The American Interest Is Dead
Or so it seems. Charles Davidson, the publisher of The American Interest, posted this note on Friday announcing that TAI is “taking a hiatus from publishing new material.” Yesterday on Twitter, Francis Fukuyama announced the launch of The American Purpose. The new web-only publication includes several TAI regulars. Jeffrey Gedmin is editor-in-chief, and Adam Keiper is editor.
In other news: The Nobel Prize in Literature is coming up. Expect a safe pick, Alison Flood writes. The winner will be announced on Thursday.
Raymond Chandler’s recently discovered “Advice to an Employer,” a “previously unpublished spoof of corporate culture,” The Guardian reports, to be published this month in The Strand.
What happened to English farming, and can it be fixed? In his new book, James Rebanks considers how to put “farming and nature back together.” Charlie Pye-Smith reviews: “Towards the end of this lyrical and passionate book, the farmer James Rebanks describes how he is moving towards producing food using the minimum amount of artificial inputs, such as chemical fertilisers. ‘Sadly it means earning money away from the farm when we have to,’ he writes. This is a course of action that increasing numbers of farmers will have to pursue as we leave the EU’s subsidy system. But why ‘sadly’? Rebanks’s first book, The Shepherd’s Life, was a bestseller. English Pastoral will be too. Rebanks may not have made much money out of farming, but happily, both for him and for us, the pen has proved mightier than the sward.”
Are empires always evil? No, says Daniel Johnson.
Ted Gioia on the poet of jazz: “When people ask how I became a jazz pianist and an authority on the music, I’m almost embarrassed to answer. They have heard so many colorful stories about jazz pros who learned their craft at bordellos and speakeasies, accompanied by various illegal vices. My story is far less glamorous.I learned about jazz at my local public library in Hawthorne, California. Even a library in a working-class neighborhood can be a magical place, and it certainly was for me during my teen years. In those pre-Internet days, the local library was my worldwide web of wonder. There I found my future vocation on a corner of a shelf marked 781.65, the Dewey Decimal classification for books on jazz and the numerical homeland where much of my life’s work was destined to reside. Here lay a whole education in a mysterious music genre, which I could supplement with jazz vinyl—also kept in the library, available for checkout and home listening—as well as enticing stacks of Downbeat and other music magazines. In my mid-teens, long before I dared enter a jazz club, these were my humble equivalents of Birdland and the Village Vanguard. And it was here I discovered the true poet of jazz, the writer who could capture the music and put it down on the printed page, turning a library into a portal on the jazz scene. His name was Whitney Balliett.”
The Mellon Foundation to give $250 million over the next five years to “reimagine monuments”: “The Monuments Project, the largest initiative in the foundation’s 50-year history, will support the creation of new monuments, as well as the relocation or rethinking of existing ones. And it defines ‘monument’ broadly to include not just memorials, statues and markers but also ‘storytelling spaces,’ as the foundation puts it, like museums and art installations.”
