I have a Google alert set for Yuval Levin, one of the calmest and most thoughtful observers of our public life. Who knew that there’s also a basketball player with the same name, playing for the Purdue University - Fort Wayne Mastadons (and that he keeps popping in in obscure sports stories)?
It’s no good to go chasing after meaning as an abstraction; meaning comes in the doing of things … There are robbers stealing the horses of your imagination: Kick them out. This book has been full of hints as to how to do that. If I’m too explicit you will be left with a pamphlet not a story.
Finished Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild. 📚
Quote provided especially for @mwerickson, who wanted to know my impression (which is favorable): the quote is the best summary of the book, by Shaw himself.
Transport-as-a-Service will offer transportation four to ten times cheaper per mile than buying a new car and two to four times cheaper than operating an existing vehicle in 2021. (Source: rethinkx.com)
Long-time pet peeve: What the heck does “two to four times cheaper” mean?
Pet peeve waiting in the wings: broadcast journalists’ “less people” instead of “fewer people.” I’m expecting a hybrid “two to four times less people.”
Whoever would have thought that the Supreme Court’s “Birthright Citizenship” case might turn on the law’s treatment of foundlings?
Provocative but sober and dead serious: Candace Owens must be excommunicated — for the sake of her soul.
I’ve got an RSS feed for old Far Side cartoons. I couldn’t stop laughing at this one today.
Today’s Sunday reflections: Sunday, March 1 – Tipsy Teetotaler ن
I left an online newspaper to check micro.blog.
I love the sanity of this place, it’s ability to ignore most of the “news” that none of us can do anything about outside the polling place.
In my “big blog,” the first two items may be of special interest in understanding what SCOTUS did last Friday and what it’s up to more generally: February 25, 2026. And the second item comes from a source I rarely like, but she caught something nobody else did.
Our son, a third-generation attorney, turned 50 yesterday. We gave him a benchmark gift for a benchmark birthday: charcoals of his grandfather and me and a photo of the two of us at my admission to the bar.
He’s got them up in his office already.
Eeyore recommends What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays for those still worrying about demon screens instead of demon AI.
As someone who has come to love e-readers, despite some problems outlined by Warren Farha, I substantially agree.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing “look over there.” Randall Munroe via Maarten Boudry.
The justices did not determine whether or how to issue refunds for the duties.
(TMD).
It reflects civic ignorance that media have to write things like that.
SCOTUS is not a second legislature setting up mechanisms. It’s not an omniscient uber-government.
It decides issues. The issue decided Friday was whether IEPPA authorized tariffs. Yeah, this only kicks the ball down the road, but it wouldn’t be right or prudent for SCOTUS to try to negate all tariffs under all imaginable statutory or constitutional authorities.
Mortise & Tenon Magazine strikes me as something that some people on MB would like. Hat-Tip to Paul Kingsnorth.
Well, that’s an audacious first.
- Aggregator points to an interesting article, with link.
- Link is to Fortune, which asks me to shut off AdBlock plus for its site.
- I shut off AdBlock plus for Fortune.
- Fortune refuses to show me the article unless I subscribe.
Disenthralled
18. Be an ordinary person, one of the human race.
Fr. Thomas Hopko, 55 Maxims of the Christian Life
There is a certain kind of person, usually self-styled as clear-eyed, hard-headed, and immune to trends, who regards the cozy girl lifestyle with undisguised contempt. She sees cozy culture as unserious, quiescent, and politically regressive. She insists that the things celebrated by cozy girls are so celebrated because they replicate the preferences of the wealthy, of the bourgieosie. … Some of these criticism have a little merit, but I find myself entirely unable to join in that contempt. In a winner-take-all society where ordinary life has been systematically stripped of dignity, the turn toward “cozy” is less a retreat from reality into the past and more a rational adaptation to the unhappy present.
…
You’ve heard this song from me before many times: we live in an era in which the range of lives publicly regarded as worthy of living has contracted almost to nothing. Our culture confers esteem on a vanishingly small number of roles, and those roles are largely defined by being visible - that is to say, by attracting public attention, of which there is a necessarily finite supply. … Everything else - teacher! paralegal! office manager! dental hygienist! retail supervisor! random white collar office email job that’s basically fine! - is flattened into an undifferentiated gray. These are necessary roles, some of them pay well, but they certainly aren’t glamorous ones, and young Americans seem increasingly convinced that a life that doesn’t inspire envy among others - when broadcast online, naturally - isn’t one worth living.
… [A]lmost everyone who tries to get rich quick will fail, but everyone can choose to be cozy.
The genius of the cozy aesthetic is that it identifies sources of pleasure that are widely accessible and modest and treats them as inherently worthy of serious cultivation: a soft sweater, a well-made cup of tea, a public library card, a crockpot recipe that reliably produces something warm and nourishing, a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. You may find any one or all of these more or less attractive based on your own preferences, but whatever they are, they’re not signifiers of elite achievement, they’re all available in low-cost forms, and they’re all reliable and attainable. They’re not blue-check credentials, they don’t require venture capital or viral reach, and you don’t need to chew your fingernails waiting for the wheel to spin to see if you’ve won them. These simple pleasures are, instead, elements of an ordinary life lived with intention.
Freddie DeBoer, Cozy Girl Lifestyle is a Rational Response to a Winner-Take-All Culture (Shared link)
Last night, my wife and I went back to a chef-owned Italian restaurant downtown that just fell off our radar during Covid (though it had been a favorite). Judging from the crowd last night, we’re not the only ones who lost track of it.
No wonder so many small businesses failed.
Importantly, what we experience is not just an image of a world ‘outside’, some sort of projection on the walls of a Cartesian theatre inside our heads, and watched by an intracerebral homunculus on an intracerebral sofa. As I will explain, such a viewpoint could be predicted to arise from the left hemisphere’s attempt to deal with a reality it does not understand, and for which everything is a representation.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things.
Where would we be without figures of speech?
How much better things will be with AI agents who are consistent! Xfinity Hallucinating Customer Service Hell
One of David Brooks’ many merits was distinguishing résumé virtues (for which aspiring meritocrats strive) from eulogy virtues. (Reading a promising interview with him.)
Maybe it’s because of my age and my frequent solo lunches that I think this Billy Collins, Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant, is awfully good.
Christianity is a highly adaptable collection of faiths … It can be liberal or conservative or apolitical. It can be hellfire and brimstone or love and forgiveness. It can be whatever it needs to be to survive, [and] it will.
T.J. Kirk a YouTuber for twenty years as “The Amazing Atheist”, via Nick Pompella.
Ouch!
Thoughts?
Was Abraham Lincoln a Christian?.
I didn’t read it because the only acceptable answer is “none of our business” (even on Presidents Day), isn’t it?
I am influenced in my rejection by my late Aspie brother’s obsession with the question.