Homer without the Gods (or, the Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy)
The man therefore who does what he ought moves steadily towards his fate and his death. It is defeat and not victory that lies at the end. To understand this is itself a virtue;...
Author: J.L. Wall
One More Note on Israel
Andrew Sullivan, responding to Jeffrey Goldberg, writes: If no American Jew can conceive of a situation in which they would walk away from Israel, then there is no leverage at all to persuade Israel...
Notes on the Wicked Son
The reasons why people initially cared about Allison Benedikt’s essay on … something to do with changing her mind about Israel remain mysterious to me. Its sentiments were anything but new to this world;...
Opportunity Costs
Ezra Klein offers a strong response to the right-place, right-time, right-attitude argument about George Washington’s greatness. As president, he points out, Washington did have a variety of choices about how to proceed and opportunities...
Well The Midnight Gang’s Assembled…
The Big Man comes on at about 4 minutes in. Strange to think of Clarence Clemons and his saxophone in the past tense — I always kind of thought he’d disappear into back into...
Feeling for the Fictional
Brandon Watson and Kyle Cupp both explore possible solutions to the “paradox of fiction”: We human beings read, watch, and listen to a lot of fiction. We know that it is fiction. But we...
The Perils of Writing about Greatness
I’ve wanted to respond to this Yglesias post on Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life for some time now, but not until I finished the (audio)book. He wrote: Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life is a...
Pressures from the Home Front
While Confederate women and civilians pressured their sons, husbands, brothers, and fellow-citizens into fighting, those men, like one lieutenant wrote, “asked himself the question: What is this all about? Why is it that 200,000...
Of the Devil’s Side (and Knowing It)
INTERVIEWER Had you been alive during the Civil War, would you have fought for the Confederates? FOOTE No doubt about it. What’s more, I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were...
Lebron James Is Only What You Want Him To Be
Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks about the way we think about sports: Sports narratives strike me as a kind of modern mythology. We see the players as the gladiators of our cities, as champions for our...
Walker Percy’s Galaxy Quest
“[I]t is an established fact that a preponderance of religious imagery or an avowed religious intent can go a long way toward mitigating the science-fictional taint, which also helps explain the appeal to mainstream...
How to Build a State
My posts on the Israel-Palestine question two weeks ago led to requests for a primer on the Palestinian Authority’s plan to request U.N. recognition in September. This article (from Haaretz) provides just that, for those interested....
The Essay, Reborn
Daniel McCarthy finds reasons for optimism in the “death of the book” — the potential of the e-reader to rejuvenate the essay, and its lengthier, “Victorian,” versions in particular, as a literary art form....
The Humanities are Still Important (Supreme Court Edition)
What do Nabokov, Hemingway, Montesquieu, Wittgenstein, Stendhal, Proust, Shakespeare, Dickens, Faulkner, Solzhenitsyn, and Trollope have in common? They’re all readily mentioned by Supreme Court Justices when asked about influences on their decisions and their...
From Poetry to Classroom
John Talbot discusses the history of (Classical) translation, and the flaws of the task’s contemporary nature. A worthwhile, but slightly lengthy read, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Quote for the Day
“I believe you have a great thing. The great thing is, you have a president for four or eight years, and then out. If you are an enemy of the minister of culture and...
How to Think About John Demjanjuk
If John Demjanjuk’s conviction is—as seems likely—the final act of an international quest for justice that began shortly after the first Allied troops gazed in horror at the newly “liberated” death camps, it will...
Only Nixon Could Go to China
In my previous post on this topic, I concluded with a warning that, if the UN recognizes Palestinian statehood, it needs to make this recognition contingent on Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist—saying,...
Past, Present, Future: 1948 and 2011
“This is not a conflict about 1967 but about 1948, when the State of Israel was established,” said Netanyahu. “The Palestinians call this a day of catastrophe, but their catastrophe is that their leadership...
Foote’s Civil War: Spotsylvania and the Death of Jeb Stuart
As the narrator turns his eye to Grant’s first Eastern campaign—the Forty Days—the shift is from chivalry to butchery, or even from an older war closer to our myths to something more terrible because...
