January 13, 2020 – 4:51 pm
As they all said, in bone-chilling unison: this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
January 12, 2020 – 1:50 pm
It was with terrible sadness that I learned today that Sir Roger Scruton has fallen from the ramparts at age 75. He was a man of incomparable culture, erudition, discrimination, and integrity. Not only has Western civilization lost one of its greatest defenders; it is also as if a magnificent library has just been burnt […]
January 5, 2020 – 11:45 pm
I hate awards shows, and never watch them (full disclosure, though: when I was nominated for an engineering Grammy in 2004, I did go) — but I rather have to hand it to Ricky Gervais for tonight’s monologue at the Golden Globes, which was splashed at once all over social media. You can watch it […]
January 1, 2020 – 12:37 pm
Buckle up, everybody – I have a feeling 2020 is going to be an eventful year. “Interesting”, even.
December 28, 2019 – 9:33 am
Taking a little holiday break. Back soon.
December 12, 2019 – 10:10 pm
Outstanding news: it looks like the Right has won a major victory in Britain’s national elections today.
November 29, 2019 – 8:50 pm
I’ve been thinking some more about the Curtis Yarvin essay we looked at a couple of days ago. There were good comments on the previous post. A couple of readers pointed out that, despite Mr. Yarvin’s assertion of the scarcity of sociopaths in the general population, many political systems (and in particular ours, I think) […]
November 28, 2019 – 11:42 am
We all have a lot to be thankful for, even in these uncertain times (and when were the times ever not uncertain?). I’m grateful to all of you for reading and commenting. Enjoy this special day — my favorite holiday of the year.
November 24, 2019 – 8:43 pm
Sorry for the thin content here lately. Now and then I just don’t have much to say: I’ve written 5,030 posts over the past 14 years, and sometimes I feel as if anything I’d write would, at this point, just be repeating myself. (And then the muse grants me her favor once again, and I’m […]
November 12, 2019 – 8:42 pm
I’m back in Wellfleet, after an interesting weekend in Baltimore. It’s snowing here — on November 12th. The temperature is supposed to drop well down into the twenties overnight. I have a feeling, on no particular authority, that it’s going to be a long, cold winter.
November 7, 2019 – 10:40 pm
I’ll be in Baltimore this weekend at the annual conference of the H. L. Mencken Club, and driving back to Cape Cod on Monday. Should get back to business here after that.
October 17, 2019 – 12:26 pm
The lovely Nina and I are “stateside” once more after a two-week visit with our daughter’s young family in Vienna. It was wonderful to see them — in particular, to be with our three-year-old and ten-month-old grandsons Liam and Declan gives us great happiness — but as someone once said, the best part of traveling […]
October 2, 2019 – 1:49 pm
The lovely Nina and I are on the road again: back to Vienna to visit our daughter and the wee bairns, and to celebrate Nina’s birthday (it’s one of those “big ones”). We’ll back in about two weeks, though I may post a thing or two from abroad. Please feel free to browse our vast […]
September 28, 2019 – 10:57 pm
Curtis Yarvin, alias ‘Mencius Moldbug’, seems to be getting back in the game. He discontinued his enormously influential blog Unqualified Reservations years ago (it has now been archived and reorganized here, minus the comment-threads), and seemed for a while to have tried to keep his head down, concentrating on his (apparently quite successful) computer-science career. […]
September 11, 2019 – 2:38 pm
I see that the Kakistocracy blog, which Bill Vallicella had linked to just yesterday, is gone. That’s bad: the author, Porter (who used to comment here occasionally), had exceptional sharpness of mind, wit, and pen. Porter, if you should see this: what happened? Drop me a line.
September 10, 2019 – 8:31 pm
I’m back from my annual musical get-together on Star Island, but am in no shape for writing just yet. It was a fantastic weekend — we spent the days working out the more difficult material, and hosted performances/parties for all the other guests on the island every night into the wee hours — but after […]
September 4, 2019 – 9:31 pm
I’m off to my annual musical retreat in the far-flung Isles of Shoals. Back on Tuesday, if we aren’t all washed out to sea by climate change.
August 16, 2019 – 8:07 pm
Still having problems here: all my old posts with block-quotes (thousands of them) now have broken character-encoding for various punctuation marks. I believe this is due to a database migration that Bluehost did recently (though I could be mistaken). They are looking into it.
August 14, 2019 – 8:06 pm
The site’s having problems: comments are not working. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong. Update: There seems to be a problem with this WordPress theme. I may have to switch to another one. Update: Fixed. Back soon.
August 14, 2019 – 11:44 am
…there’s no place like home. The lovely Nina and I are back from our little trip abroad. We visited Slovenia and Croatia with our daughter and her young family, who had driven down from their home in Vienna to meet us, and we had a fine time getting to know these beautiful places a bit […]
Sorry about the near-total lack of content here. We’ve had a steady stream of houseguests, and I’ve hardly been online at all. I’ve paid as little attention to the news as possible, and have spent my scanty solitary time reading (Bruce Catton, Thomas West, and Forrest McDonald), working on a couple of mixes in the […]
Things might be a little slow around here for a bit; we have our children and grandchildren visiting, and the strife-torn world seems far away. Which is nice.
We’re back in the States after our whirlwind trip to Vienna. The expedition was a success: Lily, who turned ninety-eight today, bore up well, though it was exhausting for her. She was glad to visit her hometown one last time, and although she is almost completely blind, she enjoyed being taken around to some old […]
The lovely Nina and I will be away for a week. The Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna has mounted an exhibit featuring three artists who fled Vienna as the Nazis took over, and one of the three — the only one surviving — is my mother-in-law Lily, who has lived in New York […]
It occurred to me just now that July 20th of this year will be the 50th anniversary of the first time that men walked on the Moon. There should be Dunkin Donuts on the Moon by now. What the hell happened to us?
March 12, 2019 – 11:46 pm
Michael Anton comments on the seige of Tucker Carlson, here. The gist is in the final paragraph: The ruling Left cannot defeat Carlson and so must silence him. As it will attempt to silence anyone who carries his message or anything like it. Every “conservative’ who joins the ritual denunciation of Carlson wishing to be […]
The lovely Nina and I are back in the States after a ten-day visit to Ireland. We spent time with family in Lucan (a western suburb of Dublin), and toured around a bit. Among the latter were a “black-taxi” tour of the troubled sections of Belfast (an area still deeply divided, in which the walls […]
February 22, 2019 – 11:12 am
The lovely Nina and I are off to Ireland for ten days, for a visit with our new extended family (and a little old-fashioned tourism). Things may be quiet here till we get back. Meantime, do listen to John Batchelor’s recent discussion with Professor Cohen on the Sovietization of America in recent years. Part 1 […]
February 13, 2019 – 11:29 pm
I’d been getting worried again about John Batchelor — he’s been treated for cancer recently, took time off for surgery a while back, and has been away from the microphone again for the past couple of weeks. (The archival material he runs to fill in is always well worth listening to, but his latest absence […]
January 23, 2019 – 10:33 pm
I’ve just learned that Russell Baker, the longtime reporter and columnist for the New York Times, has died at the age of 93. I was a fan. I read his Observer column without fail, and have several of his books. He was a wonderful writer — graceful, witty, and piercingly but unostentatiously intelligent — and […]
January 21, 2019 – 9:57 pm
Tucker Carlson rang in the New Year with a controversial monologue on the failure of American government to address a fundamental problem of modernity: the breakdown of families, and the growing hopelessness of those who are neither intractably poor nor insouciantly rich. Unlike nearly every other “conservative” today, however, he spread the blame around, heaping […]
January 4, 2019 – 5:36 pm
This weekend, after a month in Vienna, the lovely Nina and I are heading home. We’ll be back in the States by Sunday evening. It’s been a fine time — Vienna is always a nice place to be, and we welcomed a new grandchild into our expanding extended family — but it’s time to get […]
January 1, 2019 – 10:28 am
And away we go, friends. I have no idea what 2019 will bring, but I doubt it will be boring. Keep your powder dry! I wish you all good health and good fortune, and I thank you all again for reading and commenting.
December 27, 2018 – 3:18 pm
We’re still in Vienna (for another ten days or so), spending time with our daughter and her young family, and enjoying a year-end break from our usual cares and concerns. I’ve scarcely paid any attention to the news, and I’ll confess that, as happens sometimes, I’ve had very little inclination to take up the pen. […]
December 25, 2018 – 5:53 am
…to each and every one of you. May we all put the world and its cares aside for a day to enjoy the sweet blessings of home and hearth and family, and love.
December 16, 2018 – 6:24 am
The lovely Nina and I have just welcomed into the world our second grandchild, Declan Calder Wright, born to our daughter Chloe and her husband Christopher (who is as fine a young man as ever there was) here in Vienna, Austria, at 2:40 p.m. on Saturday, December 15th, 2018. (His middle name, Calder, was my […]
December 10, 2018 – 5:09 pm
The lovely Nina and I are settled in now in Vienna, and our daughter is due to bring forth our second grandson on Wednesday (though he may arrive sooner). We are quartered in a little apartment in the 3rd District, just around the corner from the Hundertwasserhaus, and we are waiting, well, expectantly. Paris may […]
December 6, 2018 – 1:38 pm
Sorry it’s been slow here. We’ve been getting my 97-year-old mother-in-law‘s life in order after her fall last month, and today the lovely Nina and I are off to Vienna, where our daughter is expecting her second child — a baby boy — on the 12th. I’ll be back online once we get settled in […]
November 22, 2018 – 12:35 pm
… to all of you. We have much indeed to be thankful for.
November 19, 2018 – 11:15 pm
I’m very happy to report that John Batchelor, whose three-hour program every weeknight is the best thing on all of radio, is back on the air after a sudden two-week departure. Three days ago he tweeted this, which I’d missed at the time: Hi The good news is that after a 7 hour surgery and […]
November 13, 2018 – 2:43 pm
Not long ago the great physicist Freeman Dyson wrote an introduction to a report on the beneficial aspects of higher carbon dioxide levels. In it he asked: The people who are supposed to be the experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence. That to […]
November 10, 2018 – 5:15 pm
My (very) elderly mother-in-law is in an ICU after a fall. I doubt I’ll be writing anything here for at least a few days.
November 2, 2018 – 10:55 pm
In Baltimore for a conference this weekend. Back next week.
October 31, 2018 – 12:46 pm
With the mid-term elections less than a week away, Angelo Codevilla surveys the social and political battlefield that the United States — now more disunited than at any time since our last Civil War — has become. His essay begins: Prior to the 2016 election I explained how America had already “stepped over the threshold […]
October 20, 2018 – 10:42 pm
“No man is always in a disposition to write, nor has any man at all times something to say.” – Dr. Johnson (Also, I have house-guests. Back soon.)
October 14, 2018 – 12:01 am
…around here, anyway. I’ve been offline, mostly, for the past few days, and paying little attention to the news. I did see that there was a brouhaha of some sort between Antifa and Gavin McInness’s “Proud Boys” in New York City today, but I don’t know more than that, and can’t really be bothered to […]
October 2, 2018 – 10:17 pm
Still very busy here, I’m afraid. I’ve also got little to add to the big story of the moment, which is of course the Kavanaugh appointment. There’s nothing subtle or nuanced about any of it; it’s just raw combat, and everyone knows it. So what can I say? (New things do keep popping up, though.) […]
September 29, 2018 – 12:04 am
Now Twitter has suspended my all-time favorite account, the brilliant and eccentric @ThomasWictor. How intensely irritating. Update, 9/29: Now @hbdchick (who is the very soul of reason and moderation) is gone too! (Her blog, which is effectively an online university, is here.)
September 24, 2018 – 10:38 pm
I’m very sorry never to have really got back up to speed after the August break. The blog is still very much alive, but the Muse unusually silent, and it has been a very busy and chaotic time the past few weeks. Currently we are in Chicago for a couple of days, and there will […]