In Wired, Christopher Null writes that parents own all devices in a home—especially those used by kids—and “are entitled to see anything and everything on them”: “It’s always been my position not only that parents are justified in monitoring what their children do online, but that it is in fact their moral obligation to do so.”

A black that’s blacker than black: “Vantablack is a pigment that reaches a level of darkness that’s so intense, it’s kind of upsetting . . . If it looks unreal, it’s because Vantablack isn’t actually a color, it’s a form of nanotechnology.”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s School of Architecture at Taliesin to shut down: “The school was founded 88 years ago by Wright himself, and 30 students are currently in attendance. The institution is currently working out a deal with the Design School at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts through which students there could continue their studies.”

New tests indicate that a 2,000-year-old skull is likely Pliny the Elder’s: “What ultimately happened to Pliny’s body, discovered wreathed in pumice the day after his death, has long remained a mystery. But a recent spate of scientific tests suggests a team of Italian researchers may have finally pieced together a critical clue: a skull that could belong to the Roman leader himself, reports Ariel David for Haaretz.”

Oh dear. Stephen King is still apologizing for saying that only quality matters in art, and no one is even listening. Would the priests of our new religion please absolve him so he can stop groveling?

James Panero writes about Yale’s decision to dismantle its famous introductory art history course: “Following a 2017 mandate to ‘decolonize’ Yale’s Department of English, Barringer is giving over the keys of Yale’s famous art survey course to the identity vandals. According to the Yale Daily News, instead of one class that will tell the story of art from ‘Renaissance to the Present’, new courses will, Barringer says, be devised to consider art in relation to a five-step history lesson, ‘questions of gender, class and race’, with further discussion of art’s ‘involvement with Western capitalism’. Of course, ‘climate change’ will also be a ‘key theme’.”

In Outside, Colin O’Brady writes about his solo crossing of Antarctica under his own power with no resupplies: “I started thinking about my hands. That was my first mistake. After 48 days and more than 760 miles alone across Antarctica, the daily ache of my hands—cracked with cold, gripping my ski poles 12 hours a day—had become like a drumbeat, forming the rhythm of my existence. And that night, the ache got to me. As I pulled my sled into a blizzard of cold and white—my jacket thermometer read 30 below Celsius, with blasting gusts of wind that made the windchill at least 50 below—I started picturing how intensely pleasurable it would feel to get out of my mittens.”

Essay of the Day:

In National Affairs, Joseph Loconte writes about the difference between the French and American revolutions and argues that the moral crisis in America today is not the result of “liberal-democratic ideals”:

“Intoxicated by visions of a truly egalitarian society, the revolutionaries in Paris took a wrecking ball to the institutions and traditions that had shaped France for centuries. Virtually nothing, including the religion that guided the lives of most of their fellow citizens, was sacrosanct. ‘We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic,’ warned Maximilien Robespierre, ‘or perish with them.’ Their list of enemies — past and present — was endless. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, by contrast, did not share this rage against inherited authorities. Although the Americans, in the words of James Madison, did not suffer from a ‘blind veneration for antiquity,’ neither did they reject the political and cultural inheritance of Great Britain and the Western tradition. They did not seek to invent rights, but rather to reclaim their ‘chartered rights’ as Englishmen. From both classical and religious sources, the American founders understood that human passions made freedom a vulnerable state of affairs: Political liberty demanded the restraints of civic virtue and biblical religion.

“America’s deepening political crisis is not, as some claim, the inevitable result of its liberal-democratic ideals. Rather, we are witnessing a culture war waged by the defenders of two radically different revolutions, two competing views of human freedom.”

Read the rest.

Photo: 2020 John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon

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