It often has been observed that philosophy really got going when people started thinking seriously about the distinction between appearance, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. Plato is full of meditations on this theme, from the stick that appears bent when half submerged in a bowl of water to the
The Narrative is partly like quicksand. If you fall into it, struggling will hasten your envelopment and death. Best to relax, take some deep breaths, and half float, half swim out of danger. I know there are some people whispering that advice into Donald Trump’s ear. Don’t struggle! Stay calm. And above all,
I have only now stopped laughing. I was going to write about President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord the other day, but the reflexive and hysterical insanity emanating from the anti-Trump eco-nuts had me in stitches. John Kerry (who signed the accord in 2015): “one of
It is curious how certain words accumulate a nimbus of positive associations while others, semantically just as innocuous, wind up shouldering a portfolio of bad feelings.Consider the different careers of the terms “democracy” and “populism.”Do you know any responsible person who would admit to being opposed to democracy? No one who does not enjoy
Why do judges wear black robes? It's a question few judges today seem to be asking themselves. It certainly appears not to have troubled the mind of Chief Judge Roger Gregory of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals who, it seems, must instead be a student of Jorge Luis Borges. A couple of days
Over the last few years, I have several times had occasion to cite Charles Mackay’s 19th-century classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The title by itself captures something essential about our situation. But the particulars of the stories Mackay tells form an engaging collage of social history quite apart from
It’s Tuesday, so it must be time for another look at the News, Fake News, and Very Fake News. As I had occasion to note in March, the “motor of fake news is not inaccuracy. It's malice.” Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, writes a memo for President Trump outlining the case against
You have to hand it to the Clintons. They understand power. At least, Bill does. Hillary may be too much an ideologue to excel in the power sweepstakes. Donald Trump? I think the jury is out on him. Did you know that one of Bill Clinton’s first actions after he had been inaugurated
I am glad that Donald Trump skipped the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday and instead went to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a rally commemorating his first hundred days in office. He drew about 10,000 people, excoriated the swamp that is Washington, and dilated on many of the themes that put him in office: Immigration
My friend Rob Koons is less cynical than I am. He thinks that a “reformed [National Endowment for the Humanities] could be the spear point for cultural renewal on a large scale.” Having a lower estimation of the essentially unshiftable denizens of the NEH (and NEA) bureaucracy, I think Trump was right to
