Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
This past July, Howard Chua-Eoan wrote on Bloomberg: In 1931, the Politburo ordered the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow; it was built by Czar Alexander I to commemorate Napoleon’s retreat from the city and the…
I keep forgetting to post this. I once said that Jordan Peterson had been “completely unprepared” for his 2019 debate with Slavoj Žižek. Why? Because Peterson “knew next to nothing about Marxism.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it better: “Never BS…
From Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne: But of all names in the universe he [Tristram’s father] had the most unconquerable aversion for TRISTRAM;—he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of any thing in the world,—thinking it could…
Robert Pinsky reviews a translation of Adam Zagajewski’s poetry in the NYT. Among other things, he says: The Polish pronunciation and spelling Lvov has been replaced by the Ukrainian Lviv, and behind it the linguistic and cultural echoes of Lwow…
Following up on the Karamazovs, an obvious remark. It is said that Dostoevsky’s portrayal of women was lacking next to his male characters. It is not generally true – The Idiot is a counterexample – but The Brothers Karamazov is…
On Hope by Tara Isabella Burton in the Hedgehog Review: In order to accept our lives as a comedy, we must accept that none of us are the heroes we imagine ourselves to be. This is the truth understood by…
Alexander Van der Bellen has been re-elected President of Austria. As I wrote in 2016, when he won his first term, Van der Bellen’s ancestors had moved from the Netherlands to Russia in the 18th century. They lived in Pskov…
Paul Krugman admits that he underestimated the current rate of inflation when assessing the impact of the $1.9-billion “American Rescue Plan” early in 2021. On the other hand, Lawrence Summers warned in February 2021 that inflation might rise too high…
A few years ago, I tried listening to Jordan Peterson debating Marxism with Slavoj Žižek. It soon became clear to me that Peterson was completely unprepared: he knew next to nothing about Marxism. Or, perhaps, he was deliberately playing the…
I’ve argued that anti-abortionists have a common cause with Big Brother worshipers. The word “surveillance” has already appeared in some news headlines on states’ enforcement of their anti-abortion laws. But there’s another consequence: young professionals are now less likely to…
On abortion, my thoughts aren’t much different now than in 2016: …[E]nforcing a universal ban on abortion will require a greater degree of governmental interference into the private lives of the citizenry. It would make every woman of childbearing age…
In Tablet, David Mikics quotes Wallace Stevens and explains: His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light. […] Madame la Fleurie, the flowering earth,…