I’m trying to think of a dumber way to organize books than this one but can’t come up with anything: “Politicize Your Bookshelf with Colorful, Codified Stickers”: “Participants were supplied with circular sticky labels in different colors and were exhorted to use these stickers to categorize the book collection, based on considerations of race, perspective, and privilege.” Irony alert: The article goes on to tell us that this system—called Shelf Life—is “meant to trigger deeper thinking about the paradigms readers are absorbing.”

How wild was Wild Bill? Not that wild, it turns out.

A history of the clipper: “The clipper era was brief. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison remarked, clipper ships were “our Gothic Cathedrals, our Parthenon; but . . . carved from snow.” These swift, lithe steeds raced not only each other, but also the inevitable steamship and railroad, and were soon wounded by the American Civil War and thence dispatched by the transcontinental railroad, a great golden spike through these hulls of oak. Thanks to naval historians like Morison, the clippers continue to occupy an outsized place in our national mythology, their metaphorical names familiar to many today: Flying Cloud, Sovereign of the Seas, Great Republic (pace the N. B. Palmer, a swift ship saddled with a decidedly terrestrial name). The clippers were among the first industrial triumphs of the young republic, built initially to best the merchant ships of the British Empire at its apex. Now Steven Ujifusa, in his well-researched Barons of the Sea, and their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship, offers us a fresh perspective on this fleeting era.”

An Irish Dante: “Sartre famously wrote that “hell is other people,” but for the poet Micheal O’Siadhail, hell is a highly specific group of other people. Among the damned are Franz Kafka, Karl Marx, and—you guessed it—a certain existentialist Frenchman, all of whom are punished for their role in launching modernity. But this hellscape is part of a larger project for O’Siadhail, a means of puzzling over the question, “How do we describe the contemporary world?” His answer is The Five Quintets, a poem spanning 400 years of intellectual history. Mirroring Dante’s The Divine Comedy, O’Siadhail presents readers with a summation of the modern period, a Who’s Who in verse of the ways and whys that led to our particular moment in history.”

Theo Mackey Pollack remembers the Singer Building: “Rising 612 feet above Broadway (at the corner of Liberty Street) its sheer ambition was proved by a fleeting reign as the world’s tallest building. Its artfulness was established by use of neoclassical and Renaissance design elements at a novel scale. And its authenticity was grounded in local industry: Manhattan then was a maze of textiles. Its industrial fabric comprised cloth workshops and showrooms, its tenements housed armies of piece workers and seamstresses, and its labor unions were dominated by needle-trades employees. For the city’s skyline to be topped off by a maker of industrial sewing machines was a perfect fit.”

Serial art thief Stéphane Breitwieser has been arrested again: “Stéphane Breitwieser, the serial art thief who raided museums around France, Switzerland, Germany and other countries on the continent from 2004 to 2011, has been arrested again in his native region of Alsace. He had been under surveillance since 2016 when he offered a 19th-century paperweight on eBay. Several such objects were stolen from the crystalware museum in Saint Louis, owned by the fashion house Hermès. At his house in the city of Marmoutier, police also discovered roman coins from an archeological museum and other pieces from local and German galleries; €163,000 in cash was stashed in buckets at his mother’s home.”

Essay of the Day:

In First Things, Dan McCarthy argues for a “new conservative agenda”:

“We need a conservative agenda fit for the twenty-first century, and the closest thing to it is in fact the program that follows through on the themes of Trump’s 2016 campaign with greater clarity and focus than the administration itself has so far done. This is not because Trump now defines conservatism, as his detractors allege when they complain about a cult of personality. (Trump has no more of a cult than his last two predecessors did, and less of one among professional conservatives than the deified Reagan.) Rather, Trump in 2016, whether consciously or not, drew upon what has been the clear policy alternative to the elite consensus in favor of global liberalism since the early 1990s: economic nationalism, and nationalism more generally. This is an honorable tradition whose roots in the Republican party run all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. So successful was the economic nationalism pursued by America in the twentieth century that we could afford to deviate from it during the Cold War for the sake of strengthening allies like West Germany, Japan, and South Korea—and even Communist China, an ally of convenience against the Soviet Union. But when the Cold War ended, our economic policy, no less than our foreign policy, should have taken a turn back toward the national interest over building a liberal world order. Trump’s essential appeal to voters was his promise to do just that. He is not an aberration; he is not even a second, more successful Pat Buchanan. He is a return, in however haphazard a fashion, to the policy orientation that once really did make America great and the GOP grand.

“Economic nationalism is not just about tariffs. It is less about ‘economic’ than it is about ‘nationalism’—that is, it takes account of the different needs of different walks of life and regions of the country, serving the whole by serving its parts and drawing them together. In the past, the challenge was to harmonize farmers, urban capital, and labor. The challenge now is to balance those groups with the post-industrial classes as well, and to strengthen the productive economy against the largely fictional economy of administrators and clerks. All of this is for the sake not just of prosperity, in raw dollar terms, but of a national economy that provides the basis for a healthy culture in which citizens and their families can flourish.

“Culture comes first—but like a final cause or end in Aristotle’s philosophy, it is first in priority, not necessarily first in time or action. We need to bring this truth forward, for we’ve forgotten it over the past few decades.”

Read the rest.

Poem: Heinrich Heine, “In the Dream” (translated by Terese Coe)     

Photos: Antarctica

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