Reviews and News:
Dominic Green on 2014 Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s deliberate obscurantism: “The typical Modiano novel begins with a mystery of origins and identity, and proceeds by passivity and vagueness. Sometimes, the story terminates in a tragedy of life foreshortened. Sometimes the track runs full circle, as though life is a series of improvisations, each designed to keep you where you are. Either way, the ‘force of circumstances’ determines the outcome.”
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Michael Mandelbaum on the end of America’s great age of growth.
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Christopher J. Scalia: Too Pale and Male for Yale
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The Metropolitan Opera’s new music director has a tattoo.
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Daniel J. Mahoney on the specter of soft totalitarianism: “Alexis de Tocqueville ends his classic work Democracy in America (published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840) with an evocative description of a new “species of oppression” that he believed would menace the democracies of the future. This “mild” or “tutelary” despotism would not torture or kill human beings or be despotic in the usual sense of the term. But it would oppress nonetheless, undermining the vitality and self-respect of democratic souls. It would not only be a “soft” or “gentle” despotism (no gulags or political prisons in this horizon); it would be, as the French political philosopher Pierre Manent has suggested, a despotism of the soft, whose pestiferous rules and regulations would aggressively aim to make life both more equal and more humane.”
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B. Mitchell Cator has been accused of plagiarizing in his recently released All The Good That Remains.
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Roger Scruton’s confessions.
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Roger Kimball: Impending coup at St. John’s College.
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Interview
Yuval Levin talks about liberals’ and conservatives’ competing nostalgias with NPR’s Robert Siegel.
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