By REM RIEDER [American Journalism Review] – News organizations everywhere are frantically cobbling together new approaches to putting a price tag on their wares…Gathering the news is an expensive proposition. Something has to pay for it. Print advertising is sagging, classifieds are largely gone and online ads are hardly making up the difference. And as for those nonprofits, there’s no guarantee that the various foundations and benefactors will be writing checks forever.
Continue reading “Noted: Long story short? No, thanks.” »
By GAIL GREGG [ARTnews] – Just a few years ago, a visitor curious about Frank Lobdell’s 15 April 1962, in the Oakland Museum of California, could have scanned its wall label to read this description of the painting: “A tightly coiled form struggles against the confines of the canvas. Thick paint, hot colors, hard lines, and a gouged surface reinforce the sense of uneasiness. They express the artist’s view of the human condition as a struggle for meaning and dignity.”
Continue reading “Noted: In museums, the writing's on the wall.” »
By SERGE HALIMI [Le Monde diplomatique] – It is the end of an era for one of the few French daily newspapers still controlled by its journalists and its staff. Le Monde is changing hands.
Continue reading “Noted: Le Monde and its stockholders.” »
By DÎPTI SARAVANAMUTTU [Jacket Magazine] – Poets’ attitudes to poetry range from it being the most intelligent thing to do in this world, to what can be done with one hand tied behind the back. To Universal acclaim until someone notices the tied hand is someone else. Hill writes as though he could obliterate his physical body to understand and finally say this. Continue reading “Noted: The modern history of Geoffrey Hill.” »
By PAUL ROMER [City Journal] – When the Tour de France reaches the Champs-Élysées at the end of the month, the smell of victory won’t be the only odor in the streets. Public urination in Paris, particularly noxious in the July heat, remains a problem despite the considerable efforts of Paris officials. Continue reading “Noted: A spirited defense d'uriner.” »
By ZEYNO BARAN [Defining Ideas] – I believe having President Obama in office will grant the United States only short-term relief. Islamists are working on new narratives and searching for new grievances; their need to undermine the United States and its democratic vision is incredibly strong. The Obama administration, one hopes, will not be so eager to reverse the unpopularity of the Bush years that it limits the emphasis on democracy so essential for advancing U.S. interests.
Continue reading “Noted: Islamism's new anti-democratic narratives.” »
By BRIAN APPLEYARD [New Statesman] – Either Christianity is transcendentally true or it is culturally true as the moral and historical basis of this nation. Either way, prayers are valid. Or religion as a whole is false and this locally elevated sect is an abomination, therefore its rites should be relegated to the private places of the superstitious.
Continue reading “Noted: Canterbury's comedy.” »
By B. J. COMAN [Quadrant] – We live longer, suffer less, and have more leisure time, more freedom, and so on. A great number of us—perhaps the majority—simply follow what has been memorably called (by William James) “the gospel of relaxation”. And yet, there is an indefinable unease at the heart of it all.
Continue reading “Noted: The trials of the modern Marilynne Robinson.” »
by JONATHAN BARNES [Times Literary Supplement] – The story begins as Dr Watson is summoned to Baker Street, “one Sunday evening early in September of the year 1903”, by means of a splendidly terse telegram (“Come at once if convenient – if inconvenient come all the same”) in order to hear an account of the mystery of Professor Presbury, “the famous Camford physiologist”. The Professor, a “staid, elderly” widower, has recently become engaged to a much younger woman and “the current of his life” has been disrupted. Continue reading “Noted: Elementary, Watson. Daddy's gone ape.” »
By KENNETH MINOGUE [The New Criterion] – Our rulers, then, increasingly deliberate on our behalf, and decide for us what is the right thing to do. The philosopher Socrates argued that the most important activity of a human being was reflecting on how one ought to live. Most people are not philosophers, but they cannot avoid encountering moral issues. The evident problem with democracy today is that the state is pre-empting—or “crowding out,” as the economists say—our moral judgments. Nor does the state limit itself to mere principle. Continue reading “Noted: Welcome to the Ministry of Beautiful and Just Well-Living.” »
By DAVID RIEFF [The National Interest] – A number of European and North American intellectuals—some self-identified neoconservatives, others “reformed” leftists who would of late call themselves antitotalitarians—have found in The Treason of the Intellectuals a template for explaining what they view as the incapacity of their contemporaries to stand up for the Enlightenment values currently under assault by a resurgent Islamism. As Roger Kimball, a coeditor of the neoconservative magazine The New Criterion, put it in his preface to a 2006 edition of Benda’s book, this betrayal has rendered us powerless against the “depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as their truth.” Continue reading “Noted: Crossing Berman off the A-list.” »
By ANDREW F. MARCH [Dissent] – Berman would probably be the first to admit that he is out of his depth on internal Islamic legal and moral reasoning. Thus, we need to untangle some of his themes and claims to get back on dry ground.
As noted, Berman portrays Ramadan as a man with genuinely reformist and liberal instincts, but whose utterances are filled with caveats and silences. This is certainly true, but there are two problems here. Continue reading “Noted: Berman and March on Tariq Ramadan.” »
By MAX COLCHESTER [The Wall Street Journal] – In 1880, following a stinging defeat at the hands of the Prussians, French politicians decided to create a day of national celebration to boost morale.
There was debate over which date to pick. The storming of the Bastille prison in July 1789 was a bloody affair at the start of the French Revolution. However fêting the beginning of a brutal popular uprising was deemed too controversial by some. As a result, politicians plumped for July 14, 1790, a date when people from all over France came together to celebrate the creation of a short-lived constitutional monarchy.
Continue reading “Noted: Vive le roi!” »
By BENJAMIN STOREY and JENNA SILBER STOREY [from a review of La Pensée Française à l’Epreuve de l’Europe, by Justine Lacroix in the Claremont Review of Books] – Americans have long believed that what happens in the Old World matters to us. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson quarreled bitterly over the French Revolution in part because they both understood the importance of the European example. But recently Europe has become difficult for an American conservative to take seriously. How, after all, could those drawn to the examples of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln bring themselves to pay attention to Europe’s recent endeavors to bring its once proud nation-states under the aegis of an insistently benign European Union—an entity at once ethereal and bureaucratic, not quite a nation, but not merely an alliance, issuing regulations on the ingredients in jam and the volume of Scottish bagpipes but twiddling its thumbs when Russia invades Georgia? While the American Left continues to draw inspiration from European ideals, the scorn many American conservatives reserve for Europe implies that for them the Old World has lost its relevance for the New.
Continue reading “Noted: Europe, seriously.” »
