Ian Leslie:

I’d forgotten how much [Macbeth] is a play about what we now call toxic masculinity. Shakespeare was clearly fascinated by manhood and violence. Lady Macbeth, of course, is constantly imploring her husband, and indeed herself, to man up and start killing. In the play’s most moving scene, Macduff is told about the murder of his wife and children. Shakespeare doesn’t have him respond with rage, but with stunned disbelief followed by quiet horror (“What, all my pretty chickens and their dam, in one fell swoop?”). Malcolm incites him to, “Dispute it like a man!” – i.e., go and exact violent revenge. Macduff responds, “I shall do so. But I must also feel it as a man.” See – it’s manly to have feelings, as well as to fight. Shakespeare was woke.

Mary Harrington:

Abortion is such a contentious issue for us because, especially in early stages of gestation, pregnancy flies full in the face of the central premise of liberal modernity: that we are separate individuals. Pregnancy confronts mothers with the fact that another human life is radically dependent on our ceding space in our own bodies. It also confronts all of us with the fact that we begin life not as separate, autonomous subjects but merged with our mothers: not quite two, but not just one either. And when so much of our moral order is predicated on individual rights, where the wishes of a mother and the needs of a dependent baby in utero seem to be in conflict, this makes the proper balance of rights acutely difficult to assess. […]

… [We] may yet discover that this slight unpersoning of slightly more babies does not, after all, create a more compassionate world. On the contrary, it will shuffle us all a few steps closer to a world where a great many other categories of individual will discover their personhood, too, is not given but in the gift of some human authority. …

… Whose interests take priority, and why? Those who advocate decriminalising late stage abortion in the name of compassion may yet find that the changes they advocated did more to free those with power, than to protect those without it.

Masha Gessen:

[Alexei Navalny] and I had argued, over the years, about the fundamental nature of Putin and his regime: he said that they were “crooks and thieves”; I said that they were murderers and terrorists. After he came out of his coma, I asked him if he had finally been convinced that they were murderers. No, he said. They kill to protect their wealth. Fundamentally, they are just greedy.

He thought too highly of them. They are, in fact, murderers.

Masha Gessen:

Carlson emerged from the interview shaking his head. “Russia is not an expansionist power,” he said. “You’d have to be an idiot to think that.” Actually, you might look at the evidence—the invasion and de-facto control over about a fifth of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the continued occupation of about a fifth of Ukraine and the ongoing offensive there—to conclude that Russia is an expansionist power. During the interview, Putin gave every indication that he thinks of former imperial possessions as still rightfully Russia’s. That would include not only former Soviet republics but also Finland and Poland. “The professional liars in Washington . . . are trying to convince you that this guy is Hitler, that he is trying to take the Sudetenland, or something,” Carlson continued. “Not analogous in any way!” In fact, Putin had clearly, and more explicitly than ever before, channelled Hitler during the interview. This is what a tyrant looks like: small, and full of tedious resentments. […]

This was a conversation between an older man who has read a history book and fancies himself an expert and his eager nephew, who is trying to feign knowledge in a subject he failed in college. Except one of these guys reaches millions of viewers and the other has nuclear weapons.

David Abram:

Space is no longer experienced as a homogeneous void, but reveals itself as this vast and richly textured field in which we are corporeally immersed, this vibrant expanse structured by both a ground and a horizon. It is precisely the ground and the horizon that transform abstract space into space-time. And these characteristics—the ground and the horizon—are granted to us only by the earth. …

It would seem, then, that the conceptual separation of time and space—the literate distinction between a linear, progressive time and a homogeneous, featureless space—functions to eclipse the enveloping earth from human awareness. As long as we structure our lives according to assumed parameters of a static space and a rectilinear time, we will be able to ignore, or overlook, our thorough dependence upon the earth around us. Only when space and time are reconciled into a single, unified field of phenomena does the encompassing earth become evident, once again, in all its power and its depth, as the very ground and horizon of all our knowing.

Hannah Arendt:

Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the mother of all living creatures under the sky?

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also “artificial,” toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. […]

This future man, whom scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.

St. Augustine:

Our Life himself came down into this world & took away our death. He slew it with his own abounding life, & with thunder in his voice he called us from this world to return to him in heaven. From heaven he came down to us, entering first the Virgin’s womb, where humanity, our mortal flesh, was wedded to him so that it might not be for ever mortal. Then as a bridegroom coming from his bed, he exulted like some great runner who sees the track before him. He did not linger on his way but ran, calling us to return to him, calling us by his words & deeds, by his life & death, by his descent into hell & his ascension into heaven. He departed from our sight, so that we should turn to our hearts & find him there. He departed, but he is here with us. He would not stay long with us, but he did not leave us. He went back to the place which he had never left, because he, through whom the world was made, was in the world & he came into the world to save sinners. To him my soul confesses & he is its Healer, because the wrong it did was against him. Great ones of the world, will your hearts always be hardened? Your Life has come down from heaven: will you not now at last rise with him and live? But how can you rise if you are in high places and your clamour reaches heaven? Come down from those heights, for then you may climb &, this time, climb to God. To climb against him was your fall.

Gilbert Meilaender:

The recognition that friendship must necessarily be particular and preferential, that, as Aristotle said, “it is quite obvious that it is impossible to live together with many people and divide oneself up among them” — all that finds an important place in Augustine’s description of friendship. At the same time, however, these particular friendships are placed in a larger con-text, seen as a call toward and preparation for a love more universal in scope. And both aspects are incorporated into Augustine’s theological vision. Particular friendships are justified because, in the simplest sense, God gives them to those whom he has created to live within the constraints of finitude. Particular friend; ships are qualified because this same God intends that they should lead us toward the love of God in which all the redeemed will share and be a school in which that love is learned. Hence, Augustine’s understanding of friendship is transformed when it is placed within his vision of human life as pilgrimage. One is sustained by the vision of universal love toward which one is drawn, but the way to that goal leads through particular bonds of affection and attachment. For, as Augustine himself put it, “it is one thing to see from a mountaintop in the forests the land of peace in the distance. and it is another. thing to hold to the way that leads there.”

Jonah Goldberg

Which brings me to Ukraine and the treason of the nationalists. 

In Putin’s tirades about Ukraine, he makes it clear that he subscribes to a pre-nationalist, pre-popular sovereignty, pre-modern theory of politics. He thinks that because Ukraine wasn’t a country in the ninth or 13th century it can’t be a country today—at least not if he doesn’t want it to be.

This is contrary to everything nationalists today claim to believe. And that is what is so disgusting about Putin’s purportedly nationalist amen choir. Putin is not a nationalist, he’s an imperialist. But the contemporary nationalists who wax righteous about rejecting the “imperialism” of the globalists and their institutions—the U.N., the EU, the World Bank, Davos, whatever—either cheer, mumble pro-forma objections, or simply stare at their shoes in silence as Putin attempts to erase a sovereign nation. The Ukrainians have their own language, their own culture, their own national history, and have been a nation for centuries. What they want to be is a country. And the allegedly nationalist Putinphiles are too ignorant or sycophantic to respect that desire because it conflicts with the ambition of a mass murderer and tyrant. 

Putin’s apologists demonstrate that the real point of nationalism is the pursuit of power. Ideological nationalism is an attempt to provide a permission structure, to construct the slipperiest slope possible to their attainment of power. Nationalism, like “post-liberalism,” is an intellectual pretext, a means toward an end: power.

Jesse Singal

This is a common tactic for people who profit off of conspiracy theories: they make extremely inflammatory insinuations, but they keep things just vague enough to allow themselves some plausible deniability. This allows them to seem — at least to credulous readers or listeners — like they’re in possession of forbidden knowledge of the utmost importance, but without ever having to prove what they’re claiming, which is convenient since they can’t prove it, what with it not being true. 

These sorts of conspiracy entrepreneurs, if they are talented at what they do — and clearly Bret Weinstein is — will always have a ready audience of credulous, disillusioned, addled (there’s that word again) types, especially in 2024: trust in authority seems to have plummeted as a result of social media misinformation, real missteps on the part of the authorities themselves, and all the other causes of the epistemic fracturing we appear to be experiencing.

Mary Harrington:

But those families rejecting Big Romance—and with it the overwhelming economic, cultural, and political pressure to be lone atoms in a market—are turning from an inward-focused romantic vision of marriage toward one that prizes stability and productive households as a foundation for community life. Against a backdrop of escalating chaos, they are reimagining marriage in the twenty-first century to fit a new (old) model of the postindustrial household. The postromantic solidarity this convenes, in the long-term interests of both sexes and of our children, provides a basis for real hope. 

In practical terms, households formed on this model can work together both economically and socially on the common business of living, whether the work is agricultural, artisanal, knowledge-based, or a mix of all these. At the very least, such households offer women a sane, healthful, and rewarding alternative to the exploitative, medicated, disembodied, sexually libertine excesses of hypermodernity. And more broadly, moving beyond Big Romance toward a more practical conception of marriage is a crucial first step toward sustainable human societies.

Mark Hurst:

Love doesn’t scale.

The phrase appears in Marc’s argument about why markets are so important. Getting rich with markets, he says, is better than the alternative of starting a war. The only other option would be doing something for love, but why would anyone do that? Love doesn’t scale. …

For the rest of us – who haven’t made a career investing in unethical growth-at-any-cost companies – the phrase might hit differently.

Love doesn’t scale.

Deepening a relationship. Visiting a sick friend. Serving at a soup kitchen. Andreessen’s “techno-optimist” mindset is confounded by acts of love. They don’t make money, they don’t supercharge a market, and perhaps most heretically, they’re typically low-tech or even involve no technology at all. What is a techno-optimist supposed to do with this “love” idea, this thing that keeps people out of markets and off the internet? It literally doesn’t compute.

As I said of anti-inflation:

It may seem strange to think that the antidote to continuous shopping is a love of things, but, properly understood, it seems exactly right to me. To love and care for things rather than replace them or bury them behind the new and the more. Berry’s solution in the Menifesto mentioned above was simply this: “everyday do something/ that won’t compute.” And the first thing he lists is love. Nothing in this world is more resistant to computation than love. And if it won’t compute, it won’t inflate.