Alan Jacobs

Among the truly great poets, the handful of absolute masters, the most neglected is Horace. This was not always so, but when the study of Latin fell away so too did Horace’s influence and reputation. He does not yield readily to translation: his poetry combines colloquial ease and extreme concision in a way almost impossible to imitate in other tongues. (David Ferry’s marvelous versions don’t even try to be concise, but they capture much of Horace’s distinctive and inimitable charm.) In the last hundred years, two major poets in English have understood themselves as heirs to the Horatian tradition. One of them is W. H. Auden, and the other is Les Murray.

Michael O’Loughlin has named this tradition “retired leisure,” a retreat from the vortex of social and political life not simply to repudiate it, but to save yourself from being torn apart by it, to see it more clearly, to bear vivid witness to its absurdities—and perhaps to exemplify better ways to live. Horace’s friend and patron Maecenas bought him a farm near modern Licenza—the poet called it his “Sabine farm"—and from there he watched with tolerant wisdom the follies of Rome, and wrote his beautiful poems. Les Murray’s place in little Bunyah, up the North Coast of New South Wales, is his Sabine farm.

Churches do not pay federal and state income taxes on their basic operations. However, neither do other nonprofit organizations such as colleges, universities, hospitals, and private foundations. It would be interesting for Oliver to compare the lifestyles of the individuals who lead these tax-exempt institutions with the life-styles of the church leaders of whom Oliver is so critical.  
 
Interestingly, one phenomenon which troubles Oliver—small donors sending cash contributions to televangelical churches—is not problematic from a tax perspective. Oliver obviously disapproves of these donors and their responsiveness to televangelists’ appeals. However, small donors’ contributions are typically not tax deductible. Contributions to churches and other charitable institutions are deductible by the taxpayer only if the taxpayer itemizes personal deductions on his Form 1040. This occurs only among more affluent donors whose deductible outlays exceed their standard deduction for income tax purposes.  

For 2015, a single taxpayer’s standard deduction is $6,300, while the standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly is $12,600. Thus, the modest donations cited by Oliver, while large relative to the donors’ low incomes, are generally not tax deductible because donors with limited incomes typically do not contribute enough to itemize their deductions. The real beneficiaries of the Internal Revenue Code’s charitable deduction are upper-middle class and wealthy taxpayers. These affluent taxpayers typically do not contribute to churches, but to such secular entities as universities and museums.

Looking back, I’m grateful for the education the Church gave me. I walked out, I dare say, with its best principles in my heart, and maybe I left its worst behind. The Church stands yet and probably always will. It tells us that our lives mean something. It tells us that an individual existence has a shape, beginning with baptism and passing to confession, communion, confirmation, and marriage all the way to extreme unction and the grave. Without that inner structure, without some moral code, without forgiveness, what is life? Something closer to the experience of animals that merely eat, couple, and sleep. That the very best wisdom in the world is wrapped up with some of the worst crime is not easy for one to reconcile. But the Church now, even under the guidance of a new and invigorating pope, is a spiritual treasure guarded by a murderous dragon—and it is no less the treasure than it is the dragon.  

For a major human riddle—maybe the major human riddle—is this: the worst kind of corruption is the corruption of the highest ideals. Where there are high ideals, there will often be corruption and often of the vilest sort. But without ideals, where—and what—would we be?

Welcome to the world of “app-install interstitials”. They are, IMHO, a pain in the butt. On the scale of web annoyances, they rate just below pop-up ads and those display ads placed by companies that covertly monitor your browsing. But now it transpires that Google doesn’t like these interstitials either and has announced that henceforth it will be downgrading in its search results any mobile-oriented web pages that produce interstitials. “Our analysis shows,” the company says, “that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the web page.” Right on. “Starting today, we’ll be updating the mobile-friendly test to indicate that sites should avoid showing app-install interstitials that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page.”

‘Cramer said, “I’m not a fool.’   

Wolfe nodded again. 'We all feel like that occasionally.’

[gallery] thingsmagazine:

Daniel Mullen, paintings (via things)

[gallery] Nikolaus von Schillinger’s Instagram

This dichotomy in how uncertainty can be perceived by different classes and different individuals is important to recognize, for it has always presented profound dangers for liberal democracy – a form of political organization that we moderns both adore and misunderstand in equal measure. In a rich democracy threatened by terrorism, we are surprised (but shouldn’t be) by the number of people – a majority, only a handful of years ago – who are willing to tolerate outrages like torture and assassination in order to reduce their sense of insecurity. In a poor and fragile democracy like post-revolutionary Egypt, the same mechanism operates, though it is starker and more broadly applied. The promise of a political strongman like al-Sisi is the promise to reduce the majority’s sense of risk by focusing that risk instead on a minority, transforming it both in intensity and in character; boiled down, it’s a promise to oppress the few rather than worry the many. So to the extent that the cacophony of street vendors is a sign that uncertainty remains at large, it is wholly unsurprising that the Egyptian state would sooner or later move to sweep them away.

When men use the metaphor, I can’t help but hear womb envy: ‘You can create life? I can create life, too!’ But this life, this book, is intellectual, spiritual, philosophical—the opposite of the base reality of physical reproduction.

Top 13 Trumpish words:

• I
• they
• you
• Trump
• very
• great
• he
• China
• said
• me
• money
• going
• Mexico

By contrast, the top 13 Jeb-ish words:

• the
• state
• strategy
• government
• should
• create
• president
• American
• in
• growth
• of
• ISIS
• forces

— Mark Liberman at Language Log