Category: History

Sataurday 1/21/17

  1. The Class Clown Repents
  2. “Leading from behind”
  3. Tribalism on Parade
  4. What I did at the Inauguration
  5. The scholarly reading audience
  6. My Man Mitch

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Inauguration Day

  1. Music du jour
  2. A More Perfect Absolutism
  3. Read news like a defense attorney
  4. It’s more real onscreen
  5. Rahm’s lawless Chicago
  6. Land of the slave, home of the timid

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Tuesday 1/17/17

  1. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin redux
  2. Chronicling a mid-life religious crisis
  3. Real Civil Liberties don’t get no respect
  4. Trump the Twitter-Tweetin’ Fool
  5. Is Trump the Heir of Reagan — or of LBJ?
  6. Deracinated Donald
  7. The Trump Dossier
  8. Eh? Was that a “Yes” or a “No”?

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Where Are the Watchmen?

I’m attending the Eighth Day Symposium, an Orthodox-inspired but broadly ecumenical gathering, Friday and Saturday. The Symposium title is “Where Are the Watchmen?,” based on a September 2016 Harpers essay by Alan Jacobs.

Some highlights of Friday. Sit back. It’s long.

Kudos to the Cogi app for letting me capture highlights verbatim. Some of the expressions are a little goofy reduced directly to print — but that’s my experience of what happens to speech when transcribed. The written word is subtly different than the spoken word, and the written word, from intelligent and articulate people, can at times seem stupid and tongue-tied.

  1. Dyslexic Security System
  2. Secularity is the seminal American idea
  3. Evangelicalism’s Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin moment
  4. Renewing culture
  5. Stop the hijacking
  6. Rightly Reading Revelation
  7. Demoting Jesus
  8. Empire = Superpower
  9. Also missing: any public intellectuals

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Thank goodness it’s over

I have no idea why we should think that the dropping of a ball in Times’ Square should mark the end of the troubles, but I’ll wink at any ritual assurance I can get.

  1. Rest for Your Soul
  2. Lay aside all earthly cares
  3. Freedom of Fiction
  4. Straight-Edged Ruler in a Fractal Universe
  5. Our Archduke Franz Ferdinand
  6. The Power of Language
  7. Wendell Berry supplement
  8. Immigrants, State-by-State

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Xmas, Observed (U.S.) 2016

  1. What is the meaning of this city?
  2. More on “reality”
  3. Tidbits from The Great Divorce
  4. Dateline Bethlehem
  5. Biden on Clinton
  6. Trump’s Attorney General

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