Happy Friday! A survey of 60 intelligence professionals from 25 countries has crowned MI6 Europe’s most powerful spy agency. We didn’t realize anyone was keeping score—and we’re not entirely sure how you’d verify it—but congratulations to everyone involved, whoever you are.
If Democratic Socialists keep winning Democrat primaries, the eagerly-anticipated flip of the House may not happen.
Party primaries produce crackpot candidates in the general election. Bring back the smoke-filled rooms!
Well, duh! I’m so rusty professionally that it took the Advisory Opinions podcast to remind me that Anthony Fauci was 100% justified in taking the fifth because the Biden pardon only covers federal crimes! Some 25 state attorneys general are posturing about prosecuting him, too, under state laws.
Sacrilege
I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.
The Righteous Mind has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern — taking offense that the other side is profaning something sacred?
What are the sacred cows of (in broad strokes) American progressives versus American conservatives these days?
Through the grapevine: A young woman of my acquaintance, mother of 5 girls and a boy, told them that she had a disease (breast cancer) and that the treatment probably would make her bald.
The boy said “Cool!”
Isn’t that the most Boy Thing ever?
In the last few days, you may have heard about Leopold Aschenbrenner—the wonder kid hedge fund manager who lost tens of billions over the course of a few days. It’s the biggest financial fiasco of the year.
If you didn’t read about it in the news, don’t worry. Hollywood will certainly make it into a movie. This 25-year-old hot shot’s financial empire was literally collapsing while guests were showing up for his blowout wedding at a fake Tuscan villa in California. The screenplay practically writes itself.
Ted Gioia covers what I hadn’t seen before. This kid was an SBF wannabe.
I have a reminder popping up on my screen every morning at 6:30 am: Will anyone care about this in a few years?
A reminder not to dwell on ephemera, which spared me dwelling on Anthony Fauci today.
Hate to say it, but Olivia Miles of the Minnesota Lynx was fabulous yesterday against the Fever. She was more dominant in the pace and enthusiasm of the Lynx than even her solid numbers (24 pts., 4 reb., 6 asst.) show. 🏀
I don’t look to Ezra Klein for spiritual insight. He delivered anyway. Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul.
TIL: The illegibly-small customer service phone number for a credit card thrust upon me, made further illegible by embossing the card number over it, is just one digit off from “America’s hottest chat line.”
Trying to cancel a credit card early on Sunday morning after attempted fraud is no fun.
It looked interesting, so I subscribed: For the love of the game: Orange Blossom Ordinary celebrates two years — Orange Blossom Ordinary
The problem today is we value what’s countable rather than what’s important.
Wise voices like David Brooks are being lost as the AI Gee-Whiz crowd and the AI Luddites shout at each other. When last did you hear anyone point out that AI often produces “eloquence without content,” sounding smart without saying anything substantive?
The Russell Moore Show is hit-or-miss. His interview with Brooks was a very solid hit.
Stunned that Ross Douthat is leaving the New York Times to join CBS 60 Minutes. He is a great interviewer, though I don’t know how well he does “gotcha.” I’ll miss his regular appearance in print.
It’s getting to the point that I need to have Chrome open to run things my Firefox configuration doesn’t want to run. Only on Chrome, for instance, could I actually unsubscribe from the Bose marketing emails; only on Chrome could I select buying options other than Amazon on Goodreads.
Occasionally, Ted Gioia publishes something of so little interest to me that I am forcibly reminded that he’s a polymath and I’m not. F’rinstance, The 50 Essential Western Films (Part 2) - by Ted Gioia
As someone who sees inquirers arriving at my small parish every week these days (14 catechumens currently), and with scuttlebutt about Orthodoxy being part of the manosphere or something, I really appreciated Eve Tushnet’s Nobody Converts Right.
(It could apply to Paul Kingsnorth’s conversion, too)
Watched A Man for All Seasons 🍿, which I take as fortification every 10-15 years or so.
The main difference between Robert Bolt’s Thomas More and me is that I can’t keep my mouth shut nearly as well as he. They wouldn’t have to look hard to find my opinion expressed.
I’ve read Andrew Sullivan for years, but what he writes just doesn’t seem to fit who and where I am today. So tomorrow, the subscription ends.
There’s only 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and too many smart people writing things to fit it all in.
Even as I use AI, I continue reading the cautions from people I respect. Brad Littlejohn, One Tool to Rule Them All, distinguishes tools from machines and brings Middle Earth into it.
The more opaque new things are, the more we resort to myths and stories to explain them, I guess.
OK by me.
As different as different can be:
- Malcolm Guite, Galahad and the Grail (finished a few days ago)
- Julien Vocance, one hundred visions of war (100 French haiku from The Great War, lovingly translated to English (finished in a flash this evening) 📚
I’ve come to presume illegality of almost anything Trump does, even if I’m not familiar with the area of law. My presumption has been right oftener than it has been wrong, though I have been surprised a few times at what the law actually does allow a President to do. (It allows him to do too much, but nowhere near everything, without Congress.)
57 years to the day since the first man, a Purdue Boilermaker, set foot on the moon. Soon, there will be a space mission with 5 Boilermakers.
We’ve called it “the cradle of astronauts” for years.
I sing in a chorale with a Purdue prof who’s behind the Mars Rover and jockeys it around.
Have I mentioned yet today how much I love Becket?