Good morning, everyone. Over at First Things, John Wilson writes about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s legacy and the first book of Between Two Millstones. Here’s the first sentence: “It would have been much better for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s posthumous reputation if the KGB had killed him just before or shortly after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1974.”

In The New Republic, Sean Williams notes professional soccer’s “culture of graft”: “Since a 2015 investigation into graft at FIFA, the sport’s highest international body, hackers, whistleblowers and journalists have unearthed hundreds of examples of fraud involving soccer’s biggest brands. A series of stories from published by German outlet Der Spiegel and others, relying on over 18.6 million leaked documents from the website Football Leaks have hinted at elaborate tax dodges by players’ agents in the UK, offshore shell companies to funnel money to managers, and elaborate ‘backroom’ deals with officials and businesspeople from Gulf nations, including a billion-euro deal with Qatar Tourism Authority reported to have violated European soccer’s Financial Fair Play regulations.”

Want to know what Isaac Newton was doing on May 23, 1705? Read the minutes of the Royal Society meetings, which have just been digitized: “The minutes are records of the Society’s science in their most original form, dating from the presidency of Samuel Pepys and the publication of the Principia Mathematica to the early years of Newton’s time at the helm. They contain summaries of Royal Society meetings discussing experiments, publications and natural curiosities.”

Penguin Random House closes its Spiegel & Grau imprint: “On Friday, the company announced that the imprint will be shuttered and that its founders, Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau, will leave. The news came as a shock to some at the company and in the publishing world, as the imprint had just completed one of its most successful years.”

Netflix to fund film of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy with Ron Howard directing.

Buzzfeed lays off its entire national news desk. More layoffs to come.

The Man Booker Prize loses funding following a comment last year by novelist Sebastian Faulks that hedge funds, like the Man Group that gives £1.6 million to the prize every year, are “the enemy”: “It said in a statement that it had been a privilege to support the prize but that it would ‘focus in resources’ on a new campaign to increase diversity in the industry. Relations between the financial giant and Booker organisers are said to have been strained for some time, with a source telling the BBC the company felt ‘underappreciated’.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New York Times, Milton Esterow writes about the search for books stolen by Nazis during the Second World War:

“The hunt for the millions of books stolen by the Nazis during World War II has been pursued quietly and diligently for decades, but it has been largely ignored, even as the search for lost art drew headlines. The plundered volumes seldom carried the same glamour as the looted paintings, which were often masterpieces worth millions of dollars.

“But recently, with little fanfare, the search for the books has intensified, driven by researchers in America and Europe who have developed a road map of sorts to track the stolen books, many of which are still hiding in plain sight on library shelves throughout Europe.

“Their work has been aided by newly opened archives, the internet, and the growing number of European librarians who have made such searches a priority, researchers say.

“‘People have looked away for so long,’ said Anders Rydell, author of The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, ‘but I don’t think they can anymore.’

“Given the scope of the looting, the task ahead remains mountainous. In Berlin, for example, at the Central and Regional Library, almost a third of the 3.5 million books are suspected to have been looted by the Nazis, according to Sebastian Finsterwalder, a provenance researcher there.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Ruhr

Poem: David Orr, “Winter”

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