John Brown's Notes and Essays

image (not from article) from Opinion by Columnist George F. Will, The Washington Post , Dec. 25, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EST   Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the malleable South Carolinian, says the time has come for “a dialogue about how we can finally begin to address the debt.” Finally the time is at last ripe. Which means a Democratic administration approaches. Graham wants finally to “begin,” as though there has not been, long before and ever since the 2010 Simpson-Bowles commission (the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform), abundant serious thinking and specific proposals for bringing government outlays and revenues closer together. What Graham wants finally to begin is a “dialogue,” which is one of Washington’s two favorite words (the other is “conversation”) to signal protracted solemnity without politically risky actions. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl notes that defense spending is not driving deficits: It is a declining percentage of gro...

image from article By Jennifer Szalai,  The New York Times , Dec. 23, 2020 [ Original article contains links and a photograph of  May. ]   An uncertain fate awaits the most bracing and contrarian writers: Will the insights they offer still come across as stingingly original if the disillusion they so often recommend becomes commonplace? I was thinking about this while reading John Gray’s peculiar new book, “ Feline Philosophy ,” the latest in a provocative oeuvre that has spanned four decades and covered subjects including Al Qaeda, global capitalism and John Stuart Mill. Gray, a British philosopher, has long been one of the sharpest critics of the neoliberal consensus that emerged after the end of the Cold War. (He happens to share a name with an American self-help author, leading to some unintentional comedy whenever someone has to explain that the writer of books like “Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia” isn’t also responsible for the best s...

A top journal retracts a study following a political outcry.  image (not from article) from By The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal , Dec. 23, 2020 6:16 pm ET  [ Article contains an illustration and additional links .] In 2020 scientific publications have leapt into the political fray. Scientific American gave its first ever Presidential endorsement to Joe Biden, declaring that Donald Trump “rejects evidence and science.” The New England Journal of Medicine said in a pre-election editorial that “our current leaders have undercut trust in science.”  But if populist politicians undercut trust in science, sometimes they are aided by science’s own institutions. Consider the controversy over a now-retracted paper in the prestigious science journal Nature Communications, which shows how political fashions can dictate what research outcomes are acceptable. In November three NYU Abu Dhabi researchers came under fire for an article questioning the popular academic vi...

Image from article:   A police officer walks past the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. (Sergei Fadeichev/TASS/Getty Images) By Carol Morello, The Washington Post ,  Dec. 25, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EST [ Original article contains links. ] See also: an interview on RT (aired on Dec 13) with a U.S. diplomat who served at the U.S. Consulate in Vladivostok. The deplorable state of relations between Washington and Moscow has gotten so bad that the United States cannot get visas for American technicians to come repair malfunctioning elevators and fire alarms at diplomatic missions.   The U.S. Embassy in Moscow is understaffed and overstretched, as every individual diplomatic visa requires drawn-out negotiations that get snagged over minuscule matters. Senior diplomats are being tasked with basic tasks like shoveling snow and mixing disinfectants to supplement depleted cleaning crews battling the coronavirus pandemic. Even as President Trump has refrained from directly criticizing...

  image (not from article) from By Andrew Sullivan, The New York Times , Dec. 24, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET; review of:   CONSERVATISM:   The Fight for a Tradition  By Edmund Fawcett [ review includes links and illustrations ]  From its very origins in resistance to revolutionary movements in the late 18th century, conservatism has had two broad contrasting moods. The first is an attachment to the world as it is, and a resistance to too drastic a change in anything. The second is an attachment to what once was — and a radical desire to overturn the present in order to restore the past. Some have attempted to distinguish these two responses by defining conservatism as the more moderate version and reactionism as the more virulent. But Edmund Fawcett, in “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition,” a truly magisterial survey of the thought and actions of conservatives in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, insists more interestingly that they ar...

Tiny towers, fake ruins and Greek temples for the garden: the joys of a very English architectural obsession.   image from article:  ‘Jack the Treacle Eater’ PHOTO: ZULEIKA   By Witold Rybczyns , The Wall Street Journal , Dec. 24, 2020 11:13 am; see also The subject of this discursive book is the architectural folly, which the British author Rory Fraser describes as “an elaborate building set in a beautiful landscape that serves no purpose other than to improve the view: architecture for the sake of architecture.” Follies originated as a feature of English and French 18th-century landscape gardening, and were typically Greek temples, turreted towers and picturesque ruins. The Great Pagoda in Kew Gardens is an example; so is the Temple of Love built for Marie-Antoinette in the garden of Versailles.  Mr. Fraser broadens the definition and includes other eccentric memorials and odd garden structures. He is drawn to their quirky architecture and equally to the stories...

An acronym that didn’t exist in 2019 has been proclaimed Word of the Year for the long shadow it has cast over our language image from article By Ben Zimmer The Wall Street Journal Dec. 24, 2020 12:28 pm ET [ Original article contains additional links. ] Linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer analyzes the origins of words in the news. Read previous columns here .   Thirty years ago this month, the American Dialect Society began an annual tradition of selecting a Word of the Year. What began as a whimsical exercise on the model of Time’s Person of the Year has grown in stature as dictionary publishers and other groups have followed suit. For a decade now, I have been overseeing the dialect society’s Word of the Year selection as chair of the its New Words Committee. For this year, more than 300 attendees took part in a virtual event last week featuring a lively debate over nominations in a variety of categories. There was no shortage of innovative terms, including some previously fe...