Taking a month off. See y’all in August, though I might stop cross-posting to Twitter when I get back. It’s getting harder and harder for me to justify having a Twitter account.

Here’s my Texas Covid Summer Official Anthem.

I wrote about sharing a typewriter (model) with Carl Reiner.

I wrote about why Rod Dreher’s recent books are worth reading even for people who hate Rod’s politics.

“Michael Hickson, husband to Melissa and father of five children, died at age 46 on Thursday, June 11 at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center after the hospital withheld treatment from him, including hydration and nutrition, for six days. His wife was not notified of his death until the next morning after his remains had already been transported to a funeral home without her permission.” His doctors decided that he lacked “quality of life.” They appear not to have asked for the views of his wife and children on this question.

Disappointed by Miralem Pjanic’s move to Barcelona, because for years I’ve been praying for him to come to Chelsea or Arsenal so I can sing “Pjanic on the streets of London” 🎵 ⚽️

Eric B. Schnurer: “Deflecting the anger of the dispossessed at those in the middle is the time-honored tactic of those at the top of human societies, and as events across Europe and the United States in 2016 showed, this has been the story of the right-wing populist rebellion of recent years.”

Avi Woolf: “ If the Great Awokening wishes to crush moderate discourse, then we must re-create it somewhere else.”

Zito Madu: “How should a people ask for justice from a world that has already denied them? That they have to ask at all says so much.” This is a powerful, powerful essay.

Went down to the river today to make sure it’s still there. ✔️

People who can’t think? There’s a book for that!

♫

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You’ll be hired by the New York Times right now
And then you’ll call us — alt-right
You’re looking for a — Twitter fight
You’re doxxing and canceling — all night

[fuzzy power chords]

♫

My amazingly gifted friend the Rev. Canon Dr. Jessica Martin has a new book coming out called Holiness and Desire, and she’s created a Tumblr for it here.

Today’s newsletter is largely about working spaces.

Wall Street Journal:

Hong Kong, with over 7.5 million residents, is one of the most densely populated places on earth, but recorded only six deaths from Covid-19 despite having no lockdown and recelving nearly three million travelers a day from abroad, around half of them from mainland China, where the virus originated.

The key secret of Hong Kong’s success, Prof. Yuen said, is that the mask compliance rate during morning rush hour is 97%. The 3% who don’t comply are mainly Americans and Europeans, he said.

“The only thing you can do is universal masking, that’s what stopped it,” Prof. Yuen said.

Mao Zedong, in his Little Red Book: “We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.”

Mao Zedong: “As for the so-called love of humanity, there has been no such all-inclusive love since humanity was divided into classes. All the ruling classes of the past were fond of advocating it, and so were many so-called sages and wise men, but nobody has ever really practiced it, because it is impossible in class society. There will be genuine love of humanity — after classes are eliminated all over the world. Classes have split society into many antagonistic groupings; there will be love of all humanity when classes are eliminated, but not now. We cannot love enemies, we cannot love social evils, our aim is to destroy them. This is common sense; can it be that some of our writers and artists still do not understand this?”

T. S. Eliot, from “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt”: “It is proverbially easier to destroy than to construct; and, as a corollary of this proverb, it is easier for readers to apprehend the destructive than the constructive side of an author’s thought. More than this: when a writer is skilful in destructive criticism, the public is satisfied with that. If he has no constructive philosophy, it is not demanded; if he has, it is overlooked.”

Kevin Williamson: “Leaf-Blower Man is the king of his castle, and if he blows his yard waste into the street, that is somebody else’s problem. ‘Not My Problem’ — translate that into Latin and inscribe it on the Capitol Rotunda. If Leaf-Blower Man blows his trash into the faces of passing pedestrians or bicyclists, well, walking is for poor people and bicycles are for hippies, anyway.”

Did a short post a few minutes ago that I realized needed to become a longer one, on why social media mobs need to punish the innocent.

We’ve reached an interesting cultural moment when a magazine (plausibly!) believes the best way to market its commitment to free thought is to say “We’re not like the New York Times.”

Uh-oh: “Many institutions appear to be assuming they can have up to half as many students as normal in their instructional spaces, but some of the most sophisticated analyses released so far, like Cornell University’s, conclude that ‘after accounting for six-foot distancing, classroom capacity is reduced to 13 to 24 percent, depending on configuration.’”

Andrew Sullivan: “Mao’s model is instructive in another way. It shows you what happens when a mob is actually quietly supported by elites, who use it to advance their own goals. The Red Guards did what they did — to their friends, and parents, and teachers — in the spirit of the Communist regime itself. They murdered and tortured, and subjected opponents to public humiliations — accompanied by the gleeful ransacking of religious and cultural sites. In their attack on the Temple of Confucius, almost 7,000 priceless artifacts were destroyed. By the end of the revolution, almost two-thirds of Beijing’s historical sites had been destroyed in a frenzy of destruction against ‘the four olds: old customs, old habits, old culture, and old ideas.’”