Currently reading: Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock. Bullock is obviously drawing on Plutarch — and the story of how widely read Plutarch used to be versus how completely unknown he is today is a story worth telling — but he also says this in his preface: “Looking back, I cannot think of a better preparation for writing about Hitler and Stalin than the familiarity I acquired at Oxford in the 1930s with Thucydides, Tacitus, and those sections of Aristotle’s Politics that deal with the Greek experience of tyranny.” If we today had the lessons of ancient history ready to hand we could have much more productive political debates. People who know only the present — i.e. almost everybody — have no means of comparative measurement and so live by the feels. 📚
Hank Green’s timeline of Artemis mission photos is great.
I’m getting a start on my critical edition of Auden’s Nones, and reflecting that one of the chief pleasures of doing this work is the requirement that I own and consult the original Random House and Faber editions of the volumes. I’m amassing an interesting collection.
“Influencers” and “content creators”: People who want to affect others in unspecified ways for unspecified reasons by unspecified means.
Currently reading: A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from The Readers’ Subscription and Mid-century Book Clubs. It’s odd to think that Auden and Barzun were born in the same year, two years after Trilling — and Barzun lived until 2012. 📚
