Ugly thoughts

This seems correct. When I first engaged in social media, I was often guilty of making instant comment that I regretted almost immediately (although not "horrific, cruel, and vindictive").  Jim Geraghty:

On Friday, John Podhoretz of Commentary offered a series of posts on X that succinctly encapsulated what we’ve seen since the rise of social media and why so many previously normal-ish seeming people are suddenly blurting out the most horrific, cruel, and vindictive ideas imaginable. You should read the whole thing — I hope John turns it into a column or essay — but this is the gist:

Here’s the danger of social media. It allows people to publish their internal monologues. Our internal monologues and fantasies are often incredibly ugly. People go to therapists because they feel so guilty about them, and one of the tasks of a therapist is to explain that thoughts are not actions. You can rage in your thoughts about your brother, or someone at work, even fantasize about them dying — but you have done nothing and are guilty of nothing, and you need to forgive yourself and learn how to calm yourself down.

Since 2007, people have [had] a means of externalizing that interior monologue....

If the world knew what was going on inside us, we would all be punished viscerally for it. Until 2007, for the most part, the world would not, could not, know. The question is, and I mean this literally: Can civilization survive now that we have been made witness to the interior lives of others?

Just about everybody’s got ugly thoughts sometimes. Thankfully, the percentage of people who act on those thoughts is pretty small; otherwise, society would be anarchy. And thankfully, most people keep those thoughts to themselves.

I would note that if you say something that violates other people’s sense of right and wrong — “I’m glad that guy is dead, I wish I had killed him myself” — in front of other people, you’re likely to see visible reactions of disapproval. You might even lose friends over it or get the sense that other people see you as a broken, hateful lunatic. That dormant sense of shame might awaken. But online, it’s much easier to dismiss those who criticize your comment, and also much easier to bask in the approval of other people, as well. ....

Jim Geraghty, "‘Consequence Culture’ Comes for the Angry Left," National Review, Sept. 15, 2025.

The Bird and Baby

The world's richest man has purchased the Oxford pub where the Inklings once met. From The Telegraph:

The most unlikely part of Ellison’s plan to put his stamp on Oxford is his purchase of one of its most historic and best loved pubs. In 2023, EIT reportedly paid the eye-watering sum of £8m for the Eagle and Child, in the centre of the city, which is being restored by Foster + Partners.

The pub, which first opened in 1684, closed its doors in March 2020 because of the pandemic and has never reopened. Until its closure, its most famous feature was the wooden plaque in the back room, known as the Rabbit Room, commemorating the literary group known as the Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, who would meet there regularly to socialise and discuss their work.

It was here, when Tolkien was reading The Lord of the Rings to the assembled company, that the academic Hugh Dyson is said to have remarked, “not another f------ elf”.

In one of the group’s last meetings, Lewis distributed literary proofs for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. ....

Ellison bought the pub from St John’s College – co-incidentally, [Tony] Blair’s old college – with a pledge to refurbish and reopen it as a place where technologists and university scholars can come to meet and exchange ideas – as well, of course, as to drink. The pub’s menu will also, apparently, become rather more refined. .... (more)

I had a drink there when in Oxford and, of course, visited the area in the pub where the Inklings would gather, usually on Tuesday. They would also meet in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College on Thursday evenings. I hope the restoration of the pub retains reference to its association with Lewis, Tolkien, and the others. The Bird and Baby picture is one I collected some time ago..

Mick Brown, "How the world’s richest man is buying up Oxford," The Telegraph, Sept. 13, 2025.

"But"

Jonah Goldberg:

...[Y]ou often hear a lot of “buts” after an event like this. When Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was murdered, there were a lot of statements along the lines of “murder is wrong, but people need to understand how bad insurance companies are.”

(It’s depressing how I had to look up the name of the innocent victim, but knew the suspect’s name by heart).

Not everybody who said that kind of thing thought they were condoning or somehow justifying murder, but some did and more came across as if they were. And that is grotesque.

When it comes to murder—not self-defense or combat in war—there is nothing one can say after the “but” that can mitigate the wrongness of murder.

Murder is axiomatically unjustifiable.

It’s literally the word we use to describe an unjustified and unjustifiable taking of a human life. Under the law, if the justification is persuasive then it’s not murder but something else, and we use other words to describe it (negligent homicide, self-defense, manslaughter, etc.). ....

When you fail to condemn a murder because you don’t like what the victim said or believed, you are suggesting at some fundamental level that some speech or ideas should be punishable by death. That is atavistic. That is literally barbaric in that it is a throwback to a time when the powerful could kill the powerless simply because they gave offense. Every person who surrenders, even at the margins, to the idea that one can justify murdering people for expressing their beliefs is not a sophisticated modern advocate of some edgy new way of thinking. They are, all of them, reactionaries at the most metaphysical level, rejecting the core convictions of not just “modernity” but of Judeo-Christian civilization itself. .... (more)

Jonah Goldberg, "There Is No ‘They.’ Only ‘We.’," The Dispatch, Sept. 12, 2025.

Politics

George Will:

Today, on both sides of the barricades, politics is practiced with a snarl. It makes people cranky, permeates everything, and in two months, will spoil innumerable Thanksgiving dinners. Why then must we have politics? ....

Trout get along swimmingly without politics. Ants and beavers collaborate building anthills and dams, and bees in apiaries have hierarchies (queens and drones), but we do not speak of the “politics” of ants, beavers and bees.

Only humans have politics, for two reasons: We are opinionated, and we are egotistical. We think our opinions are preferable to others’ opinions. Hence the primary purpose and challenge of politics is to keep the peace among such creatures living together.

Many visionary nuisances think that keeping the peace is a contemptibly modest, even banal purpose for politics. They believe that social peace — living together congenially — is not merely overrated, it is evidence of bad character: too little passion for perfecting the world. Sacrificing social peace is, they think, an inevitable price worth paying for a politics with properly elevated ambitions, including the suppression of those whose opinions and egotism are impediments to politically driven progress.

Addressing what he called, with notable understatement, “my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” Lincoln said in his first inaugural: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” When he spoke, seven states had voted to secede. The nation was fractured by disagreement about the right of some human beings to own other human beings.

Today, American politics is embittered by many disagreements, but not even all of them cumulatively begin to justify the insanely disproportionate furies that so many people on both sides of the metaphoric barricades relish feeling. Perhaps they feel important, even to themselves, only when cloaked in the derivative importance that comes from immersion in apocalyptic politics. Politics too grand to settle for merely keeping the peace that gives congeniality a chance. ....

George Will, "William F. Buckley Jr. would recognize Charlie Kirk as a kindred spirit," The Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2025.

Compassion and permissiveness are not the same

"The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska" describes what happened, but also why it shouldn't have happened:

Until the...security footage from that night was released—footage that shows not just the moments leading up to Zarutska’s murder, but the horrifying aftermath as Brown stalks up and down the car leaving a literal trail of blood in his wake—the story oddly flew under the radar. It did so for the same reasons that it’s now become a flashpoint in the online discourse about crime, disorder, and public safety in American cities today. ....

The greater issue is a cultural one: a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavior—and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don’t exist. ....

In shying away from what is politically inconvenient, ugly, or otherwise uncomfortable, we not only cede the conversation to racist idiots, but relinquish with it all hopes of a better future. The problem is not politics per se, but an inability to course correct when what seemed like progress turned out to be a misstep.

Nowhere is that clearer than in a well-intentioned attempt to give the mentally ill more agency that instead resulted in vastly fewer people accessing the care they desperately needed. ....

...[T]he tragedy is not just how badly this country failed to protect Iryna Zarutska from someone like Decarlos Brown Jr.—or to save Decarlos Brown Jr. from becoming the monster who killed her. It’s that we have fallen for the misguided idea that compassion and permissiveness are one and the same. In doing so, we have lost sight of the fact that a country founded on the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is also founded on the promise that when you come here, you will be not just free but safe. The tragedy is that a woman who fled the terror and disorder of war for a better life in a peaceful America instead ended up, unknown to her, in an America where we have tacitly abandoned certain public spaces to the most disordered and depraved among us because enforcing the law feels mean and makes us uncomfortable. .... (more, perhaps behind a paywall)

Kat Rosenfield, "The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska," The Free Press, Sept. 8, 2025.

The best of the past

A friend thought I might appreciate this by Peggy Noonan. He was right. The excerpts below begin with a quotation from David McCullough:

.... “At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation.” Everything we have, he says, all the great institutions, the arts, our law, exists because those who came before us built them. Why did they do that? What drove them, what obstacles did they face, how are we doing as stewards and creators? “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.” This is a wonderful sentence because it is true and bluntly put. Ignorance is a form of ingratitude. ....

Earlier this summer I wrote that we now routinely say and do things in our public life that are at odds with our history, that are unlike us. I focused on President Trump’s language and imagery when speaking to the troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., in early June. His remarks were partisan in the extreme, even for him; it was a Trump rally, not a president addressing the troops. Elsewhere, on sending the National Guard into Los Angeles: “When they spit, we hit.” All of it, the rally and what he said, was, I said, the kind of thing we don’t do. And we mustn’t lose sight of what we don’t do. ....

You can’t be dreamy about the past and say, “It was nice then.” It was never nice, it was made by human beings. You can’t say, “People were better then.” They weren’t. But in even the recent past the allowable boundaries of public behavior were firmer, and the expectations we held for our leaders higher. And their public behavior (not private, or not necessarily private) was often preferable to the public behavior we see today. So you don’t want to live in the past, but you do want to bring the best of the past into the present. .... (more)

Peggy Noonan, "We Need to Know History, Especially Now," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 4, 2025

What the law requires

On September 9^th, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's Listening to the Law will be published. Her decisions on the Court have annoyed both liberals and MAGA types, but not, I think, those who understand what judges are supposed to do. "Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is, not what it should be." This is excerpted from an excerpt from the coming book:

...[I]n our system, a judge must abide by the rules set by the American people, both in the Constitution and legislation. Thus, the most important question for a nominee is whether she will honor her commitment to do so. Though the confirmation process sometimes suggests otherwise, it shouldn’t matter what the nominee thinks about the death penalty, abortion, affirmative action, or any other politically charged topic. What matters is whether she will respect the people’s resolution of such issues.

The judicial oath demands no less. The Constitution requires that all federal and state officials, including judges, “be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” To enforce this requirement, Congress mandates that all federal officials swear to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution and to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.”

Federal judges take an additional oath, swearing to “administer justice without respect to persons” and to “faithfully and impartially discharge” their duties under the Constitution. Each of these oaths is a promise to leave personal preferences and biases at the courthouse door. The guiding principle in every case is what the law requires, not what aligns with the judge’s own concept of justice. .... (more)

Amy Coney Barrett, Listening to the Law, The Free Press, Sept. 3, 2025.

Vocation

Tomorrow is Labor Day in the US. As I have done in the past for Labor Day, I re-post part of a 1942 address by Dorothy L. Sayers: "Why Work?" (pdf):

I HAVE already, on a previous occasion, spoken at some length on the subject of Work and Vocation. What I urged then was a thorough-going revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon—not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God's image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing. ....

It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people, and particularly perhaps the Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work. .... It is not right for her to acquiesce in the notion that a man's life is divided into the time he spends on his work and the time he spends in serving God. He must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation. ....

Where we have become confused is in mixing up the ends to which our work is put with the way in which the work is done. The end of the work will be decided by our religious outlook: as we are so we make. It is the business of religion to make us Christian people, and then our work will naturally be turned to Christian ends, because our work is the expression of ourselves. But the way in which the work is done is governed by no sanction except the good of the work itself; and religion has no direct connexion with that, except to insist that the workman should be free to do his work well according to its own integrity. ....

Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?" Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949, pp. 46-62.

Repent!

Paul Kingsnorth writes "I Found Freedom Along the Alaska Highway," sometimes quoting from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as here:

Pirsig’s 1968 road trip took place in a revolutionary year. There were fires all around him in America, but he could see where the real enemy lay:

Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

There’s a Greek word for this: metanoia. In English, it is usually translated as “repent.” It’s the first word Jesus of Nazareth is recorded as saying as he begins his mission. Sometimes we think it means “say sorry to God or get cast into hell,” but actually it means “turn around.” It means “change yourself”—your heart, your mind, your way of seeing. It all starts there. We all know this really, but simply accepting it would leave all the overthinkers with nothing to do.

Paul Kingsnorth, "I Found Freedom Along the Alaska Highway," The Free Press, August 28, 2025.

Reading when young (or old)

Once again this summer, The Telegraph offered "The best children’s books for every age group." It's a pretty good list. A few examples:

Four- to five-year-olds

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by AA Milne

In his 1939 memoir, It’s Too Late Now, AA Milne raged at how the “bear of very little brain” had undermined his reputation as a serious writer. For though Milne wrote seven adult novels and 34 plays, the extraordinary success of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), with line drawings by EH Shepard, eclipsed any of the Englishman’s other literary efforts. They show Milne to be a brilliant observer of human behaviour, to the extent that the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood, be it pompous Owl or melancholic Eeyore, have become part of the cultural lexicon. And just as you’re never too old to read Pooh, you’re never too young: the books will give any inquisitive child an Arcadian first step into plot-driven stories.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) by Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter’s stories contain all manners of horrors, from Squirrel Nutkin’s tail being broken off by Old Brown the owl to Benjamin Bunny’s young family being kidnapped by a hungry badger. The Tale of Peter Rabbit begins with a particularly gruesome image, as Peter’s mother warns him not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden: “Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.” Not always a comforting read, then. But Potter’s exquisite illustrations, with their teasing interplay between fantasy and realism, make for some of the most enchanting children’s stories of all time.

Nine- to eleven-year-olds

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by CS Lewis

CS Lewis’s postwar fantasy has inspired more literary analysis than almost any other work of children’s fiction; but it’s part of the novel’s magic that its subtext can be enjoyed in blissful ignorance. Countless fans have reported that they read it for the first time unaware even of its Christian allegory – let alone the academic theories that link the trees in the Narnian woods, like Kerr’s hungry tiger, to the Gestapo. Lewis understood the unbridled power of a child’s imagination: no child who has followed the adventures of the Pevensie children will look on a wardrobe the same way again.

The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame

The poetic language in Grahame’s story, which is set in a bucolic Edwardian England, might strike the modern child as old-fashioned. But they should persevere: the tale of Mole, Ratty, Badger and their trouble-prone friend Toad is a dazzling combination of enchantment and psychological acuity. As with Winnie-the-Pooh, the characters have acquired a universal quality. We may not be lucky enough to know a Ratty – but we all know a Toad: “I have the gift of conversation. I’ve been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be.”

(more, perhaps only available to subscribers)

Emily Bearn, "The best children’s books for every age group," The Telegraph, July 15, 2025.

Buchan

Although published more than three years ago, I only came across it yesterday while searching for something else. Buchan is one of my favorite early 20^th century authors. From "Important lessons from a neglected Christian writer":

If asked to list important lay Christian writers from the twentieth century, people tend to list names such as GK Chesterton, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. One name that will probably not figure is John Buchan. Yet this omission is unfortunate, because Buchan was one of the twentieth century's most prolific and widely read British Christian authors, and, more importantly, he is an author whose works still have much to teach Christians today.

Buchan is best remembered today as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, but there was far more to his life than the writing of this single book. ....

Buchan...stands in the Christian tradition of moral realism. In his writings he teaches us that right and wrong, good and evil, are not mere human political inventions, but have objective existence, and that human beings have to take the right side in the battle between them. ....

[I]n Greenmantle, his hero, Richard Hannay, is rescued by the wife of a woodcutter while lost on an undercover mission in Germany in World War I. Her husband is away in the German army fighting the Russians, and she and her children are poverty-stricken and have very little food. However, out of Christian charity, she unhesitatingly offers food and shelter to Hannay, who is suffering from a bout of malaria, and her example changes Hannay's attitude completely:

'When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Hun some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter's cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany's madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children's bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.' .... (more)

Buchan wrote in the inter-war years, and his books sometimes reflect prejudices common in Britain then, particularly anti-Semitism. I have posted about that before, and especially recommend this Gertrude Himmelfarb essay.

Martin Davie, "Important lessons from a neglected Christian writer," Christian Today, April 23, 2022.

Silent people

Cosmo Landesman "In praise of the silent people":

We Silent People don’t sign on-line petitions or go on protests to show solidarity with this group or that one. We don’t tweet our outrage, or blog our bile. We prefer to keep what we think to ourselves. When a verbal punch-up erupts over Gaza or trans rights at a dinner party, I stay silent and wonder what’s for pudding. ....

We do not lack empathy or understanding. We watch what is happening – in Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan, the Congo – with the same amount of horror as any activist. So why do we remain silent?

Because so much protest in the age of social media is just noise, theatre and virtue-signalling. Digital activism is the fomo of politics. It’s not about the rights and wrongs of issues and actually trying to resolve the great conflicts of our time, and everything to do with identity politics and tribal affiliations. In taking positions at dinner parties, we are presenting who we are.

Our political discourse has become so adversarial there’s no longer any point in exchanging opinions with the person sitting next to you. The days in which debates or conversations were conducted to inform and expand minds are over. ....

Cosmo Landesman, "In praise of the silent people," The Spectator, August 19, 2025.

"Christian nationalism"

Mark Tooley on "Douglas Wilson’s America." The subtitle is "His work to create a confessionally Christian state is the wrong antidote to what he seeks to cure." From that post:

...[T]he chief challenge to Christianity in America, and perhaps even to the broader unity of our democracy and civil society, is the stunning decline in religious affiliation. Only several decades ago, 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian, and now just about 60 percent do. Nearly 30 percent identify with no religion. Americans are not bewitched by Hindu statues or other religions; they are less interested in institutional religion. The fault can lie only with America’s Christian churches, which no longer command transgenerational loyalty. Yet few postliberals, religious or not, talk about the imperative of reviving churches and their affiliated institutions in America, absent which there can be no “Christian America.” Many postliberals celebrate Hungary under Viktor Orbán, who stresses his nation’s Christian identity. Recent data shows that church attendance in Massachusetts is 50 percent higher than in “Christian” Hungary, where the regime, despite its rhetoric and state-controlled media, has not increased religious observance. No government can.

Christianity can survive and thrive in America, as everywhere else, only through evangelism—making new converts—and discipling—strengthening its adherents in the faith. An agenda of state promotion of Christianity may rhetorically scratch itching ears eager to attack liberalism and its principles of religious freedom and legal equality for all. But it almost certainly will have no effect on rejuvenating Christian influence. At least Wilson, unlike most of the rhetoricians and social influencers touting Christian nationalism of some sort, is a pastor who plants churches and builds Christian institutions. Many of his ideas are offensive, unhelpful, or implausible. The company he keeps and the followers he attracts are often disturbing. .... (more)

Mark Tooley, "Douglas Wilson’s America," The Dispatch, August 17, 2025.

Conviction or compliance?

I was a public school teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. Many (most?) of the students in my high school classes had political and social opinions that differed from mine. If I created the kind of classroom atmosphere described below, it was certainly not my intention, and it would have definitely contradicted my teaching philosophy. This article from The Hill discusses what many college students believe they need to do to succeed.

On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. ....

Late adolescence and early adulthood represent a narrow and non-replicable developmental window. It is during this stage that individuals begin the lifelong work of integrating personal experience with inherited values, forming the foundations of moral reasoning, internal coherence, and emotional resilience.

But when belief is prescriptive, and ideological divergence is treated as social risk, the integrative process stalls. Rather than forging a durable sense of self through trial, error, and reflection, students learn to compartmentalize. Publicly, they conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development.

This dissonance shows up everywhere. Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation. .... (more)

Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman, "Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed," The Hill, Aug. 13, 2025.

"The sage on the stage"

My teaching style was primarily the lecture. There was pressure, especially in the '70s, to avoid lectures in favor of students sitting in a circle and sharing what little they knew. However, it always seemed to me that, having formally studied a subject in college and graduate school, I was qualified to share it, translating it into understandable terms for my students. It was incumbent on me to make the lectures interesting and to respond to questions. But what was the point of requiring teachers to have advanced education if it wasn't intended to be used? Consequently, I liked "Don’t Yank the Sage From His Stage":

.... Relegating the teacher to a secondary (or even tertiary) supporting role as a “guide on the side” implicitly devalues what it is that sets him apart from his students: his education, knowledge, and professional experience. We reduce him to a mere repository of information. This may have initially been a bug in the system, but, in any case, it is now a feature. The transformation of the teacher’s role from “sage” to “guide” and the corollary “flip” of the classroom have been aided by obsessions with “power,” biases against “privilege,” and efforts to dismantle “systemic” and “institutional” structures of “oppression”—all of which are represented by the “sage on the stage.” ....

Contrary to widespread characterizations, the sage on the stage does far more than merely transmit information to a necessarily passive audience. The lecture, writes Amanda Fulford and Áine Mahon, “should … be seen as a special form of human encounter.” And it is a human encounter that allows for the kind of “guidance” that the flipped classroom may or may not actually provide in practice.

This is particularly true when the lecture is delivered live. Students not only are able to think critically about the material that is being presented, but they may also be able to ask questions about it and receive answers in real time. They may even be able to engage in dialogue with the lecturer. ....

A good lecture isn’t the regurgitation of information gleaned from sources that could be provided directly to students to be read on their own. It is the product of the kind of active learning that teachers seek to promote—a synthesis of information, critical analysis, and informed interpretation on a specific subject, carefully prepared within a particular context for a target audience for specific purposes. In this, it serves as a real-world example of “active learning.” In a piece titled “In Defense of Lecturing,” professor Mary Burgan notes that lecturers serve as “models of knowledgeable adults grappling with first principles in order to open their students’ understanding. […] The phenomenon of a grown-up person capable of talking enthusiastically and sequentially can show students how they themselves might someday be able to think things through.” Lectures thus provide students with the opportunity to see that “the passionate display of erudition [is] valuable in itself—regardless of the rewards of approval or popularity.” Those students “rarely … have the chance to observe intellectual mastery and excitement in their daily world. When they find it on a campus, it validates the life—the liveliness—of the mind.” ....

None of this means that direct instruction is always the best approach—that there is no room at all for facilitated “active learning” in an occasionally “flipped” classroom. In practice, almost every sage occasionally leaves the stage to guide from the side. As Peter Stanton argues, “the ideal teacher should be able to act as both a sage on the stage and a guide on the side, and they should carefully evaluate when it’s most valuable to use each approach.”

What I do mean, however, is that the guide on the side is no substitute for a sage on the stage. Students do, in fact, need a sage—for his education, knowledge, experience, and expertise. And if students are to receive the full benefit of these things, the sage needs his stage—even if he may occasionally leave it to guide from the side. (more)

David C. Phillips, "Don’t Yank the Sage From His Stage," Martin Center for Academic Renewal, August 8, 2025.

Action and adventure

Dirda has reappeared at The Washington Post with "What are the best adventure novels?" including a list of books that he would choose:

What are the greatest adventure novels ever written? By “adventure” I don’t mean “exciting” — nearly all fiction should be exciting in some way — but rather stories that emphasize action, danger and heroism. My own nominees — and tastes will certainly differ — would include the following baker’s dozen:

• 
  Homer, The Odyssey
• Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
• H. Rider Haggard, She
• Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
• Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
• John Buchan, Greenmantle
• Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood
• P.C. Wren, Beau Geste
• Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
• Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships

I haven't read The Odyssey since it was assigned in school. I never got into Haggard or Burroughs, except for a couple of the Tarzan books when I was in grade school. I know nothing about Bengtsson. But I do know the rest, and many are among my favorite reads.

Dirda goes on to consider some of the post-WWII titles he might choose as great adventure novels, and again, it's a list that includes many I've read with pleasure. Most of the rest of the essay is about another author unfamiliar to me, Lionel Davidson, and particularly his The Rose of Tibet.

I am very much looking forward to the book Michael Dirda is working on, an "appreciation and guide to the popular fiction of late 19^th and early 20^th century Britain."

Michael Dirda, "What are the best adventure novels? Let’s add a hidden gem to the list," The Washington Post, July 30, 2025.

"Oppressed and evil oppressors"

A few excerpts from "Why the Revolution Never Ends":

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously began The Communist Manifesto (1848) proclaiming that “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism,” but today it is more like a zombie, unexpectedly risen from the dead. History did not end, it just had taken a brief nap.

Refurbishing the old ideology was easy. It was only necessary to substitute other, more up-to-date oppositions for “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” so the world could still be divided into virtuous oppressed and evil oppressors. Far from betraying Marxism, this flexibility was just what Marx and Vladimir Lenin had recommended. Lenin, who adapted an ideology focused on workers to a country still composed largely of peasants, deemed the rigid refusal to grasp present opportunities an “infantile disorder.” Marx himself had described a constant change of hostile classes: “freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”

And why limit oneself to one opposition at a time? White and black, cis and trans, colonizer and colonized, and many more potentially unlimited contrasts now “intersect.” ....

Robert Conquest wisely observed that Marxism captivates not in spite of its mass killings but because of them. That is why it attracted far more enthusiastic American followers during Stalin’s great terror than in the less brutal reigns of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, when admiration shifted to the even more murderous Mao. .... (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "Why the Revolution Never Ends," The Free Press, July 24, 2025.

In the time we are given

Tolkien delivered "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" in 1936, before he began writing the Middle-earth books. This is from "Monsters and the Long Defeat" about that lecture:

.... The need to defend “man’s precarious fortress” would never cease; crisis would emerge yet again, and then again, exhaustingly, until the end of the age. Tolkien had no patience for defeatism, but he knew at the same time that the dragon-fight to which any of us, the descendants of Adam, are summoned, will not be the last. And if it is branded the “dragon-fight to end dragons,” the vendors of that narrative will consign many hopeful young persons to the bleak fate of having failed. We cannot hope to root out Evil from the soil of the cosmos entirely. All we can do is confront its promulgation so far as we are able to in our weakness. This is the responsibility entrusted to human beings in the time they are given. If we neglect this, we will discover, each and every time, that the cost of our crusades is unbearably high. ....

The history of our species isn’t one of onward and upward progress: it is one of chaos and desperate rearguard actions, punctuated by all too short gasps of peace. We try to hold the dark but it’s never a single, concentrated line of defense holding across time, united by the same allegiances or the same threats. It is fragmented clumps of contention putting themselves in the way of the dark’s machinations, and the fact that they are often overwhelmed by it is no discrediting of the effort.

And it is the eschaton that is the final retroactive judgment that will unveil everything’s hidden significance and the obscured connections they bear to one another. Then the seemingly isolated, disparate string of defeats will be revealed to be episodes in the long campaign against the darkness, from a cup of cold water to rescuing a persecutor to a doomed last stand. The Beowulf-poet illuminated Tolkien’s instinct to see eschatological reversal as a source of hopeful activity. We, their unpromising descendants, can likewise contend for the present with the hope that the eschaton will vindicate and resurrect its good within its upheaval, but without triumphalism or presumption. Instead, we can adhere to Beckett’s like-hearted maxim, “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This is our doom and our challenge: to fight the long defeat, the only fight in which there is real integrity due to its small aims and its recognition of human frailty. We may be summoned to many fights, to end this wrong or that evil, but the end of the evils and afflictions that characterize our existence will always asymptotically evade our reach. But if we would not be monsters, then we must strive all the same and leave their ultimate defeat to God. (more)

Ian Olson, "Monsters and the Long Defeat," Mere Orthodoxy, July 24, 2025.

"What the fairy tale provides..."

From "The Seven Most Popular G.K. Chesterton Quotes He Never Said":

“Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, 

but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

What he actually wrote:

.... Fairy tales...are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. .... ("The Red Angel," Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

The Seven Most Popular G.K. Chesterton Quotes He Never Said

"Footprints on the sands of time"

In its weekly "Things Worth Remembering" essay, The Free Press publishes "Life Is Real! Life Is Earnest!" quoting from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1838 poem “A Psalm of Life.” From the end of that essay:

“A Psalm of Life” is a call to meaning. A call to action. A call to be good. A call to try to make a difference—for yourself and for others. A reassurance that we matter. A reassurance that although we return to dust, our soul lives on.

That’s why I read it to my sons. That’s the lesson I want to pass along, a footprint I am trying to leave behind for them now, so that they might draw on it in some moment of struggle far in the future. So that they can always remember why we are here:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

One foot in front of the other. One small act after one small action. One little thing that makes a difference, for us and for others. (more)

Ryan Holiday, "Things Worth Remembering: ‘Life Is Real! Life Is Earnest!’," The Free Press, July 13, 2025.