Books
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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February 14, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Reason has posted statistician Aaron Brown’s excellent column “The shameless attack on a climate change dissenter.” The “dissenter” is Steven F. Koonin, a University Professor at New York University with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics. He served in the Energy Department under the Obama administration (“where his portfolio included the climate research program and energy technology strategy”) and
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February 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Andrew Sullivan has just posted an accessible 50-plus minute preview of his Dishcast with former New York Times science writer and editor Nicholas Wade. Wade is the author, most recently, of the essay Where Covid Came From, published by our friends at Encounter Books. Sullivan introduces the Dishcast here at his Substack site. (Wade’s grandson interrupts briefly at about 39:30.) Sullivan has separately posted two clips from the interview on
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February 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands at the summit of American fiction, followed closely (in chronological order) by The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Portrait of a Lady, The Great Gatsby, four of Faulkner’s novels beginning with The Sound and the Fury, and Invisible Man. Let us pause this morning for the sheer pleasure of it over one paragraph from Huckleberry Finn, a paragraph from chapter 7 that virtually encapsulates the whole
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January 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I take it there is no news advancing the Biden classified documents matter today. Assuming our readers were intimately familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, I may have mystified some by adapting the title of Edgar Allan Poe’s fantastic story “MS. Found In a Bottle” for several of my posts on the Biden matter. (“MS.” is an abbreviation of “manuscript.”) Published by Baltimore’s Saturday Visiter newspaper on October
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January 2, 2023 — John Hinderaker
A year ago I remembered the books I read in 2021, as I had done in some past years. Then in April, while I was laid up following surgery on an Achilles tendon, I wrote about the books I had read to that point in 2022. These included The Last King of America, Andrew Roberts’ biography of George III, which I was in the midst of at that time, Ulysses,
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January 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Paul Ehrlich is alive — I thought that was news — and he is still predicting doom. He was among the featured experts on last night’s 60 Minutes segment “Scientists say planet in midst of sixth mass extinction, Earth’s wildlife running out of places to live” (video below). CBS’s Scott Pelley tracked him down: At the age of 90, biologist Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough to see some
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December 28, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Whoopi Goldberg is in the news again — here and here, for example. Ignorance and malice can be mitigated, but stupidity is something with which you are stuck. Ms. Goldberg is the bearer of a toxic combination. Her thoughts on the Jewish people are a case in point. Something does not compute. When I was a teenager I read every paperback book I came across on the Holocaust. Among the
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December 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The producers of Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray have just posted episode 5 on Winston Churchill. Whose brain would you want Murray to pick on Churchill? Luckily for us they thought to call on Andrew Roberts and luckily for us Roberts answered the call. Roberts is of course the prominent historian and prolific author of the one-volume bio Churchill: Walking With Destiny and related books. Murray and Roberts discuss the
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December 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Frank Dikötter is the author of The People’s Trilogy (“a series of books that document the impact of communism on the lives of ordinary people in China on the basis of new archival material”) and, most recently, China After Mao. He has served as Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006 — “one wonders for how much longer,” Tunku Varadarajan added in his Wall Street
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December 19, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I have a happy memory of taking my two youngest daughters to hear Andrew Ferguson read from his then new book Land of Lincoln at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis back in June 2007. Andy greeted us warmly and we all greatly enjoyed the reading. (To that happy memory I can join the current observation that Magers & Quinn is with us yet. It is
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December 12, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Steve Hayward is the author of the two-volume history The Age of Reagan. Matt Continetti is the author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. They agree — Steve here (Washington Free Beacon) and Matt here (Wall Street Journal) — that William Inboden’s The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink is must reading. Inboden is the executive director of the Clements Center
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November 25, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Douglas Murray has kicked off a podcast series entitled Uncancelled History with author Jonathan Horn. (I prefer to spell uncanceled with one “l,” American style.) Horn is a former White House speechwriter whose first book — The Man Who Would Not Be Washington (2015) — was a biography of Robert E. Lee. He is also the author, most recently, of Washington’s End (2020), about the man who was Washington. Murray’s
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November 24, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I just finished a five-week Zoom class with retired Dartmouth English Professor James Heffernan. Professor Heffernan is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II. Under Professor Heffernan’s guidance, we read the last five chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was the third installment of the three courses in which Professor Heffernan has taken students through the novel under the auspices
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November 14, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Dan Senor has just posted a one-hour podcast with once and future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (below). The interview is occasioned by the publication of Netanyahu’s memoir Bibi: My Story. They also take up Netanyahu’s prescient A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations (2000). Senor is the knowledgeable co-author of Start-Up Nation and the interview takes up the subject of Senor’s book while ranging beyond the
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