Torture and the Rhetoric of Evil
Since it’s apparently “Torture Awareness Week” here at the League, yet another — I’m on the road, so forgive me if I continue to ignore the comments section until early next week. (But that...
Author: J.L. Wall
Hopelessness and Torture
“It’s a mistake to say this was about inflicting pain. These measures were about instilling a sense of hopelessness, and that led them to compliance.” — Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism...
Shande
I was going to keep my damn mouth shut today, because, well, my attitude toward the news is May his name be blotted out! and it’s kind of hard to shake a grogger at...
Foote and Tragedy, Ctd.
While we continue fighting the Civil War in the comments to my previous post, I want to make a quick addition, to my comments on Foote’s literary project. There’s another aspect of the sense...
Foote’s Civil War, Volume II: Tragedy and Just Causes
I finished Volume II of Foote’s Civil War over the last two days of Passover, and returned to the internet this morning to find two posts at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog with the title and...
Battle of Marathon Casualty List
A piece of the (Classical) historical record of which I had never heard, here (with a h/t good summary of the background here). Worth your time, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
American Decline!
I don’t normally take the time to point out that I find foreign policy statements at Commentary patently wrong, because, well, that’s just to be assumed by now. But this opening salvo from Max...
Foote’s Historia
There’s something to be said for attempting to read Foote’s Civil War at the same time as Proust. I don’t know that I would have otherwise noticed quirks of structure in Foote’s work that,...
Notes Toward an Integration of Education and Citizenship
In case you didn’t get enough on Conservative Critiques of Academia (CCOA) when Rufus was trying to explore the idea of liberal bias, and whether it holds water, Phoebe Maltz and Withywindle have been...
Kohelet and Proust
About a week ago, Rufus responded to Jason’s comments on Strauss and philosophy-as-drug by saying: I’m not the first person to say this, but I feel like the best model for doing philosophy in...
Objects and Animals
Our fantasy is that until the industrial era domesticated animals were treated decently. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t; but certainly they weren’t turned out by the tens of thousands as if they...
Israel in 2008 and America in 2011
In the summer of 2006, Israel sent forces into Lebanon. The strike, while tactically successful, failed on two terms: on the diplomatic level, where Israel began to turn a number of lukewarm friends into...
Got the I Don’t Know Where I’m Going, But I’m Going Somewhere in a Hurry Blues
So the book business is in for some very big changes that I suspect will move power away from publishers and agents and toward authors. – John Steel Gordon, Contentions So Gordon writes in...
Education and Entertainment; University and Community
(Note: this post uses terms and discusses situations that are borderline NSFW.) Strange things are happening at my dear alma mater. There is a controversy of unknown size crewing around a post-class demonstration of...
For those who need to “justify” procrastination…
Joe Carter is arranging a second annual “Tournament of Novels.” I missed last year’s, somehow, but expect me to be out there fighting tooth and nail for the sake of the Modernists. (Unless, that...
The Political Implications of “Never Again”
If, the argument goes, the world’s great powers, first and foremost of course the United States, in collaboration with the UN system and with global civil society, would act decisively and in a timely...
History’s Lost, Part II: Sappho
“Euripides was eaten by dogs; Aeschylus killed by a stone; Sappho leapt from a cliff. We know no more of them than that. We have their poetry, and that is all.” – Virginia Woolf,...
More True Grit
The New York Review of Books blog discusses all three versions of True Grit (but mainly the latest) and questions of genre and Rooster’s need and potential for redemption. This bit of trivia, if...
History’s Lost, Part I: Stesichorus
Rufus has, for some time now, guiding this little community through “The Canon,” and it seems we’ve finally made it past 400 BCE and Greek tragedy. The danger when speaking of any “canon” is...
Re-Wiring the Kill Switch
I have no clue about the accuracy of this, and I have no idea how to feel about what’s going on in Egypt (except my usual revulsion at violence), but I see no reason...
