Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- Popular Sovereignty on the Ropes
Clare Spark on what the term means, why it’s critical to the American project, why it’s endangered, and what we can do to start restoring it: Rooseveltian internationalists, leaders of the American Studies movement, were fond of trouncing the Founders and Herman Melville’s character Captain Ahab as messianic and rabidly imperialistic. Thus “American exceptionalism” has […]
- Mapping the Republic of Letters
Social networking, as it existed among the 18th-Century intelligentsia: “Mapping the Republic of Letters” is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and international project in the digital humanities, centered at Stanford University. Since 2008, we have been creating visualizations to analyze “big data” relating to the world of early-modern scholars. We focus primarily on their correspondence, travel, and […]
- Why We Fight
James Delingpole on why he’s so hard on the climate warmists: On a personal level, it’s a problem for us climate sceptics because it means we find ourselves continually being vilified – and denied airspace or funding or preferment – on the basis not of what we actually believe and say but on a grotesque […]
- The Littlest Generals
Brothers in tiny Mexican town push for changes to nation’s strict gun-control laws: “Had we not been able to defend ourselves that afternoon with our own weapons, I don’t know that we’d be standing here today,” said Alex LeBaron, a state legislator who is leading a campaign to allow residents to arm themselves. “Without our […]
- Obama’s Tax Bill Comes Due
As usual, Arthur Brooks nails it: After paying a lifetime of taxes on wages and salaries, business and farm profits and capital gains, Americans who save their money rather than spend it get the reward of giving 40% to Uncle Sam. As a political matter, the GOP also gave a big break to Democratic Senators […]
- The Artistic Legacy of the Great War
Why did World War I produce a unique cultural paralysis? Everywhere, the Great War precipitated a cultural paralysis the like of which had not been known since medieval times. The causes of this precipitate ice age are elusive. Its consequences endure. A pattern of cultural response and expectation in wartime was set for the next […]
- Paul Krugman: Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics
This time, it’s social scientism: Let me be clear, however: in pointing out the familiarity of the various societies we see in Foundation, I’m not being critical. On the contrary, this familiarity, the way Asimov’s invented societies recapitulate historical models, goes right along with his underlying conceit: the possibility of a rigorous, mathematical social science […]
- The Folly of Scientism
Scientists continue to overreach in their estimation of themselves: Is scientism defensible? Is it really true that natural science provides a satisfying and reasonably complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand — of every phenomenon in the universe? And is it true that science is more capable, even singularly capable, of […]
