A fantastic essay on Blake’s Laocoön by Adam Roberts. I must write about this at some point….
In one of the Nero Wolfe books Archie Goodwin calls his typewriter the “alphabet piano,” so that’s what I’m gonna call my computer keyboard from now on.
Architectural designs from The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs by English garden designer Batty Langley (1696-1751)
Civil-official husu, Korea (19th century)
Some people will struggle to believe that I did this, but I wrote about Auden’s bad wrong essay on detective fiction.
ONE-NIL TO THE ARSENAL ⚽️
My ol’ buddy Chuck Mathewes writing brilliantly about Alasdair MacIntyre:
It was the spring semester of 1991, my senior year at Georgetown University, and my capstone seminar was dedicated to reading everything the Scottish-born philosopher had written up to that point. (It was a lot.) At the end of the semester, he came for a full day of discussion. To call it “vigorous” and “frank” would suggest we were auditioning for the State Department.
As I recall, he mocked those who did not like the Red Sox (or possibly those who did?). At another point, he suggested that, if we were in Ireland, he would have been entitled to kill one of my classmates.
Undoubtedly, though, the most memorable moment for me came at lunch, when one of us asked him a question that was really a barely disguised invitation for him to congratulate us on our class's dedication to his writings. He was having none of it. "Oh, I think your class is profoundly misbegotten," he said. "If you had understood anything of what I have written, you would have immediately stopped reading my work and turned to an intensive study of Aristotle and Aquinas."
Steven Pinker’s new essay on Harvard is outstanding: fair-minded, well-reasoned, clearly-argued, and full of links to articles that provide copious support for his key claims.
The Taming of the Shrew, illustrated by Valenti Angelo