Friedrich --

Home with a stomach virus. Heroically, I struggled to the keyboard and, despite the occasional tummy gurgle, made a few happy discoveries.

* Aaron Haspel has posted a new installment in his "How to Read a Poem" series, this one about "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (here).

* Paul Mansour, who blogs too seldom, makes an inspired return here. He takes a swing first at the chic architecture world, then at a Robert Schiller op-ed piece about inequality.

I also stumbled across the online presences of a couple of magazines, both of which offer much to be enjoyed.

* The American Conservative (here) -- yep, the one edited by Patrick Buchanan and Taki -- runs articles and essays from the point of view of the paleo-right. Some are surprising (righties against the Iraq war; righties against free trade), and some are well-done. Not enough of what they print in the magazine is online -- I want it all, and I want it free! -- but I enjoyed wrestling with this piece by Robert Locke (here), in which he makes a distinction between globalism (in his view, an elite ideology akin to Marxism) and globalization (a simple acknowledgment of the fact that more trade is occurring between countries worldwide). Is he correct? I certainly wouldn't know, but I had a good time scratching my chin over his arguments. I can also recommend this piece here by Matthew Alexander, arguing that the English renaissance composer William Byrd ranks among the very greatest of composers. I'm a long way from being anyone whose classical-music tastes anyone else should pay attention to, but I can't resist noting that one of my favorite CDs is of Glenn Gould performing work by Byrd and two other standouts, Gibbons and Sweelinck. Heartbreakingly beautiful, and buyable here.

* Why hadn't I run across the Australian magazine Policy before (here)? Free-market theory, evolution, the occasional look at culture ... Bliss. Even though I've only begun to scratch the surface of their vast online archive, I've already liked a lot of what they've published. Peter Saunders has a marvelous a q&a with the brilliant English prison doctor/essayist Theodore Dalyrmple here. Denis Dutton (of Arts & Letters Daily) and Wolfgang Kasper argue here that the Kyoto Treaty is less about doing the environment some good than it is a powergrab by Euro-bureaucrats. Marian Tupy makes a couldn't-be-more-clear-or-concise presentation (here) of the free-market view of foreign aid. In "Evolutionary Economics" (here), Jason Potts connects the dots between Darwin and Adam Smith. And a special treat for culturebuffs -- the terrific political-philosophy prof Jeremy Shearmur (who once worked with Popper and Hayek) visits the New-Urbanist Florida town of Celebration and comes back with mostly-positive things to say about it here.

Having a computer and a cable modem makes being home sick a whole lot more fun than it'd otherwise be.

Gurgle, gurgle,

Michael

Mini Link-a-palooza:

Isn't it terrifying how much good stuff to read there is on the Net? Like you, I've found that my book reading has declined severely due to the competition of on-line texts.

One style question: isn't it standard to highlight hypertext links? Your style is to highlight the author's name and place the link under the word "here". This is non-standard and confusing (to me, anyway - I keep trying to click on author names).

Posted by: Rich Rostrom on June 2, 2003 02:39 PM

Hi Rich -- Sorry for the inconvenience. Yeah, it's unconventional. Partly we're obstinate, partly we're coping with the fact that I do most of my blogging from the home Mac. Movable Type on Mac seems somewhat scaled back, and it's a lot of trouble to boldface and underline hyperlinks (and sometimes they don't seem to work right anyway). If I hyperlinked the author's name or the article's title, you probably wouldn't be able to see that I'd done so. So we've settled on using "here" consistently, hoping it's not too much trouble for people. Maybe we should reconsider, and thanks for the feedback.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on June 2, 2003 08:15 PM






Post a comment

Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember your info?