Good morning. I’ve updated our pandemic reading list (scroll to the bottom to see the new entries.) Thanks again to everyone who contributed. If you’d like to support your local bookstore, one way to do so would be to buy books from Bookshop. I may move my Amazon lists to Bookshop at some point if I can find the time.

“I continue to believe,” Adam Kirsch writes, “that any critic who wants to write something lasting—who believes that criticism can be a species of literature—must write partly out of aggression. Or perhaps a better word is animus, in the sense of a fixed intention, a partiality . . .  Few critics in history have been more successful in that endeavor than T. S. Eliot.”

Guy Davenport’s art criticism: “Davenport looked at art like a painter, and wrote like one.”

Jan Morris on growing old: “‘I’m getting rather tired of me,’ begins Jan Morris in one of the diary entries in Thinking Again, almost certainly the writer and journalist’s last book. She is only half kidding. This collection of essays and whimsical daily musings — a sequel to 2018’s In My Mind’s Eye — is both a deep dive into the charming and erudite mind of Morris, now 93, and also a moving meditation on just what it means to be old.”

Is it time to stop water fluoridation? “Fluoridation of public water supplies is backed by every mainstream dental organization in the nation and opposed by a lot of people who spend too much time on YouTube . . . Yet the more I looked, the more I realized that fluoridation encapsulates several recurring medical dilemmas. How much trust should we give to expert judgment? How much potential harm can we expose one group to in the course of helping another? And how much evidence should be required before we allow governments to force people to do something for their own good?”

The Metropolitan Opera breaks its contract with soloists: “Multiple soloists currently engaged at the Met confirm they found out about their lost work via a tweet.”

The faith of Antonin Scalia: “There is no other book quite like On Faith about any other Supreme Court Justice or American Catholic. Then again, there has been no other Catholic Justice quite like Antonin Scalia.”

Essay of the Day:

In City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple revisits the “horrifying” and “contested” Clydach killings:

“I have a habit—whether good or bad, I cannot say, though my wife does not fully approve—of buying books almost everywhere I go. I do not necessarily read them, though I always intend to do so: and good intentions are, of course, an important component of the moral life. Recently, on a short trip to Tenby, the ancient walled town in southwest Wales, I bought a book about four gruesome murders that took place in the village of Clydach, not far away geographically, but very far socially, from Tenby. The Clydach Murders, by John Morris, a retired lawyer, is first-rate, as gripping an account of a crime as one is likely to read. It is also an account of what seems a miscarriage of justice. Though, or perhaps because, Clydach is a small place, tight-knit and socially incestuous, the story—a shocking one, of byzantine complexity—is more than enough to put one off the supposed joys of community, if not forever, at least for some time.

“The murders took place at 9 Kelvin Road, Clydach, in the early hours of June 27, 1999. Mandy Power, aged 34, her invalid mother, Doris Dawson, and her two children, Katie and Emily, aged ten and eight, were killed with a blunt instrument, wielded with such force that it inflicted injuries far greater than those necessary to cause death. Whoever was responsible sought to destroy the evidence by trying to burn the house down, but firemen extinguished the blaze before total destruction ensued.

“It took seven years before someone was convicted for the crimes—and then, it was possibly the wrong man.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Empty streets

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.