Here’s Micah Mattix, the editor of Portico, on this new endeavor.
I wrote a post for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters about Cosmos Murray and Cosmos Jacobs.
Wanting to find out if money does in fact make everything better, I bought a brand-new, confidently-made, 2026 portable CD player, equipped with all the fixings to make playing a CD as smooth as streaming.
So far so good: yesterday, going to Barbes in Park Slope, SMOKE on the Upper West Side, and back home to Bay Ridge, I listened to Daniel Barenboim and Gervase DePeyer play Brahms’ Clarinet Concerto No. 1 enough times to develop a favorite movement (2nd) and to feel that Barenboim is sometimes just too rubato for me. I just wouldn’t have done this with streaming, where endless novelty is the point. Scarcity and necessity are back.
Christopher Beha, from Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer :
I could tell that my foundation was sound. I just wanted to know what was underfoot. So I told myself, Suppose you start with love. That was the one clear and certain thing in my life. What would it mean to start there? To begin with the certain reality of that love and build whatever could be built on top of it? If I took this for true, what else would have to be true with it?
To believe in love — not as a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain, an adaptive strategy blindly hit upon by the genes in control of us survival machines, but as a foundational reality — means abandoning strict materialism, for the kind of love I’m talking about simply can’t be reduced to physical processes. It also means abandoning the idealism that says that the world we experience is entirely or even largely our own creation, that we project upon the raw facts whatever meaning and value and order we find there. From this perspective, love is a “mood,” part of the subjective apparatus with which we take in the objects of experience. But to really feel love is to be certain that it is not simply a projection, just as to stand in the warmth and the light of the sun is to be certain that the sun exists outside ourselves.
This reminds me of Auden:
One bubble-brained creature said—
“I am loved, therefore I am” — :
And well by now might the lion
Be lying down with the kid,
Had he stuck to that logic.
Watched: 49th Parallel. An excellent piece of propaganda, though I can’t decide whether it is enlivened or diminished by the French-Canadian trapper’s accent of … Laurence Olivier. Sacré bleu! 🍿
Watched: Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. A wonderful tribute to the Archers (especially Michael Powell) by Scorsese, which makes me wish I could enjoy their movies as much as he does. 🍿
Adam Roberts with a brilliant tale within a tale within a tale within a tale… I’d love to see more stories from Adam on his Substack.
Finished reading: Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha. A very good book. More thoughts coming soon in The Dispatch. 📚
Kevin D. Williamson: “Negative partisanship is the third-strongest force in American politics, coming in behind only inertia and stupidity.”