Zinophilia

Although I’ve been cutting back on subscriptions to second-rate (and worse) magazines lately, I’ve been sinking a couple of hundreds bucks into back issues of two worthwhile periodicals — Liberty and Chronicles. Both mags have fire-sales of low-priced archival copies underway. Loads of Bill Kauffman, Murray Rothbard, and other greats in the issues from the [...]

How I Voted

The election issue of The American Conservative includes a short piece in which I argue for writing in Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater Jr. rather than voting for any of the major- or minor-party candidates for president. Today I followed through on my own advice, casting an absentee ballot in Virginia. Writing-in a vote turns [...]

Republican of Letters

(With a small-r, of course). George Scialabba on Gore Vidal:
The hacks of academe (new generation) have put it about that everything is political, especially textual analyses of great literature that reveal, through the application of emancipatory ideology and subversive wordplay, that the past was even less enlightened than the present. Besides allowing critical minnows to [...]

Magazine Triage

In the past couple of years I binged on magazine subscriptions, just to see what I might be missing. Not much, it turns out. The New Criterion has admirers across the political spectrum, but after giving it a fair try I remain unconverted. Its aesthetics are as midcentury as its politics–and this is a journal [...]

Goodbye GOP

I predict the Republicans will lose an additional Senate seat for every 500 points the Dow loses below 9500. How long before Mitch McConnell is toast?

Blogging from an iphone

My verizon contract finally expired today, opening the way for me to buy an iPhone at long last. Naturally one of the first things I downloaded was Wordpress for iphone, of which this post is a test.