My reading is so performative that I became a professor of literature. That’s what’s called committing to the bit.
Currently reading: The World Ahead 2026 in the Economist. As I have often noted, I strictly ration my news intake, and while I do not share the Economist’s technocratic-marketcentric worldview, I find its writing blessedly free from hot takes and clickbaity BS. I always look forward to the magazine’s forecasts, because they’re very well-informed and help me know what I should be reading more about now and in the near future. 🗞️
I’ve written an essay for a forthcoming issue of the Hedgehog Review on the conditions required the for emergence of a new humanism, and I wish when I was writing it I had remembered this passage from Kołakowski’s Religion:
Absurd as it might have been to denounce envy and resentment as the roots of Christianity – the entire text of the Gospels is and irrefutable argument against this indictment – it was not at all absurd to see in it a confession of irreparable human infirmity. It does not take, however, a clever philosopher to unmask this side of Christianity, for this is what it says about itself. Sickness is the natural state of a Christian, Pascal wrote to his sister, Madame Perrier. Christianity may be viewed as an expression of what in human misery is incurable by human efforts; an expression, rather than a philosophical or psychological description. Thereby it is a cry for help. By making people acutely aware of their contingency and the finitude of life, of the corruptibility of the body, of the limitations of reason and language, of the power of evil in us, and by concentrating this awareness in the doctrine of original sin, Christianity clearly defied the Promethean side of the Enlightenment and was to be inevitably castigated for its “anti-humanist” bias. To what extent this accusation is justified – and indeed in what sense it amounts to an accusation – depends on the meaning of the word “humanism”, and all the known definitions of it are heavily loaded with ideological content. If “humanism” means a doctrine implying either that there are no limits whatever to human self-perfectibility or that people are entirely free in stating the criteria of good and evil, Christianity is certainly opposed to humanism…. Recent history seems rather to suggest that attempts, in traditionally Christian societies, to achieve a perfect “liberation” from what radical humanists believed was man’s bondage under God’s imaginary tyranny, were to threaten mankind with a more sinister slavery than Christianity has ever encouraged.
Angus loves the cooler weather.
I wrote about the friendship between Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner.
Looks like my review of Miłosz’s Poet in the New World has escaped its firewall.
Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem has become for China what Asimov’s Foundation was for the United States: a literary scaffolding for thinking about technology, geopolitics, and the fate of civilizations. As Fudan University professor Yan Feng observed, Liu “single-handedly elevated Chinese science fiction to the world stage.” His novels minted phrases that have since entered China’s everyday political and business lexicon: jiangwei daji (dimensional reduction strike), mianbizhe (wallfacer), pobiren (wallbreaker), the “dark forest law,” the “chain of suspicion,” and the “technological explosion.” These terms are now common shorthand in boardrooms and policy circles, invoked to describe competitive landscapes, strategy under uncertainty, or the fragility of trust in both markets and diplomacy. The tech community has seized upon them with particular enthusiasm. Countless essays have drawn “internet strategies of the Three-Body universe” or even “Three-Body management science,” treating Liu’s cosmic metaphors as diagnostic tools for China’s entrepreneurial reality.