"Something more than nostalgia"

From Ben Mankiewicz in "Hollywood’s Golden Era Still Has Lessons for America":

Think of Hollywood’s Golden Age as the era from 1930, when the full takeover of sound technology in movies made silent films essentially obsolete, to 1959, when the collapse of the studio system became inevitable.

To call this a critical three-decade era in our collective history is a vast understatement. It encompasses the Depression and World War II; the postwar reentry into civilian life of more than a million men who’d seen combat; the creation of the economic engine that transformed American life in the back half of the 20^th century; the start of the Cold War; the seismic shift into Dwight Eisenhower’s America and the expanse of a suburban society; and of course, the dawn and rapid ubiquity of television. And it’s fair to say that most Americans, certainly tens of millions, came to frame what all this meant to us by what they saw in the movies. ....

Everybody like me who loves these movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age knows they’re flawed. The pervasive racism—both in the depiction of black characters and the denial of opportunity to black actors—was grotesque. The sexism—narrowing women to, in broad terms, characters who needed either to be saved for their virtue or slayed for their villainy—was an embarrassment (and we’re not even discussing what happened if actresses had the audacity to turn 40).

While we need to be open about those cracks in the framework of classic films, we should never lose sight of what continues to make these movies so relevant, so watchable, whether they’re 50, 75, or 100 years old. In addition to giving us a desperately needed sense of our civic responsibility to the nation and to each other, they function, I believe, as vitally important hybrid documentaries. ....

Their documentary-adjacent status rests in the details surrounding the characters: their clothes and hats, their manner of speech, the cadence of their humor, the cars they drive.

You want to know what it looked like to leave Oklahoma during the Depression and drive your family to California? Watch The Grapes of Wrath. How did a U.S. senator orchestrate a filibuster to make a point about decency and honesty in 1939, and what did the chamber look like? Watch Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. How did small-town America react as the country let out its collective breath after World War II? Check out It’s a Wonderful Life. If you’re interested in the same thing but in a bigger city, then see The Best Years of Our Lives. That’s our shared history, right there in black and white, and sometimes in color. ....

There is something worth recalling about that time. Something more than nostalgia. Something magical. We understood there was a foundation to what we were, what we stood for, what we were willing to fight for. That foundation is still there, but I think we all feel it giving and hear it creaking.

I’m not saying watching Casablanca, Sullivan’s Travels, The Ox-Bow Incident, Red River, 12 Angry Men, Out of the Past, The Narrow Margin, and Letter to Three Wives is the solution. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt. (more)

Ben Mankiewicz, "Hollywood’s Golden Era Still Has Lessons for America," The Dispatch, June 26, 2026.

"Envy has displaced gratitude"

From Patrick Kurp's post yesterday:

I encountered this in [Sir Thomas] Browne’s “A Letter to a Friend” (written in 1665, published posthumously in 1690):

Let Age, not Envy, draw Wrinkles on thy Cheeks: be content to be envied, but envy not, Emulation may be plausible, and Indignation allowable; but admit no Treaty with that Passion which no Circumstance can make good. A Displacency at the good of others, because they enjoy it, altho we do not want it, is an absurd Depravity, sticking fast unto humane Nature from its primitive Corruption ...

Again: “which no Circumstance can make good.” Politics today seems driven overwhelmingly by envy. People want what others have, whether or not they worked for them or otherwise deserve to possess them. Envy has displaced gratitude for what is already ours.

Patrick Kurp, "An Absurd Depravity," Anecdotal Evidence, June 23, 2026.

Self esteem or self-respect?

I've been reading Theodore Dalrymple on Agatha Christie and the Metaphysics of Murder. The book is really a close reading of only one of Christie's books, but rewarding nonetheless. The result is a series of essays reacting to her descriptions of characters and conversations. He finds Christie well ahead of her time. Miss Marple's conversation with a doctor treating young offenders who believes the main thing they lack is self-esteem causes the author, who himself served as a prison doctor for many years, to offer this:

The cult of self-esteem was reminiscent of the facilely optimistic method of Emile Coue in the early part of the twentieth century, according to which someone who was worried about his health had only to repeat "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better" to feel much better. But Coue's method was at least harmless, unless it induced people to disregard symptoms of a dangerous but curable illness, and may even have done some people some good, whereas the cult of self-esteem is pernicious. The quality of self-esteem is but tissue-paper thickness away from that of self-importance. It demands nothing of anybody but an ability to puff out his chest and preen himself mentally if not physically (the latter requiring some discipline), while demanding, as of right, the recognition by others of the exceptional value of his person. It is essentially solipsistic: there need be no objective correlative for its occasion. It is a quality that accords with the psychology of the so-called real me, that inner person of goodness and perfection that subsists when all the dross of the merely apparent me or outer me — the one who is selfish, lazy, coarse, dishonest, cruel, and so forth — is disregarded or stripped away, The beauty of the real me excuses everything in advance, and by doing so increases the quantity of what there is to excuse.

A certain degree of self-confidence is necessary for any kind of achievement, but it ought always to be balanced by a certain degree of self-doubt, like the clown or jester who reminded the emperor that he was mortal, like all humans. And self-esteem must always be contrasted with self-respect. The former is inward-looking and self-regarding, the latter outward-looking and other-regarding. The former requires nothing but an attitude, the latter a discipline. If one compares the mode of dress of each, self-esteem suggests that others must accept me as I am, however scruffy that may be, and not judge by appearances. It gives me license to take the line of least resistance and make no effort, in dress as in everything else. Self-respect, on the other hand, imposes on me the duty to see me as others might see me. It requires me to straighten my tie, which might be uncomfortable, and polish my shoes, which is a bore. This may all go too far, but virtues can always go too far and become vices. Self-respect in dress may descend into dandyism, which comes full circle to self-esteem. Self-respect carried too far may impose an inflexible and tyrannical etiquette, breach of which may induce hasty and cruel adverse judgment of others. But if you walk in the street of almost any city in the Western world, you will see how far we are from self-respect carried too far, and how near to universal self-esteem we are, carelessness of dress being almost de rigueur. Here I am, everyone seems to be saying, you must accept me as I am. There is a certain hypocrisy in this equality of carelessness, however: it disguises the fact that no one wants to be equal in all other ways, for example, in the amount of money that he has.

Theodore Dalrymple, Agatha Christie and the Metaphysics of Murder, Criterion Books, 2026, Chapter XIII, pp. 123-124.

A drift from decency?

To what extent do poll results reflect what people actually believe? From "What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?":

On Monday, The Free Press launched The Honesty Project, a series of surveys we’re conducting through November to understand what our fellow Americans truly believe—and the size of the gap between those true beliefs and their publicly stated views. To pull it off, we’ve partnered with Populace, a leading, Boston-based think tank. The key to our surveys is a system that asks sensitive questions, along with a group of less controversial ones, letting respondents signal their answers without stating them directly. (You can read more about the full methodology here (pdf).)

Not surprisingly, we find a massive gap between what people say publicly and what they believe privately. In public, for example, 28 percent of Generation Z believe that we “may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” In private, that number rises to 39 percent. It’s only away from prying eyes that many young Americans reveal how far they’ve drifted from decency. ....

[T]his support for political violence wasn’t the only finding to cast doubt on our shared faith in American democracy, and in one another. Our poll also found that 62 percent of Americans privately believe the greatest threat to our nation comes from their own countrymen. That number rises to 86 percent among liberals, and 74 percent among Democrats and independents.

Meanwhile, we find that Republicans who question the integrity of elections may not be doing so sincerely. In public, only 40 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of conservatives agree that U.S. elections are free and fair. Yet in private, the share rises to 61 percent among Republicans and 57 percent for conservatives.

The brightest spot in our results regards the question of patriotism. Seventy-one percent of Americans say they are proud of their country in public. Best of all, the share of people expressing national pride rises in private among nearly every group. .... (more)

And, also from The Free Press, including the results of the first survey:

Political correctness, party loyalty, and other factors drive many respondents to hide their true feelings. About two-thirds of Americans believe that most people lie in political surveys, according to one 2020 poll.

As a result, politicians and the media constantly misread the actual views of the public. Shallow spasms of groupthink are mistaken for deep shifts in the popular will. And real, slow-moving changes in American values are often missed entirely.... (more, scroll down for the survey results).

The Editors, "What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?," The Free Press, June 21, 2026.

"Cool the day before yesterday"

Upon encountering a Pride month notice board for a Church of England parish, Carl Trueman wonders, "What Is the Church of England For?":

H. Richard Niebuhr famously denounced the liberal church of his day, summarizing its theology in a single withering sentence: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” What he did not note—but perhaps implied—is that such theology typically manifests in worship that is infantile, offering a pastiche of the wider culture’s predilections that would qualify as kitsch, if its purveyors had the wit to see it as such. The progressive church is always a poor imitation of what the world considered cool the day before yesterday. ....

Another irony is that churches that try to ape the tastes of the day in order to speak to the times typically fail to do so. They simply offer the standard fare of the surrounding culture in a cringe-inducing religious idiom and often with an enthusiasm that aspires to be shocking but is merely out-of-date. ....

Further, under the guise of prophetic courage, these churches are actually demonstrating cowardice, preferring to affirm the fashionable falsehoods of the sexual revolution to the truths of the faith they claim to adhere to. Christianity does not affirm the values of the earthly city, left or right, and then seek to blend them seamlessly into celebrations of the most disruptive moment in human history—the incarnation of God himself. Instead, it points beyond, to things above, to something better. Rather than calling people back to a true vision of humanity, progressive churches offer the fraudulent answers of a culture that will do anything but face up to its mythology—the cult of human autonomy, expressed most pungently in the sexual revolution. This is not the gospel of Christ; it is the mendacity of the age. .... (more)

Carl R. Trueman, "What Is the Church of England For?," First Things, June 18, 2026.

Soccer or football?

Alan Jacobs follows the sport. I don't, but then I don't pay much attention to sports at all (apart from the Packers). The arrival of the World Cup has, though, impinged upon my consciousness. Jacobs has found the Brits' commentary on the games particularly annoying. From "Pot, Kettle, Soccer, Football":

I just saw a Brit on BlueSky mocking “an actual respected American online news commentator” for pronouncing “Macron” to rhyme with “Ramone.” My first thought: Pronounce the word “Paris” for me. .... Brits can look down their noses at Americans for many things, but when it comes to mispronouncing foreign words, they are the undefeated world champions. ....

...I have had to stop consulting the Guardian’s World Cup coverage. I typically find their soccer coverage the best available, but these days virtually all their commentators feel the need to belittle everything American at every opportunity — they seem to be under some compulsion to shoehorn the belittlement in even when it’s irrelevant....

...[H]aving the World Cup in the USA has, inevitably, revived British hatred of the word “soccer” — which is a British word. And isn’t it also odd that the regular denunciations of stupid Americans for saying “soccer” aren’t accompanied by denunciations of the Irish for doing the same thing? (In Ireland “football” means “Gaelic football,” so, like Americans, the Irish need a different word for what’s going on now in the World Cup.) As Paul Rouse, a historian of sport at University College Dublin, has pointed out,

The word [soccer] can be found in the title of a book written by one of the iconic personalities of the sport in England – Jimmy Hill – who published Striking for Soccer in 1961.

In England, for most of the 20th century, the words “soccer” and “football” were used interchangeably. Perhaps the best example of this is the title of the former Manchester United manager Matt Busby’s autobiography in 1973, Soccer at the Top: My Life in Football.

On another level, of 75 Annuals listed in a compendium as being published for the children’s market in England between 1949 and 1995, 29 contained the word “soccer” in the title and 32 contained the word “football”.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the British use of “soccer” began to disappear. The Brits mocking Americans for using the word are ignorant across both space and time. ....

Thanks to all this, it has been great fun to see all these foreign visitors being fascinating and delighted by a country they’ve been taught to despise: I could choose a hundred such stories, but here are one, two, and three. It’s been rather heartwarming to hear this refrain from so many strangers: “I feel like I’ve been lied to all my life about America.” ....

Alan Jacobs, "Pot, Kettle, Soccer, Football," The Homebound Symphony, June 20, 2026.

"Miserable offenders"

In "Confessing Sin, Then and Now," an Anglican pastor dislikes some modern liturgical innovations. I think he's right. The "updates" are unnecessary, and the changes inferior.  On the "Confession of Sin":

For the General Confession of Sins at Morning and Evening Prayer [BCP, 1662], we are given this prayer:

Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done, And there is no health in us: But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders; Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults, Restore thou them that are penitent, According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord: And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

This is an all-time classic, and parts of it are now being used by other denominations besides Anglicans. It is both theologically well-rounded and liturgically sonorous. .... At Morning and Evening Prayer, the 1979 BCP has this confession of sins:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, spare thou those who confess their faults, restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord; and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

The language here is largely unchanged. It’s got “thy” and “thou.” There’s even still the potentially tongue-tying alliteration of “spare thou those.” None of that was a problem. But what’s different? There’s nothing added. But there is something missing.

Miserable Offenders. That’s been cut. The older BCPs read, “Have mercy upon us miserable offenders.” Now it’s just “have mercy upon us.” We can only presume that the 1979 American liturgists read C.S. Lewis’ essay on this line and chose to do the opposite of what he recommended. Fearful of misunderstanding or perhaps simply because they no longer felt quite so miserable, that line had to go. It was a tragedy then, and it’s a tragedy that has stuck with Anglicans, even of the more conservative variety.

Another cut is the removal of the line “there is no health in us.” Lurking behind this is surely the same sort of combination of confusion about the meaning of the words and possibly also a disbelief in the full reality of sin. There’s gotta be “some health” in us, right? A full humiliation and abasement is simply off-putting to the modern American mindset. .... (more, and some of the other modifications are worse)

Steven Wedgeworth, "Confessing Sin, Then and Now," Mere Orthodoxy, June 17, 2026.

"Are Women Human?"

Ben Domenech, in "She Loved God, Booze, And Cigarettes — And She Thought...," notes that today is the birthday of Dorothy L. Sayers, the author of very good, "Golden Age," mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. But she was much more:

If you are a Christian, you may know Sayers as someone who, while not a member of the infamous men-only Inklings, was a close friend of some of its members, including C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. ....

If you’re a true nerd, you may even know Sayers as a founding member of the renowned Detection Club, whose first members included Agatha Christie and whose first president was G.K. Chesterton. She famously authored the oath to be sworn over a skull by its invite-only members: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?” She would go on to curate great collections of detective fiction published by some of the top writers in the field. ....

The daughter of a vicar, she behaved like nothing of the sort, despite her Christian faith. She loved to smoke and drink and ride her motorcycle, and as an advertising writer in the 1930s, she created the famed Guinness toucan, the ads for which you’ll still find hanging around your Irish local pub.

What certainly deserves to be known and appreciated more about her is that Sayers’ unique life and experience gave her an understanding of human nature that proved prescient for our day and age, and particularly for the fractious relationship between modern men and women. .... (more)

Domenech proceeds to quote from Sayers' "Are Women Human?" It can be found online here. A few excerpts:

...[W]e have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that “a woman is as good as a man,” without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: not that every woman is, in virtue of her sex, as strong, clever, artistic, level-headed, industrious and so forth as any man that can be mentioned; but, that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. A certain amount of classification is, of course, necessary for practical purposes: there is no harm in saying that women, as a class, have smaller bones than men, wear lighter clothing, have more hair on their heads and less on their faces, go more pertinaciously to church or the cinema, or have more patience with small and noisy babies. In the same way, we may say that stout people of both sexes are commonly better-tempered than thin ones, or that university dons of both sexes are more pedantic in their speech than agricultural labourers, or that Communists of both sexes are more ferocious than Fascists — or the other way round. What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume that all one’s tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs. That has been the very common error into which men have frequently fallen about women — and it is the error into which feminist women are, perhaps, a little inclined to fall into about themselves. ....

We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served. There is a fundamental difference between men and women, but it is not the only fundamental difference in the world. There is a sense in which my charwoman and I have more in common than either of us has with, say, Mr. Bernard Shaw; on the other hand, in a discussion about art and literature, Mr. Shaw and I should probably find we had more fundamental interests in common than either of us had with my charwoman. I grant that, even so, he and I should disagree ferociously about the eating of meat — but that is not a difference between the sexes — on that point, the late Mr. G.K. Chesterton would have sided with me against the representative of his own sex. Then there are points on which I, and many of my own generation of both sexes, should find ourselves heartily in agreement; but on which the rising generation of young men and women would find us too incomprehensibly stupid for words. A difference of age is as fundamental as a difference of sex; and so is a difference of nationality. All categories, if they are insisted upon beyond the immediate purpose which they serve, breed class antagonism and disruption in the state, and that is why they are dangerous. ....

Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general. And though for certain purposes it may still be necessary, as it undoubtedly was in the immediate past, for women to band themselves together, as women, to secure recognition of their requirements as a sex, I am sure that the time has now come to insist more strongly on each woman’s — and indeed each man’s — requirements as an individual person. It used to be said that women had no esprit de corps; we have proved that we have — do not let us run into the opposite error of insisting that there is an aggressively feminist “point of view” about everything. To oppose one class perpetually to another — young against old, manual labour against brain-worker, rich against poor, woman against man — is to split the foundations of the State; and if the cleavage runs too deep, there remains no remedy but force and dictatorship. If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it — not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick and Harry, on the individual Jack and Jill — in fact, upon you and me. (more, the entire essay)

Ben Domenech, "She Loved God, Booze, And Cigarettes — And She Thought," DailyWire, June13, 2026.

"Back when I didn’t believe in God..."

I found this book review very much worth reading. David Brooks:

Back when I didn’t believe in God, I did a lot of church shopping. I was trying to figure out which denomination of atheism I could have faith in. There were so many to choose from! Marxists, Freudians, existentialists, the hard-core science types like Richard Dawkins, and the rationalist philosophers like Bertrand Russell. In my Fatherless mansion, there were many rooms.

As I looked across all these different flavours of atheism, I think I intuited something that Christopher Beha makes explicit in his book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. Beha argues that it is a fallacy to define atheism as simply an absence of belief.

Atheists sometimes like to portray themselves that way. They like to tell what philosopher Charles Taylor calls subtraction stories: Over the last thousands of years, religious people built up all this mumbo-jumbo about the supposed supernatural world. The job for any reasonable person is to strip all that away and get down to reality itself—the stuff we can see, feel, and measure. In this telling, atheists don’t subscribe to a creed or a faith; they are just taking a neutral, objective look at empirical reality and following the evidence.

Beha counters that this is nonsense. In fact, atheists have a worldview just like anybody else. A worldview is a system of belief that describes the underlying nature of reality, a theory of how we ought to act, and a theory of knowledge, where we should go for wisdom. ....

Humans are structured in such a way that it is hard for us to feel content unless our mess of desires is drawn by something outside ourselves, some supreme love that harmonizes them. Humans were built in such a way that it is hard for us to find peace through self-analysis, as the rationalists might suppose, or self-creation, as the Romantics argue, but only through the self-emptying love that flows from a sanctified soul.

The second advantage of the religious worldview is that it provides a structure for that yearning; it provides a way. Many secular worldviews are neutral about ends. It’s up to each person to define the goal of their life. (This is not true of Marxism, which is a religion without God.) Many secular worldviews have failed to come up with compelling systems of morality precisely because, without a concept of what life is for, it is hard to come up with justifications that separate right from wrong. .... (more)

David Brooks, "More Than Evolution Requires: Christopher Beha’s journey out of atheism," Comment

“To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”

Allen Guelzo, historian of the American Civil War, comments on what was lost when Gordon Wood was killed. Wood was one of the most influential historians of the American Revolution. He died in a grocery store parking lot accident at 92. Guelzo on Wood:

...Wood made me understand how thoroughly stuck in the antique ways of pre-modern European society Americans were on the eve of 1776, a world in which slavery was treated with a shrug of the shoulders as just one more practice of servitude, and where commerce functioned within webs of patronage, not customers. The Revolution, Wood explained, constituted a sharp and decisive break with that world. Servitude disappears in America and slavery becomes an aberration that demands either bizarre excuses or unprecedented denunciation. Gentleman is no longer a rank for those who do not work with their hands, but merely a description of polite behavior; honor shrinks as a symbol of importance, and business becomes dominated by the mobility and impersonality of banks and paper money. With a jolt, it becomes clear how, in the span of a single generation, Americans become the people who Tocqueville admired and who elected Lincoln as president.

Wood’s trademarks were his strict attention to written sources, and his relative indifference to social, cultural, and ethnic history. .... When Creation was published in 1969, Wood was considered avant-garde because his revolutionaries seemed to pay no attention to the restrained and lofty political models of Greece and Rome. But he would remain just as resistant to the import of more recent ideological fashions into history writing, and especially the attempt to convert historical process into broad binary categories of oppressed/oppressor or settler/indigenous. In 2019, he broke with a large community of historians when he expressed his skepticism toward the 1619 Project’s proposal that slavery was the dominant fact of American life and that the Revolution was a device for protecting it. In Wood’s eyes, this was absurd. The 1619 Project might be pardoned as an example of over-wrought journalism, but it should not be mistaken for sober-sided history-writing, and it was important for the life a nation for historians to say so. “We all want justice,” he wrote, “but not at the expense of truth.” ....

As fully as he repudiated the 1619 Project, he also repudiated the more recent nonsense which insists that there is an American “heritage” conferred by ancestry from the Mayflower or Valley Forge. “There is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” he wrote in one of his last essays. To the contrary, it was the Revolutionary state and its fiery and universalistic Declaration of Independence which made the American nation. “To be an American is not to be someone,” he wrote, “but to believe in something.”

Gordon Wood understood that historians are the memory system of a democracy. Because the American democracy has been organized around a set of propositions which have political meaning, it is vital to understand where that political meaning came from, and that is the task of the historian. .... (more)

Allen C. Guelzo, "In Memoriam, Gordon S. Wood," National Review, June 10. 2026.

The trouble with the Humanities

Many colleges, both private and many campuses of state schools, are in trouble. Demographics indicate that there are, and will be, fewer and fewer students of college age. Less expensive alternatives and the prospect of higher pay also lead to alternatives like junior colleges and trade schools. But some of the wounds have been self-inflicted. From the "Special Commission Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences":

The report is prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble. It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi. However, with rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues. Our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.

Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start — witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens. In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left. More specifically, the complaint is that scholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorized. ....

...[O]ur review of the disciplines paints a mixed picture. Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity. In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished. ....

...[W]hile we have focused entirely on the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, there is reason to believe that the problems we have identified exist to some extent in other areas, including the natural sciences. Our report does not speak to these larger issues but may form a useful template for the study of them. Second, within the humanities and social sciences, we have focused exclusively on core academic disciplines represented at research universities by Ph.D.-granting departments in schools of Arts and Sciences rather than the academic work generated by interdisciplinary units of various sorts and by scholars elsewhere in the university, e.g., in schools of education, social work, communications and so forth. There is reason to believe that the problems we have identified in the core disciplines are significantly more serious in some of these allied areas, but we have not studied these issues in detail. ....

An indispensable condition for serious scholarship in any area is institutional openness to a range of ideas. That openness requires firmly resisting any effort to judge scholarly work based on its conformity to a priori ideological constraints. .... (more, very much worth reading if you care about higher education).

"Special Commission Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences," April 5, 2026.

Humbly grateful

June 6, 1944

From Patrick Kurp, Those Both Dead and Alive Who Did It for You:

Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp. . .

Note Ernie Pyle’s use of the first-person plural — “we” took the beach, “our units,” “our troops.” Pyle could assume his readers — tens of thousands of them back home — shared a unanimity of purpose with the troops on June 6, 1944 — D-Day. At a symbolic though not trivial level, Pyle and his readers were invading France, retaking Europe, defeating Hitler. Such a consensus — call it reflexive patriotism — seems impossible today. On June 6, an estimated 4,414 Allied soldiers were killed, of whom 2,501 were Americans. The rest were from the United Kingdom and Canada. Pyle continues his thought:

In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.

.... Pyle covered the war from December 1940 until April 1945. He filed dispatches from Great Britain, North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and the Pacific. On April 18, 1945, he was killed by Japanese machine-gun fire on the island of Ie Shima near Okinawa. .... (more)

The quotations are from Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Dispatches

Patrick Kurp, "Those Both Dead and Alive Who Did It for You," Anecdotal Evidence, June 6, 2023.

Useful idiots

About useful idiots and fellow travelers: today there are many on both the Left and the Right.

What is the difference between a useful idiot and a fellow traveler? For the record, “useful idiots” (a term coined not by Vladimir Lenin but first used mockingly in Britain against Russian nihilists of the 1860s) are unaware that they are being used for propaganda purposes by sinister regimes. Fellow travelers, on the other hand, are well aware but don’t care.

In Soviet times, world-class celebrities such as Pablo Picasso, George Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Dos Passos all made carefully orchestrated trips to admire the achievements of the mighty USSR.

Most of these Commie-curious pilgrims were deeply impressed. “Tomorrow I leave this land of hope,” wrote Shaw in 1931 after a luxury river cruise and a visit to Stalin in the Kremlin, “and return to our Western countries – the countries of despair.” Others later became disillusioned. But for 70 years Kremlin propagandists were able to enlist a sizeable chunk of the West’s intellectuals to their cause. ....

This week, a motley crew of Westerners, all self-professed Putin fanboys and girls, appeared at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) to express their solidarity with Holy Russia. Among them were manosphere influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who face charges in Romania and Britain for alleged rape, actual bodily harm, human trafficking and controlling prostitution for gain. ....

American Right-wing influencer Candace Owens was at the forum too, as was the Kremlin’s favourite action hero Steven Seagal, beloved among pensioners as the star of history’s cheesiest karate movies. Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector and convicted paedophile, attended in his capacity as a prominent pro-Kremlin voice. ....

The Kremlin’s attempts to demonstrate that it still has friends and supporters in the West look pathetic, ham-handed and deeply cringe. It’s a sad indication of Russia’s inferiority complex that they still crave validation by Westerners – even if they’re Q-Anon Tik-Tokers, steroidal weirdos and convicted perverts. And it’s a powerful indication of how far Russia’s soft power has fallen that they can’t recruit even half-decent idiots any more. (more)

Owen Matthews, "Andrew Tate’s bizarre trip to Russia shows how ridiculous Putin has become," The Telegraph, June 5, 2026.

"I know that my Redeemer lives..."

In 1988, I gave my pastor, Rev. Kevin Butler, a sealed envelope containing my "Funeral and Burial Instructions." Recently, his wife, Janet, came across that envelope in his desk. I was curious about my thoughts on such matters almost forty years ago, so I asked if it could be mailed to me. It came today (thanks, Janet). Not much has changed, although my hymn selections might vary a bit. Following the burial instructions, I wrote:

3. I am a Christian. I believe that I will live eternally in the presence of God. I wish a service that reflects that fact. If possible, I would like the following elements to be a part of that service:

• "The Order for the Burial of the Dead" from The Book of Common Prayer, 1559. I do not want a modern language version.
• Hymns: "Amazing Grace," especially the verse: "When we've been there ten thousand years..." Isaac Watts' "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" to St Anne's tune.
• If possible, a soloist and choir to sing "O Taste and See" by Ralph Vaughan Williams from the Sacred and Secular Songs.
• Only the barest and briefest eulogy, or none at all.
• No choruses and as little sentimentality as possible.

4. The service must be conducted by someone who is orthodox in Christian doctrine and who believes the words he will say or read.

Today, I might add or substitute the hymn "How Firm a Foundation." The Vaughan Williams is probably a bit much to ask (see below). I would change the Prayer Book selection for the scriptures, prayers, and readings to the 1662 version of "The Order for the Burial of the Dead." By and large, though, it was fine — just a description of the ordinary elements of a Christian funeral with some personalization. I won't mind if the need for such instruction is postponed for a while.

"You can't return"

Patrick Kurp:

“I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it.”

Rarely does someone speak so precisely for me. Boris Dralyuk is writing in “On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy.” Few states leave me as conflicted as nostalgia. Every day my thoughts turn to the past. It’s as involuntary as a heart attack. Is this associated with aging? Of course. Nostalgia is misunderstood as a wish to return to the past or at least flee from the present. That’s not my desire. In fact, nostalgia is made more piercingly bittersweet by the knowledge that you can’t return, that even the sweetest, most vivid memory is a dream.

Patrick Kurp, "An Emotion I Must Have Been Inventing," Anecdotal Evidence, June 2, 2026.

Trees

I've owned this book for some time, but only started reading it yesterday. It is The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben. Definitely not my usual fare. But I am finding it fascinating (the influence of Tolkien?). I'm neither a hunter nor a camper. I'm a pretty urban person, so I don't experience forests much. Nevertheless...

From the Forward, not by the author, but a good introduction:

WE READ IN fairy tales of trees with human faces, trees that can talk, and sometimes walk. This enchanted forest is the kind of place, I feel sure, that Peter Wohlleben inhabits. His deep understanding of the lives of trees, reached through decades of careful observation and study, reveals a world so astonishing that if you read his book, I believe that forests will become magical places for you, too.

One reason that many of us fail to understand trees is that they live on a different time scale than us. One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old. That's 115 times longer than the average human lifetime. Creatures with such a luxury of time on their hands can afford to take things at a leisurely pace. The electrical impulses that pass through the roots of trees, for example, move at the slow rate of one-third of an inch per second. But why, you might ask, do trees pass electrical impulses through their tissues at all?

The answer is that trees need to communicate, and electrical impulses are just one of their many means of communication. Trees also use the senses of smell and taste for communication. If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemical drifts through the air and reaches other trees, they "smell" it and are warned of the danger. Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producing toxic chemicals. Insect pests are dealt with slightly differently. The saliva of leaf-eating insects can be "tasted" by the leaf being eaten. In response, the tree sends out a chemical signal that attracts predators that feed on that particular leaf-eating insect. Life in the slow lane is clearly not always dull.

But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. A tree's most important means of staying connected to other trees is a "wood wide web" of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods. Scientific research aimed at understanding the astonishing abilities of this partnership between fungi and plant has only just begun.

The reason trees share food and communicate is that they need each other. It takes a forest to create a microclimate suitable for tree growth and sustenance. So it's not surprising that isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living connected together in forests. in forests. Perhaps the saddest plants of all are those we have enslaved in our agricultural systems. They seem to have lost the ability to communicate, and, as Wohlleben says, are thus rendered deaf and dumb. ....

Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Greystone Books, 2016.

Melodramatic schlock?

Kyle Smith didn't much care for Pressure, a film about the preparation for D-Day which I had been hoping to like. Not so much, now.

A sharp intake of breath greeted the news that Brendan Fraser had agreed to play the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in the D-Day drama Pressure. Brendan Fraser? As Dwight David Eisenhower? ....

Mr. Fraser, the Canadian-American star of George of the Jungle and The Mummy, and an Oscar winner for The Whale, shares top billing with the man playing his chief meteorologist, the recently commissioned RAF Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott). ....

The commander of ground troops, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, tries to bigfoot [Stagg], insisting the attack must go ahead at all costs. The normally sturdy Damian Lewis (who, at the other end of events, was among the first Americans to parachute into Normandy years ago, on Band of Brothers) plays Monty as an almost comically out-of-touch figure who is prepared to sacrifice thousands of lives on the altar of his vanity. ....

If Mr. Lewis’s portrayal is wince-inducing on one end, Mr. Scott’s is almost equally unfortunate. I’ve never seen the latter give a weak performance before....

For anyone with a passing acquaintance with military ways, the movie is eye-gougingly painful, with senior officers lounging around half out of uniform, ties askew or missing, their headgear AWOL when they go outdoors. Capt. Stagg treats Lt. Col. Krick like a private and rarely addresses Eisenhower himself as “Sir.” When Montgomery pops in, Stagg doesn’t even stand up, let alone treat him with one-tenth of the deference due a man who was by then one of the most revered figures in the history of the British military.

It’s as if every actor on hand were told to behave like a vain, semi-insolent millennial. ....

The mushy score, absurdly pompous speeches, and Victorian staginess harmonize with Mr. Fraser’s conception of his role as the emoter in chief. Eisenhower, the very model of quiet composure amid unfathomable stress, this time comes across as a petulant, often rageful ninny who has to be told, again and again, that the weather near the English Channel is volatile. Ike had lived in England for two years by this point.

Today our historical memory of the 1940s stands in severe jeopardy, given that hardly anyone living remembers the war years. For decades thereafter, though, people who knew them well made the war pictures. If Pressure is any indicator, we might be in a new era when what Ike dubbed the Crusade in Europe will be reimagined as melodramatic schlock. (more)

Kyle Smith, "Pressure Review: Brendan Fraser Isn’t Like Ike," Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2026.

Good detective fiction

From CrimeReads, Jeffrey Archer selects the "the ten novels [he] return[s] to from before 1980," excluding Agatha Christie (who got her own list elsewhere). It's a good list. Some excerpts:

• 
  Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years when The Hound of the Baskervilles was published. Doyle had killed him at Reichenbach Falls in 1893 because he was tired of him; the public refused to accept it; and Hound—a chronologically earlier case, set before Holmes’s death—was Doyle’s compromise. It is also, by general agreement, his best novel. .... It is gothic. It is patient. Watson is alone on the moor for almost half the book—Holmes does not appear for chapters at a time—and the slow gathering of menace, the fog, the great dog, the family curse, are all sustained for two hundred pages without a single passage that drags. ....
• The Maltese Falcon became a worldwide bestseller, and rightly so. Sam Spade is not Sherlock Holmes. He’s bloody good. He’s not Sherlock Holmes. But it’s a damn good story. And I recommend it. .... Hammett wrote the way he had lived. He had been a Pinkerton operative. He knew, in a way no British crime writer of his generation could have known, what the inside of an actual investigation felt like. The dialogue is harder than English fiction permits itself to be. The morality is bleaker. The book is shorter than you expect. ....
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, written in 1939, is a classic—and of course became a classic film. Its genius is that Marlowe is Sam Spade with better lines. It’s famously complicated. Very difficult to follow at some points, but a wonderful story. .... [N]o reader reads Chandler for the plot. It’s the language. He captures Los Angeles. He captures America. He captures the people. You know you’re on the street with him. That itself is a gift. ....
• The Nine Tailors is set in a Fenland parish where the bell-ringers gather one New Year’s Eve to ring a peal of nine thousand changes—and somewhere in the course of that long, freezing night, a man dies. Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur detective, arrives by accident. .... In the case of The Nine Tailors, what you have is the great Lord Peter Wimsey—who is not a detective. He is a member of the House of Lords. He is an aristocratic peer. He is an amateur. He just loves joining in.

The others include another Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, Maigret Sets a Trap by Georges Simenon, P.D. James' first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, the first Inspector Morse novel by Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, and an Ellis Peters Cadfael novel. (the full descriptions)

"The Top 10 Classic Detective Novels, According to Jeffrey Archer," CrimeReads, May 29, 2026.

Remember and Honor

 

Politically homeless

Irving Kristol once defined a neoconservative as "a liberal who's been mugged by reality." Former mainstream liberal Democratic mayor of Madison, Dave Cieslewicz, seems to have suffered a mugging. In his recent column, "A Conservative By September?" he writes that he is going to study conservative thought, but "By this I most definitely do not mean anything having to do with Donald Trump, who is no conservative in any event. Trump is a blood and soil, white Christian nationalist populist. I want nothing to do with any of that or with the obnoxious “conservative” blatherers, like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson." He continues:

I realize that I’m in political no man’s land, no matter what I choose to call myself. I enthusiastically reject what Donald Trump represents. But I’m also repulsed by a liberalism that rejects Enlightenment values to pursue a rigid identity politics in which everyone is either a helpless victim or an undeserving winner based solely on their race or gender. What attracts me most about traditional conservatism is that it sees people as individuals who are primarily responsible for their own lot in life.

Identity politics is now so engrained in the Democratic Party that I don’t see how it can reform itself. Meanwhile, I don’t know how the Republicans can recover from Trump, now that they’re addicted to his populist voters. If the pre-Trump party could ever reconstitute itself, I might give it a try, but I don’t see that happening.

What I question is whether I want to go on thinking of myself as a moderate, non-partisan Democrat or rather as a traditionally conservative (and classically liberal) independent.

I know. Nobody cares. But I do. ....

Reagan said that he didn't leave the Democratic party; it left him. These days, there are a whole lot of us, from both major parties, who feel the same way, politically homeless.

Dave Cieslewicz, "A Conservative By September?," Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos: A safe place for moderates in a polarized world, May 19, 2026.