Books
May 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I’m reading Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s just-published memoir Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence. I hope to write a formal book review. I’s taking my time reading the book, compiling notes on it, and doing research on related points. I want to post a series of brief comments on the book on Power Line while I am working my way through it. This is part 1.
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May 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Power Line observes its twenty-first anniversary this Memorial Day weekend. I want to take the liberty of looking back by pulling out three of my favorite posts of the past twenty-one years. This is from March 2009. * * * * * * Asked where they had their most memorable campus experiences, Dartmouth students polled back when I was an undergraduate most frequently identified the Hopkins Center for the Arts.
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May 23, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Adam Goldman was part of a team of New York Times journalists that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for national reporting on the Russia hoax. Goldman and his Times colleagues promoted the hoax. They and their sources seemed not to notice that the Steele Dossier was a farce on its face and the FBI’s Russia collusion investigation something worse. The Times was itself a key player in the hoax.
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April 25, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I greatly respect the biographer/historian David Garrow for the depth of his research and the honesty of his work. I wrote about his gargantuan biography of Barack Obama in “Obama’s airbrushed dreams” and quoted from his response to one of my queries about it. As the title
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April 24, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Glenn Beaton is the former columnist of the Aspen Times and current proprietor of The Aspen beat. Glenn’s new book — High Attitude: How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen — was published on April 18 by Bombardier Books, the conservative imprint at Post Hill Press. I took up Glenn’s invitation to read the book in galley this past January. This is what I had to say about it: Glenn Beaton tells
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April 18, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Since the cancel culture censors have come for Dr. Seuss, Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and P.G. Woodhouse (among others), how come they’ve overlooked Evelyn Waugh, for passages like this one—my favorite—in Scoop: Various courageous Europeans in the seventies of the last century came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft treaties and flags of the nations which they had been obliged
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April 12, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The calculated barrage of lies directed at Judge Brett Kavanaugh in his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearing should never be forgotten. The Democrats did everything but physically assassinate Justice Kavanaugh as they assassinated his good name. Complicit in the assault were the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee including Dianne Feinstein, Patrick J. Leahy, Richard J. Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse — who could forget Sherlock Sheldon? — Minnesota’s own Amy
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April 7, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll has some advice in the self-help department. She urges us to HARNESS THE POWER OF PROCRASTINATION! While I generally did my homework in a timely fashion in high school, in college I took procrastination “up a notch,” as Emeril would say. How well I remember Finals Week the first quarter of my freshman year. It turns out – for an historic first time in college history — I
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March 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz seeks to portray himself as a champion of freedom. Those of us who were subjected to his one-man rule during the Covid emergency have found him to be a petty tyrant. The Star Tribune is Walz’s handmaiden and most valuable player in Walz’s puffery, as in Brianna Bierschbach’s “Gov. Tim Walz draws contrast between Minnesota and conservative GOP-led states.” Bierschbach opened with Walz’s theatrics: Gov. Tim
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March 16, 2023 — Scott Johnson
In my comments on his new book I expressed my regard for the incomparable Edward Jay Epstein and his autobiography Assume Nothing, just published by Encounter Books. I wanted to follow up with Ed to bring the book to your attention again and ifperhaps to spark your interest in reading it. Below is my written interview with Ed geared to the publication of the book on March 7: Power Line:
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March 7, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Abraham Lincoln paid tribute to Henry Clay as “my beau ideal of a statesman.” Borrowing Lincoln’s expression, I think of Edward Jay Epstein as my beau ideal of a journalist. He has gotten deeply inside an improbably large number of mind-boggling stories in the course of his long career — starting with Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, a best-seller he wrote as a thesis for his
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March 5, 2023 — Scott Johnson
And now for something completely different, I would like to introduce readers to Benjamin Bagby. Mr. Bagby is a medievalist, musician, composer, and performer. Among other things, he has memorized and performed the epic poem Beowulf. At the bottom of this post is a video of Bagby performing Beowulf at the 92nd Street Y in August 2020. Bagby’s performance begins at about 1:50 of the video. I read Beowulf in
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February 20, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Piers Morgan calls the rewriting of deceased author Roald Dahl’s books by his publisher a “woke overhaul.” Morgan’s New York Post column links to the Telegraph’s “stunning, damning exposé” headlined with the GIF “The (re)writing of Roald Dahl” (behind the Telegraph paywall). What’s it all about? Morgan writes: “It’s about the latest salvo in a relentless war on language and art heritage by dementedly self-righteous woke wastrels who think they
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February 19, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I wrote briefly here last week about William Faulkner’s Flags In the Dust. My appreciation of Flags In the Dust derives entirely from the St. John’s Summer Classics course I took on it from “tutors” (professors) Frank Pagano and James Carey. Mr. Pagano is the author, most recently, of “The was that is not: Some comments on Faulkner’s ‘Was,'” which he has given us permission to post on Power Line.
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February 17, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Muriel Spark’s classic novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published in full by the New Yorker in October 1961 and subsequently in hardcover. The novel remains in print and was successfully adapted for the stage and screen by Jay Presson Allen. If you ever saw the film, you won’t have forgotten Maggie Smith’s incredible portrayal of the title character. Smith took home the Oscar for best leading actress
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February 17, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll isn’t forgetting HISTORICAL AMNESIA And a beautiful antidote. She writes: The I.T. guys assert that all programs are only as good as their code. The computer – at least for now – cannot think for itself. It can only blindly follow the code. When the coder has made a fatal error that makes everything else go haywire, the I.T. guys refer to this as “garbage in, garbage out.”
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February 15, 2023 — Scott Johnson
We will resume our regular programming momentarily. Sick of the news of the Biden Era, I want to write a few posts on literary matters in the spirit of Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star.” Frost’s poem is complicated, yet his conclusion is at least simple on the surface. You know the spirit: So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We
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