46

August 18, 2009

The AMC’s Madmen, themed around New York advertising executives in the 1960s, captivates viewers for its plots, fashions, shocking levels of political incorrectness, and, most of all, and with the way it draws viewers so closely into a world of the early 1960s that they never knew.

47

December 18, 2009

Digital media—particularly “social” media like forums, wikis, blogs, and tweets—have forced all people, including intellectuals, to engage each other as never before in human history.

And yet, people have discovered that to know others is not necessarily to love them. Conflicts and confrontations are a regular feature of daily discussion, which is all fine; but sometimes these can become personal and hysterical, and lead to lifelong hatreds.

48

December 28, 2009

The culture is going to hell in a handbag, we’ve been told for hundreds of years, and the free market gets a large share of the blame. The observation stretches from Left to Right and everywhere in between. It is universally agreed that letting markets run loose runs roughshod over all the finer things in life, from books to arts to clothing to manners.

49

November 1, 2007

Dealing with personal failure is one of the great struggles of growing up. When we are young, the possibilities seem without limit, but as the years pass, we face every manner of barrier that causes us to be all too aware that we face a world with many constraints, many of them due to the limits of the temporal world but also, we must admit, many of them due to our own inadequacies.

50

August 28, 2006

Have you noticed how the texts of the “fortunes” in fortune cookies seem to be improving? In contrast to the old days when the fortune was a mere throw-away, these days, the language is clearer. The thoughts are more profound. Some of them are real keepers.

Is this a consequence of China’s having become more capitalistic?

51

September 28, 2005

There’s a sense these days that anyone would favor a pie over a cake, and I think I know why. Pies don’t tempt household cooks to scrimp on ingredients. That’s why pies generally taste better.

52

October 9, 2002

War is coming, we’re still in recession, the public is still angry about 9-11 (hey, is all this connected?), so we must do something to rekindle a sense of joy in our own private lives. But what? What people on the home front have always done: throw themselves into the domestic arts, preferably something that is beyond the time and connects us with ancient truth. For my part, it is all about bread.

53

July 16, 2005

Everyone knows the rule: drink no liquor before noon. How insufferable such advice is! It has caused morning drinkers to hide their habits, deny them when confronted, and otherwise feel like they are doing something wrong or immoral or socially intolerable, a combination which leads to other forms of pathology.

54

February 9, 2006

Ever since there has been government, there have been those who want to purify it from its excesses and corruptions, rid it of its grafters and operators, and cleanse it from any taint of the sin of private interest.

Government should serve the people with an eye to the common good, they declare, and it should be part of the solution to the problem of evil in the world, and not contribute to the problem itself. Government, in short, should be good!

55

October 25, 2007

If Garet Garrett (1878–1954) is known at all today, it is by those who are captivated by the handful of intellectuals who wrote in opposition to the New Deal planning state and the regimentation of national life it brought about. They were a rare breed, but there is much more to Garrett than people know.