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The Cost of Suburbs, a New Editor at Harper’s, and Anti-Semitism Today

Also: In search of authentic travel, and more.
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Let’s start with the good news first, shall we? Harper’s has appointed Christopher Beha as its new editor. I’m sure many of you know Beha from his novels—What Happened to Sophie Wilder and Arts & Entertainments—and if you don’t, you should. He’s been at Harper’s since 2008, and I think he’ll do a fantastic job in the lead role.

David P. Goldman reviews two books on anti-Semitism today—Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism and Marc Weitzmann’s Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France. Weiss’s work is particularly weak: “Anti-Semitism, Weiss observes, appears in the written record with the Hellenistic Egyptian priest Manetho in 300 B.C. Throughout the next twenty-four centuries, the West was hostile to the Jews . . . Not once does Weiss mention evangelicals’ support for Israel, nor their manifest sympathy for the Jewish people. From what I can tell, she has ignored evangelicals throughout her writing career, except for a 2018 Times interview with Ralph Reed that puts evangelical support for Trump in a bad light. Weiss complains, ‘If the Christian Bible is the most important book in Western civilization and Jesus is that civilization’s most important figure, the Jews’ rejection of him and his message means that anti-Semitism is baked into the very foundations of the world we inhabit.’ Yet an earthquake has dislodged this foundation during the last generation. A majority of the most impassioned Christians—evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and others—have allied with the Jewish people. Western hostility to the Jews is concentrated in secular Europe and the American left. Weiss has written not a book about anti-Semitism but an exhortation to the dwindling cohort of Jewish liberals who want to support Israel and defend Jews against slander and mayhem without abandoning the dogmas of a left that turned against Israel long ago. That explains but doesn’t excuse the deficiencies of the book. Her recitation of the history of Jew-hatred reads like a Wikipedia entry, pocked by denunciations of political figures she doesn’t like.”

Meet the newest head writer at Jeopardy: “Back in 1993, Michele Loud became the newest member of the small but mighty Jeopardy! team when she was hired as a researcher. Now, with the show’s 36th season underway (and with an in-recovery Alex Trebek still our delightfully stern taskmaster), Loud received one hell of a promotion, becoming a head writer alongside fellow Jep! veteran Billy Wisse.”

In Strong Towns, Charles Marohn argues that “urban sprawl is a financial loser”: “Marohn calculated, for example, that it would take 37 years’ worth of property-tax revenue from all the houses on his own cul de sac just to recoup the street’s initial cost . . . According to Marohn, the current approach to suburban development is a ‘growth Ponzi scheme.’ New developments, like housing subdivisions or industrial parks, require little maintenance for many years after their initial construction. This allows the municipal tax revenues they produce to be used for other purposes. But over time, infrastructure inevitably needs repairs, and, too often, a city can’t cover the cost. If the city goes ahead with the maintenance work, it will need to boost economic growth to generate the necessary revenue to pay for it.”

Colin Burrow reviews Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic: “He draws inspiration from Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, but knows that he lives in a different world. Reimagining the literature of Stalin’s terror carries two big risks. The first is trivialising catastrophic horror by comparing it to lesser horror. The second is appearing to exaggerate the ills of the present by forcing an analogy with events of a different order of magnitude. Probably no poet can fully overcome those risks, but Kaminsky is brave enough to take them on.”

What does Watership Down—you know, the novel about rabbits—tell us today about a well-ordered society? Ross Douthat explains.

Essay of the Day:

In Vox, Kyle Chayka writes about a trip to Iceland and the search for “authentic” travel:

“These days, Reykjavik is full of the kinds of signifiers that mark an ‘authentic’ travel experience, at least according to the influencer set: artisanal coffee shops like Reykjavik Roasters, locavore restaurants like Skál, and shops with names like ‘Nomad.store’ selling minimalist coffee-table books and scented candles. None of these things are bad, necessarily, but they’re also not particularly local to Iceland in the first place. Unlike Paris, for example, where the centuries-old urban culture is what attracts visitors, Reykjavik developed in tandem with tourism.

“‘I grew up in the city center and I remember the streets used to be empty. It was a small fraction of the cafes and restaurants you have now,’ says Karen María Jónsdóttir, at the time the director of Visit Reykjavik, the marketing office for the city. We’re sitting in The Coocoo’s Nest, a homey farm-to-table bar-slash-restaurant in the harbor neighborhood, where old fishermen’s supply sheds are being turned into boutiques and food halls in a familiar flavor of industrial gentrification. We drink two fashionably non-alcoholic lemonade cocktails at the wood bar. Icelanders used to only go out on the weekends and shop at outlet malls outside the city; now things are open all week long. ‘You need a certain mass of people to [sustain] a selection of good restaurants and services for everybody,’ Jónsdóttir says. ‘We all want the services but then we complain about the people using them.’”

Read the rest.

Photo: Reykjavík

Poem: Jared Carter, “Fermata”

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