Pinker’s forthcoming bestseller which I’m expecting Taleb to eventually rip into. Despite Pinker ostensibly being a classical liberal his implicit progressivist ebullience is suspect. Epistemic humility is not seen as a cultural virtue: it is the zeitgeist of the modern age that we exist in a (misperceived) linear trajectory of progress, progress here taken to be…
It just so happens that IMHO, the two greatest musicians of the twentieth century, have the best blogs dedicated to their remarkable work. Louis Armstrong has Ricky Riccardi batting for him — someone whose praises I have repeatedly sung. Now I know that the other artist I refer to may seem a world apart but they…
David Marquand in the New Statesman on “something is stirring among Chesterton’s secret people”. Here is a review of Marquand’s Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain England and the English now face the primordial questions that face all self-conscious political communities: “Who are we?”, “Who do we want to be?” At bottom, these questions are philosophical, in a…
This in The Atlantic (H/T to Shannon Selin) If you’ve got only 10 minutes, read his essay “A Much Repeated Repetition.” (“Of a mechanical thing we have a full knowledge. Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance.”) Why should it want to make him a saint? Why Chesterton and not—if you’re talking about…
manwithoutqualities 