10/31 John Ellis’s Literature Lost (Yale University Press) is one of my favorite books from the 1990s. Here is a timeless excerpt on how Western civilization’s unique trait of self-reflective criticism regularly becomes perverted to cultural self-hatred.
10/30 Photos of great bridges.
10/29 Ibn Warraq’s new book is out: Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. (Thanks to Irfan.) Warraq is also the author of Why I Am Not a Muslim. John R. Thompson asks: Whose genocide will it be? And at Salon.com, Steve Paulson looks at the religious state of Islamic science. (Thanks to Chris for the link.)
10/28 All parents have lived this YouTube version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. (Thanks to Beverly for the link.)
10/27 Rossputin paints an ugly picture: corporate welfare is an abomination of both Democrats and Republicans. Classical Values points out new horizons in rent seeking. John Enright does the math on welfare for babies. Meanwhile, Stephen Green confesses: I was a card-carrying Libertarian. Scary.
10/26 I recently got an unexpected chance to visit the Legion of Honor collection, one of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It has an outstanding collection of Rodins, some fine Impressionist pieces I had never seen before, as well as a solid collection of very good works from the early Renaissance through the early twentieth century. So put it on your must-see list. And here is a good review of the Edward Hopper exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, which I almost got to see but the lines were waaaaaaaaay too long. (Thanks to Mark for the link.)
10/24 How high are the effective tax rates on the American rich? And here’s some good Canadian anti-tax spirit in a spoof posted at YouTube: (Thanks to Craig for the link.)
10/23 Religion and the American experience: A Los Angeles Times review of Gary Wills’s new book. A key quotation: “at the time of the founding, historians estimate that only about 17% of Americans professed formal religious adherence, a historic low point. The framers were deists, who believed in a divine providence knowable only through reason and experience and not prone to intervene in the affairs of men.” And Tom Stone directs our attention to a new wrinkle on the theodicy problem and why God won’t heal amputees.
10/22 The conservatives do have a legitimate complaint about academic diversity. 27 – 0 is not a football score at the University of Iowa. (Thanks to Richard for the link.) And Walter Williams comments on the significance of “Indoctrinate U”. (Thanks to Charles for the link.)
10/17 Cross-fertilization: applying evolutionary biology to design engineering. (Thanks to Joe for the link.)
10/15 Now that Chicago has been named as the USA’s proposed city to host the 2016 summer Olympic Games, here is a summary of its private-versus-public funding debates. Perhaps we in Illinois can learn from the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles and Ed Snider’s ComcastSpectacor and its development of the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia.
10/12 In the wake of recent ugliness on campuses over controversial speakers, the American Association of University Professors has issued this timely set of guidelines for invitations to outside speakers. Lester Hunter reflects on the age of apoplexy. And as Harvard’s Larry Summers has been a lightning rod for one issue, here is the text of his speech.
10/10 More major Ayn Rand coverage: After features in earlier this year in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Times, and Forbes, here is another piece in The Wall Street Journal, this one by David Kelley.
10/8 Where are the top small workplaces 2007? (Via Jeff Cornwall.) And what are the most dangerous jobs?
10/4 Tom Palmer praises as Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 as “an elegant treatment of twentieth century collectivism” and links to a review by David Boaz.
10/3 Canada—my (former) home and native land: Jeff Cornwall has this item on the state of entrepreneurship in Canada. Learning (not) from the dismal failure of the drug war in the US, Canada’s conservatives have decided that they too will escalate the drug war. Tyler Cowen links to a piece comparing health care in the US and Canada. And here are some great photos of the Thousand Islands, near the family homestead in Ontario.
10/2 Relativist multiculturalism taken to its immoral and absurd extreme. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
10/1 Rich Karlgaard nicely extracts some key themes in the Forbes 400 as a Lesson in Economics.