz's editing of The New Republic produced a must-read magazine.
First Paragraph
There was a photograph of Frank in an ad that ran in the Detroit Free Press and showed all the friendly salesmen at Red Bowers Chevrolet. Under his photo it said Frank J. Ryan. He had on a nice smile, a styled moustache, and a summer-weight suit made out of that material that's shiny and looks like it has snags in it.
- From Swag by Elmore Leonard
Sunday, August 09, 2026
Saturday, August 08, 2026
Evergreen
"I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University."
- William F. Buckley, Jr.
Friday, August 07, 2026
An Odious and Unwise Endorsement
The American Association of University Professors endorsed a political candidate for the first time in its 110-year history.
Its views, long suspected, are now out in the open.
A Crisis in the Humanities
Quillette: Peter Boghossian writes about the rigid orthodoxy on political issues.
Not to worry. They will defend your right to agree with them.
On Writing
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
- Kurt Vonnegut
[Read the sample from my novel, Pilate's Magician. The book went through numerous drafts.]
Living with Heat
The hottest day in Phoenix was memorable: 122 degrees in 1990.
Somehow all of the "But it's a dry heat" jokes didn't work then. I opened my front door, and it was like opening the door of an oven.
Stunningly hot.
But living in Phoenix is usually akin, I suppose, to living in Alaska: you adjust to the weather. Most places are air-conditioned and there are times when you are only moving about in an air-conditioned car.
[And the winters are marvelous.]
It is expected that our water bills will climb due to the multistate battles over Colorado River water. Much of that is unfair because Arizona has been far more active with water conservation than California.
There is also the sensitive issue of agriculture. Farming can easily take more water than a sub-division, but the state and the nation will pay a price if the farms disappear.
In the meantime, we're optimistic. The predicted high temperature for today is 104 degrees. Some rain is expected next week.
Thursday, August 06, 2026
The Paradox of The Information State
And herein lies a central paradox of the information state. The great ills that it seeks to remedy, such as disinformation, are themselves products of the very thing, namely the surveillance- and attention-based Internet, on which the state relies. That is why, throughout all the outcry about the evils done by Facebook or Twitter, the politicians who are loudest in condemning those platforms do not take the obvious step of seeking to make them less powerful. Their aim is not to reform or rebuild the repressive infrastructure of the Internet, only to make it serve their own interests.
- From The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob Siegel
Wednesday, August 05, 2026
The Arday Scandal
The Free Beacon on the scandal involving the youngest black professor in Cambridge history.
Random Thoughts
A qualified compliment is an alarm bell. ~ Any business lunch that involves Chinese food or BBQ is likely to be well-attended. ~ In general, you should avoid the novels of Graham Greene if you're depressed. ~ Breaking exercise into small segments makes it more difficult to avoid. ~ Whether to replace a trip to a conference with a trip to the mountains or the beach should not be a difficult decision. ~ Before proceeding with a major decision, explore the assumptions. ~ A new word is needed to describe the modern news media's unique blend of incompetence and bias. ~ I wonder if colleges will even have majors in 2030. ~ Let's bring back postcards as a charming way of updating one another. ~ It is easy to work alongside heroes and not realize it, but the same cannot be said of fools. ~ One of the many gifts that Israel has inadvertently given to supporters of Western Civilization is that of shared enemies. ~ Networking events may give you some meaningful connections but volunteer work for the good of the community will definitely do so. ~ How can we preserve the values produced by farm families if farms continue to be replaced by real estate developments? ~ Much of research involves determining which material can be ignored. ~ If you want to be shunned by someone either loan them money or do them a favor. ~ One of the biggest mistakes of people who speak the same language is assuming that they share the same meanings.
Tuesday, August 04, 2026
Not That This Would Be Subject to Abuse
Brownstone Institute: The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention considered establishing a national system of quarantine camps.
[HT: Joel Engel]
Read This!
Myron Magnet explores how Rudy Giuliani made New York City great again.
[Photo by Getty Images at Unsplash+]
Monday, August 03, 2026
Fauci and China
Writing in City Journal, Nicholas Wade (no relation) examines where the blame rests for the pandemic.
An excerpt:
Fauci did not defend the natural origin position at Senator Paul’s hearing. In his long silences—he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, despite his 2025 pardon from President Biden—even his supporters could hear a failure to deny some incontrovertible facts. He supported an extensive program of gain of function research without seeking the public advice and consent of independent scientific experts. He let his grantees fund dangerous viral manipulations at the Wuhan Institute in unsupervised and unsafe laboratory conditions. When the SARS-CoV2 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, as it almost certainly did, he engineered a seemingly independent report that blamed the pandemic on nature instead of on the research that he had calamitously funded.
First Paragraph
We set off in an open cart drawn by four whip-scarred little oxen and piled high with equipment and provisions. No medieval knight could have been more closely armoured than were Tilly and I, against the rays of the sun. A mushroom-brimmed hat, built of two thicknesses of heavy felt and lined with red flannel, protected her creamy complexion, a long-sleeved white blouse clasped her by the neck, and a heavy skirt of khaki drill fell to her booted ankles.
- From The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood by Elspeth Huxley
Sunday, August 02, 2026
Saturday, August 01, 2026
Books for Children
Sippican Cottage: I Read All These Books and Boy Are My Lips Tired.
[I'm flashing back to when many children's books had the works of great illustrators such as Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth.]
A Greater Enlightenment
Joel Kotkin: "Scientists Who Believe in God Are Challenging the Expert Atheist Establishment."
An excerpt:
The rise of religiously oriented scientists represents a challenge to the "established" ultra-secular scientific establishment whose credibility was undermined by their adding political dogma to their research. This includes such absurdities as insisting there are more than two biological sexes.
Friday, July 31, 2026
First Paragraph
It was May 14. In a few days my class back in Jamestown, North Dakota would be graduating from high school, and I was in Singapore.
- From Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L'Amour
Lake Sebago
I have come to look forward to Stephen Landry's annual vacation at Lake Sebago.
The man worked at a university so he's used to dealing with loons.
As Europe Crumbles
I recall posting warnings about Europe's uncontrolled and slipshod borders policies years ago when books by Douglas Murray, Christopher Caldwell, Mark Steyn, and Bruce Bawer were sounding the alarm.
Some readers claimed it was an overreaction and that the numbers were nothing to be worried about.
Their views were either shared at top governmental levels or the decision makers actually wanted to produce chaos.
I confess that the latter explanation is not as crazy as it may seem. These are not stupid people.
But they are duplicitous.
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Substack: Eclectic Collections of Demonstrators
Beware of assuming good will. Not everyone wants the best.
[Photo by Karollyne Videira Hubert at Unsplash]
First Paragraph
When Elena Lang went missing, Sebastian Wolff couldn't work out what all the fuss was about.
- From Evil in High Places by Rory Clements
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Living a Better Life
Nicholas Bate reveals his favorite book in the Companion series.
It is mine as well.
First Paragraph
On 2 August 216 BC the Carthaginian General Hannibal won one of the most complete battlefield victories in history. Outnumbered nearly two to one, his heterogenous army of Africans, Spaniards and Celts not merely defeated, but virtually destroyed the Roman army opposing them. By the end of the day, nearly 50,000 Roman and Allied soldiers lay dead or were dying in an area of a few square kilometres, whilst between ten and twenty thousand more were prisoners. Less than 20% of one of the largest armies ever fielded by the Roman State survived to reform over the next few weeks. Cannae became the yardstick by which the Romans measured later catastrophes, but only one or two defeats in their history were ever judged to have been as bad. The scale of the losses at Cannae was unrivalled until the industrialized slaughter of the First World War.
- From Cannae: Hannibal's Greatest Victory by Adrian Goldsworthy
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Hmm
The first names of the authors of Amazon's "First Read" books for July:
Anna, Lindsay, Katie, Leslie, Carissa, Callie, Elba, Kristin, Faith, Lucinda, Melinda, and Brittney.
There is a bonus "short read" by Peter.
One to Study
At an incoherent company, employees stop believing that what they joined to do is possible. As that belief erodes, cynicism takes root. Passion drains away, replaced by quiet quitting and mediocre work. The best talent leaves for companies whose values they can believe it, while those who stay stop caring about the customers they serve or the products they build. The "values" become a residue of past aspirations, orphaned on the walls. Those cynical comments over dinner? They're not just venting but symptoms of an organization eating itself alive.
- From Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad...and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries
Monday, July 27, 2026
First Paragraph
During the last days of the Western Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages, Western Europe was threatened, and often invaded, by outsiders. First came the Huns, then the Arabs, then the Magyars, then the Vikings, then the Mongols, and then the Turks. Each in turn, they were described as ferocious warriors none could withstand. Each in turn, their hordes inflicted immense bloodshed, destruction, and suffering on a continent rendered almost defenseless by the prevailing socio-economic--political structures and the internecine struggles to which it led.
- From Pussycats: Why the Rest Keep Beating the West and What Can Be Done About It by Martin Van Creveld
Content Creation Major
I look forward to following the story.
Sunday, July 26, 2026
Saturday, July 25, 2026
First Paragraph
The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted.
- From Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
Get Well Soon Packages of Books
If you had a friend of eclectic tastes who was going to be recuperating at home for a lengthy period and who was a reader, which books would you placing in a Get Well Soon package?
My selections would include:
1. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Age 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend
2. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
3. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
4. Erasure by Percy Everett
4. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
5. Any of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries
6. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
7. Directions to Servants by Jonathan Swift
8. Shogun by James Clavell
9. Station Eleven by Emily St. John
9. City Primeval by Elmore Leonard
10. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
11. Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James
12. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
13. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Friday, July 24, 2026
You Never Know
A lawyer who read an early draft of Pilate's Magician predicted that the book would have a particular appeal to lawyers.
So far, he appears to be correct although I certainly sought a wider audience.
Christians? Jews? Roman history buffs?
Preparing for the Future
Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not the teacher's past. Most teachers rarely discuss the important topic of the future of their field, and when this is pointed out they usually reply: "No one can know the future." It seems to me the difficulty of knowing the future does not absolve the teacher from seriously trying to help the student to be ready for it when it comes. It is obvious the experience of an individual is not necessarily that of a class of individuals; therefore, any one person's projection into the future is apt to be somewhat personal and will not be universally accepted. This does not justify reverting to impersonal surveys and losing the impact of the personal story.
- From The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard W. Hamming
First Paragraph
Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.
- From The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Thursday, July 23, 2026
"Against Human Resources"
From The Lamp Magazine in 2024: Helen Andrews analyzes the changes in HR.
An excerpt:
"The result has been the feminization of the American workplace, the inevitable effect of giving H.R. ladies veto power over everything that happens there. This feminization has happened even in the most unlikely workplaces. Astrophysics is a predominantly male profession. Yet Dr. Matt Taylor found himself in the middle of an international scandal in 2014 when, during a press conference to announce that his team had become the first to land a spacecraft on a comet, he showed up wearing a rockabilly-style shirt with busty pinup girls on it. The shirt was denounced as disrespectful to women. His tearful forced apology was a conspicuous triumph for H.R. ladies everywhere."
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Three Authors Who Should Be Better Known
Three examples of how fame does not always follow excellence:
[Photo by Ronald Crow at Unsplash]
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Co-Intelligence
Potential Serfs of the World, Unite!
Rob Firchau at The Hammock Papers has an important message for you.
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