LET’S PLAY: ANCIENT GREEK PUNISHMENT! Read more

“SEEING LIKE A STATE“: I review Collaborators, in which Mikhail Bulgakov meets Joseph Stalin and hijinks ensue…. Read more

SENT TO ME BY A FRIEND WHO TITLED THE EMAIL, “PROGRESS IN HISTORY.” Read more

While engaged in a dispute as to the existence of a God, Henry Shanks stabbed Adam Weimer to the heart and escaped arrest. TX1883—Tweets of Old offers further evidence that Texas is partly Russia Read more

Some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the family. They have impugned it, as I think wrongly; and its defenders have defended it, and defended it wrongly. The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful and not... Read more

Then live, my strength, anchor of weary ships, Safe shore and land at last, thou, for my wreck, My honour, thou, and my abiding rest, My city safe for a bewildered heart. […] Christ who first gave thee for a friend to me, Christ keep thee well, where’er thou art, for me. [clipped] –Hrabanus Maurus (a Benedictine monk and archbishop), addressed to Abbot Grimold of St. Gall. From Mediaeval Latin Lyrics (pdf), tr. Helen Waddell, and via RB. Read more

“HOW ARE LOVE AND PITY RELATED?“ Via… JWB? Read more

THEY’VE GOT THE FINEST HOME MOVIES THAT YOU HAVE EVER SEEN: Did you know that Less Than Zero is a Christmas movie? It’s festive and totally appropriate! No, it’s actually a 1987 adaptation of a Bret Ellis novel; Robert Downey Jr. plays a downward-spiraling coke addict, which was, let’s say, a triumph of method acting. It’s set in LA, it opens with this song, it’s glossy and Swatch-colored from start to finish, its dialogue is on-the-nose (“Did you girls know... Read more

A cunning and obstinate buffoon, Fyodor Pavlovich, while he had a very firm character “in certain things in life,” as he himself put it, showed, to his own surprise, even a rather weakish character in certain other “things in life.” And he knew which ones, he knew and was afraid of many things. In certain things in life one had to be on one’s guard, and that was difficult without a faithful man. And Grigory was a most faithful man.... Read more

“You see, stupid as I am, I still keep thinking about it, I keep thinking, every once in a while, of course, not all the time. Surely it’s impossible, I think, that the devils will forget to drag me down to their place with their hooks when I die. And then I think: hooks? Where do they get them? What are they made of? Iron? Where do they forge them? Have they got some kind of factory down there? You... Read more