Not the Pope, Francis the anti-American environmentalist Jesuit. No, I mean Alex, the 18th-century English poet. Here’s my question: Is the whole Russia-meddled-in-U.S.-election/Donald-Trump-colluded-with-Putin-to-snatch-the-presidency-from-its-rightful-owner,-H.-Clinton narrative an example of what Pope talked about at the beginning of The Rape of the Lock? What dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs, What mighty Quarrels rise from trivial
I have no idea who wrote the rousing speech that Donald Trump delivered Thursday in Warsaw. But I think I know who might have provided a model: Pericles of Athens. As I noted yesterday, the speech contained the usual quota of diplomacy-speak, freshened up with numerous specific advisories: the US stands behind Article
A couple of weeks ago in this space, I speculated that CNN, the Crackpot News Network, had reached the terminal stage of malevolent implausibility. “[I]t would be a good thing,” I wrote, “were CNN humiliated and sued out of existence. It performs no journalistic function, merely a destructively partisan one.” As usual, I
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
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
