Social Matter

My father is getting on up there in years, early sixties to be exact, but he’s in enviable shape for his age. Just last September, for instance, I saw him paddle a kayak for a couple miles against the wind on a choppy lake without taking a breather, and it didn’t get the best of him. He hikes with his dog regularly. And he’s got that proverbial old man strength in his hands, which you can witness any time he picks up a tamp bar. To my knowledge, the last time he lifted weights or even had a dedicated workout […]

For over 100 years, much of the West’s intellectual culture has come to agree that war ought to be ended as a human institution. We have never really gotten around to achieving that, but the past two major wars and many major international institutions have had as an explicit aim the elimination of war between nation-states. Those states which refuse to abide by the new international system (the League of Nations between the two world wars and the United Nations after the second) tend to be referred to as ‘rogue states.’ The United States, being the widely-acknowledged leading global power, […]

G. K. Chesterton—a reactionary hero of mine and someone I try my best to imitate when I write rambling essays about whatever old thing that happens to cross my mind—took his subtitles seriously. (Well, as seriously as he took anything.) In one of his articles, the one published in the London News the day before he died in fact, he wrote that “those who endure the heavy labour of reading a book might possibly endure that of reading the title-page of a book.” He was talking to literary critics in particular, whom he suggested “might solve many of their problems […]

“The worst form of inequality is the attempt to make unequal things equal.” – Aristotle. I visit cemeteries when I travel. The old monuments are important for understanding a place. Who visits Egypt without going to the Great Pyramids? It’s a tomb. It says a hell of a story. So do the mounds in Ireland. Fewer people will visit the boneyards of abandoned prisons or war cemeteries in Spain or Virginia. They can tell as immense a story if you look deeply. I’ve been to graveyards all over the world, big and small. Archeologically they’re important. They’re also the best […]