If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Solar-powered electric plane unofficially sets new altitude record (David Szondy, August 26, 2025, New Atlas)
Another air record has been (unofficially) broken as a prop-driven solar/electric aircraft reached the highest altitude yet for its type. On August 12, 2025, a modified Elektra One reached 31,237 feet (9,521 m) in the skies over Switzerland.
Against Angst: Most teen movies encourage rebellion and nonconformity, but a few offer lessons in prudence (Peter Tonguette, 8/24/25, American Conservative)
Based on a play by William Inge, the 1955 drama Picnic revolves around the competing dispositions and worldviews of two sisters in Kansas, the pretty and fawned-over Madge (Kim Novak) and the tomboyish and ignored Millie (Susan Strasberg), who seems to conceive of herself in opposition to her sibling. When we meet her in the film, Millie is first seen bouncing a basketball that she soon trades for a book and a cigarette—sure signs that she is an apostate to the conventions of mid-American life at midcentury. By contrast, Madge is first encountered drying her “silly hair,” as Millie calls it, while hanging her head outside of her window.
In fact, Inge leans on Millie to offer remarks on and against the real and imagined provincialism of the town into which she was born and from which she eagerly hopes to one day flee. For example, urged by her mother and sister to find herself a date for the Labor Day picnic, Millie says, “I will dress and act the way I want,” before arming herself with a baseball cap and eyeglasses and digging ever deeper into her copy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter—just the sort of mildly literary, slightly scandalous book that signals to the audience her delusions of grandeur.
Not that I considered Millie deluded at all when I saw the movie all those years ago. I took her perspective as a rally cry. Having grown up on The Catcher in the Rye and Dead Poets Society, I loved it when Millie said, “When I graduate from college, I’m going to New York and write novels that’ll shock people right out of their senses.” Moving to New York, writing novels, upsetting the pieties of narrow-minded readers—it all sounded so worthwhile, so glamorous, so clearly right.Yet the movie comes to a different conclusion. The great issue in the story is whether Madge will marry a fellow named Hal (William Holden), a wayward drifter who nonetheless has great reserves of magnetism, charm, and decency. At the decisive moment, Millie, of all people, encourages Madge to take the risk of going with Hal. She is careful to clarify that the path she is urging for her sister is not one she will ever take: “I’m never going to fall in love. Not me. I’m not going to live in some jerkwater town and marry some ornery guy and raise a lot of grimy kids.” Then, getting up from the bed where she was sitting, Millie exhorts Madge to choose another way: “But just because I’m a dope doesn’t mean you have to be.”
The trouble with trigger warnings True drama is an emotional ambush (Kathleen Stock, August 22, 2025, UnHerd)
But let’s be honest: it can’t really be about harm-reduction, can it? For nobody seriously believes that the theatre can be quite that exciting. In my youth, plays were relatively boring things that parents or teachers made you sit through once a year, when what you really wanted to do was go to the cinema. The idea that you might be scarred for life by some unnaturally loud proclaiming, the odd bit of dramatic writhing around, and some judiciously applied lighting and props would have been ludicrous — as it is surely all the more so to generations raised on Netflix gorefests. And here the exception proves the rule: surely not every young dramatist can be the new Sarah Kane. If you were being cynical, you might conclude that the whole thing is a sneaky way of drumming up trade for a dying art form, by encouraging the idea that spectators might feel something visceral. (“Depending on your lived experiences, this performance may trigger memories of loss, grief, or bullying,” speculates another festival event, rather hopefully.)
The official explanation given for such notices is that they allow people to emotionally prepare for what is to come, the way you might steel yourself just before abseiling down a cliff or jumping out of a plane. But since you are not in fact going to be doing anything death-defying, but rather sitting in a cramped seat for a couple of hours casting surreptitious glances at your watch, it is possible that dire forecasts of impending emotional assault set some people up for anxiety where there would not otherwise have been any. And that, fairly predictably, is what several studies have found: trigger warnings have a tendency to increase anxiety rather than reduce it. Staying true to the ethos of the project, this awkward fact would seem to require that such warnings be given separate, prior trigger warnings of their own — and so on ad infinitum — rendering the whole process unmanageable for harried producers.
Further evidence that content warnings are basically fake news is that the theatre-makers who use them go ahead with their shows enthusiastically anyway.
They’re just unearned boasts.
Gnostic Identity in the Therapeutic Age (Albert Norton, 7/21/25, Voegelin View)
We all feel a tragic sense, owing to awareness of mortality, and of evil, and of our own part in evil. Though we revere human life in the abstract, we’re intensely aware of the moral imperfections of humanity. We know justice is real, and so we know judgment is real, even if we don’t experience it immediately within this finite life in the body. We know we’re going to die, and this is difficult to reconcile with the weighty significance we attach to human life, especially our own.
We also know, even if we attempt to avert our eyes in the moment, that there is a moral structure to our existence, and that it is not of our own invention, individually or collectively. That structure means that what we do and fail to do in this life is consequential. It results in the heaviness of being that many find unbearable, tempting one to adopt in its place the fiction that good and evil are merely words we attach to what we collectively like and don’t like. The tragic sense springs from our awareness of moral significance, and from our moral failings, and our mortality, and the reality of justice. It is the seed of faith, but it can also motivate corrupted visions of reality, as with early Gnosticism and postmodern ideologies that Voegelin correctly identified as “Gnostic.” […]Here is how, in his The New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin described the sense religion leaves us with even after the Resurrection:
Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a “world full of gods” [i.e., the pagan world] is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de—divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Hebrews 11:1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith. The bond is tenuous indeed, and may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty which if gained is loss—the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience.
These kinds of observations are attributable to many other thinkers, including but not limited to Philip Rieff, a seminal thinker on the impact of the rise of the therapeutic mentality. Voegelin is particularly relevant here, however, because he invoked “Gnosticism” to explain the advance of “speculative systems,” ideologies that supplant religious faith. As he suggests in this passage, the worldview of faith is perhaps a too-light undemanding burden; airy compared to the heavens teeming with pagan gods that preceded it. It is a relief to mankind, but it does not eliminate the tragic sense and requires much social reinforcement.
Every ism/ideology is driven by the need to escape from the reality of our Fallen nature. The fact that we are not merely imperfectable but prone to sin leads people to try and hide behind the silliest theories, lately the denial of Free Will.
The history of American corporate nationalization (Tyler Cowen, August 24, 2025, Marginal Revolution)
You should note that although the United States has not so many state-owned enterprises, the American government still has ways of expressing its will on business, or as the case may be, favoring one set of businesses over another. In these latter cases it can be said that American business is expressing its will over government through forms of crony capitalism, a concept which is spreading in both America and China.
The United States has evolved a subtle brand of corporatism and industrial policy that is mostly decentralized and also – this is an important point — relatively stable across shifts of political power. America uses its large country privileges to maintain access to world markets and to protect the property rights of its investors, usually without much regard for whether they are Democrats or Republicans. For instance the State Department works hard to maintain open world markets for films and other cultural goods and services. Toward this end America has used trade negotiations, diplomatic leverage, foreign aid, and also explicit arm-twisting, based on its military commitments to protect allied nations in Western Europe and East Asia. America already had successful entertainment producers, it just wanted to make sure they could earn more money abroad, and that is why the American government usually insists on open access for audiovisual products when it negotiates free trade treaties. Yet in these deals there is not much if any explicit favoritism for one movie or television studio over another, or for one political alliance over another. Democrats are disproportionately overrepresented in Hollywood, but Republican administrations protect the interests of the American entertainment sector nonetheless. It’s about the money and the jobs, not about shifting political coalitions. You’ll note that the independence from particular political coalitions gives the American business environment a particular stability and predictability, to its advantage internationally and otherwise.
Grumpy Old…Men? (Jeannette Cooperman, July 3, 2025, Common Reader)
But curmudgeons grow people up, too.
Lou Grant, shirtsleeves rolled up, scowling across his desk at Mary Tyler Moore. Abe Vigoda as Fish on Barney Miller; Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford, Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House. Samuel Johnson, John Adams, even the man called Ove. I loved those guys. Too much sweetness, too much palaver and perky optimism and influencer smarm, and you need an antidote. Grumpiness is honest, and there is often wisdom beneath its crust. I regularly pull out Montaigne as a yardstick: “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.” Samuel Johnson stopped me cold by observing, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Thomas Szasz stopped me, too, when he defined happiness as “an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.” H.L. Mencken presaged Trump’s sales of golden sneakers with the weary aphorism: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” And Voltaire left us an even sharper lesson: “To succeed in claiming the multitude you must seem to wear the same fetters.”
Politics is a curmudgeon’s favorite playground. In his Devil’s Dictionary, Bierce defined political life as “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” He defined “alliance,” in international politics, as “the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted into each other’s pocket that they cannot safely plunder a third.” He defined history as “an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”
Curmudgeons, you see, have standards. Sherlock Holmes could not abide being fooled, and Statler and Waldorf suffered no foolish puppets. Mark Twain rolled his eyes at idiocy of all sorts, and Lewis Black skewers it. “Curmudgeon” once implied that you were a “surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow,” which certainly explains why women could not qualify, as none of those adjectives are sanctioned for us. But environmentalist Edward Abbey noted in self-defense that the label’s meaning had evolved “to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.”
What saves a curmudgeon from bitterness is the acceptance that man is Fallen and those standards will not be met much.
Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet) (Adam Frank, July 8, 2025, Noema)
In this way, over time, scientists began to imagine a perspective-less perspective, a supposed God’s-eye view of the universe — free of any human bias. The philosopher Thomas Nagel calls this the “view from nowhere.” And this philosophical position eventually became synonymous with mainstream science itself.The development of the thermometer, and from it the science of thermodynamics, offers a notable example of our scientific culture’s blind spot. In it, we can see how those unchanging elements of experience are extracted and then, in time, misconstrued as a false perspective-less perspective.
The embodied feeling of being hot or cold is a basic example of direct experience. But developing a measurable scale of this experience for future scientific inquiry took centuries of work. Much of this story played out in what we now call laboratories, where those elements of experience could be isolated and probed. First, hot and cold needed to become correlated with something like the level of alcohol or mercury in a graduated tube. This was the invention of thermometry. Once a way to measure degrees was established, those degrees could then be used to investigate other focal points of experience, like the boiling point of water. A mathematically formulated theory of thermodynamics was then slowly developed, describing the relationship between temperature and heat flow. Later, higher levels of abstraction came as the random motions of unseen atoms — studied via the new field of statistical mechanics — were recognized as the true nature of heat. In this way, more phenomena studied in labs became describable in ever more precise terms. Along with those new, precise descriptions came new, powerful capacities to control the world via technologies like heat engines or refrigeration.
As this upward spiral of abstraction was traversed, something, however, was lost. In what Husserl called the “surreptitious substitution,” abstractions like thermometric degrees were treated as more real than the experience they imparted. Eventually, the first-person, embodied experience of being hot or feeling cold was pushed aside as a phantom epiphenomenon, while abstracted quantities like temperature, enthalpy, Gibbs potentials and phase space became more fundamental and more real. This amnesia of experience is science’s blind spot.
Science is nothing more than a product of consciousness.
On the Unlikeliness of Life: Why We’re Still Lucky to Be Alive Today (Simon Boas, July 23, 2025, LitHub)
I think, whether you believe in divine creation or solely in physics (though the two are really not incompatible), there can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love. Whether it is because some loving, omnipotent, unoriginated Being consciously decided to make the particular farting, mewling, grasping masterpiece that is you, or because a set of cosmic coincidences aligned so perfectly and yet so improbably that Simon Boas resulted, being alive at all is something we don’t appreciate nearly enough.
There can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love.
I’ve always approached this issue much more from the empirical, scientific side, and yet the conclusion is the same. Any physicist can explain the origins of the universe from a description of big bangs and spacetime and matter, but will also attest to two things: that none of this would have existed but for some pretty spectacular ‘Goldilocks’ coincidences (not too hot and not too cold); and that there are myriad things which not only can’t be explained now, but which may never be.
The universe is fine-tuned for us to exist.
…”Luck is the residue of design.”
After Civility: Smashing the patriarchy sounded fun, but it turns out even rebels often depend on the norms they are undermining. (Elizabeth Grace Matthew, 8/15/25, Law & Liberty)
In the season six Sex and the City episode “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” (2003), perpetually single protagonist Carrie Bradshaw is dismayed that someone absconded from a party with her $485 stilettos. She is even more frustrated when the party host, a married mother of three, not only fails to reimburse her for the loss but also “shames” her, calling it “crazy” to spend $485 on designer shoes—ones that, in fact, she used to wear herself before she had what she calls “a real life,” intimating that Carrie’s unmarried, childless existence is less worthy of respect and deference than her own.
Carrie, fuming, recounts indignantly to her friend Charlotte that she has bought this very friend an engagement gift, a wedding gift, and three baby gifts, not to mention traveling for her wedding. She has spent, in total, “over $2300 celebrating her choices.” Charlotte tries to offer context: “But those were gifts … if you got married, or had a child, she would spend the same on you.” Carrie responds: “And if I don’t ever get married or have a child, then, what, I get Bubkis? … If you are single, after graduation, there isn’t one occasion where people celebrate you. … I’m thrilled to give you gifts, to celebrate your life; I just think it stinks that single people are left out of it.”
What Carrie fails to recognize is that we give such gifts not to celebrate these individuals’ morally neutral “life choices,” but rather to honor marriage and childbirth as laudable and societally desirable. If they are no longer seen that way, it is only a matter of time before not just the norms of dating (which emerged as a prequel to marriage and family) but also the broader norms of treating other people with reciprocal dignity erode as well. After all, the very notion of giving gifts to celebrate milestones like marriage and childbirth is, at bottom, a statement about our shared investment in the institutions to which we all, whether married or not, owe our societal stability. To personalize this reality in a resentful, individual way, as Carrie does, is to grossly underestimate the fragility of society itself.
sex! swing dancing! sixtine!: come for the Renaissance erotics; stay for my problems with Brideshead Revisited (Tara Isabella Burton, Aug 07, 2025, The Lost Word)
This idea, like so much of the magical tradition, comes out of Plato, via hs late antique Alexandrian followers. We have an inherent attraction – and it is attraction – towards the good, and the true, and the beautiful, and God; erotic love, rightly understood, pulls us not just towards physical beauty but towards what that beauty represents: which you can find in higher forms of symmetry, or knowledge of prime numbers. Matthew Crawford helpfully touches on this in another context: in his recent First Things/Substack essays “Is Math Erotic?”/”Math is Erotic”. We’re attracted not just to the beautiful but the beautifully true. (I admit I want to read an even nerdier second postscript from him that goes into more detail about how eros differs from mere contemplative appreciation).
That attraction is, basically, hackable, by magicians capable of hacking it – but ultimately our attraction is to God, or the Good, or the One, or whatever Platonic words you want to use. Everything else is cosmological flotsam.
So far, so fair.
Oh, but, God, what do you do about other people?
This is the part where, I think, the magical worldview, and maybe the Platonic worldview, and whatever version of Christianity isn’t magical (or you might say, is magical differently) diverge. Maybe I’m too much of a Protestant, or a Kierkegaardian, or too much a nineteenth-century scholar, or a twenty-first century post-Kantian in my moral horror of treating people as means, but what always galls me about these ideas of ascent and descent, of loves that really mean the love of God, is that they seem to have so little to do with loving a person. The other night at a Cracks in Postmodernity event, a friend was explaining their reading of Brideshead Revisited to me: that we move from the aesthetic realm of Charles Ryder’s love for Sebastian, to the more explicitly romantic nature of Charles’s love for Julia, to the final completion: Charles’s conversion, his love for God. But does that mean Sebastian and Julia are just waystations? Is Charles’s love for them just a metaphor for divine love, the way, say, dancing is a metaphor for sex?
This idea may be the right one. It may – I’m not sure – also be deeply Christian; of course Christians have our own version of it; the batter my heart, three person’d God, the Bernini angel that pierces St. Teresa’s breast – He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart,…when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God…[that] made me moan. There’s precedent, too, of thinking of all the things of this world, love included, as merely conveyances for the knowledge and love of God. Augustine himself (as the always-insightful Sam Kimbriel reminded me, when I was driving myself nuts over this exact topic back in May) distinguishes between right objects of enjoyment (basically: God), and right objects of use (basically, everything else).
But is that all we are to each other? Objects?
Here’s what I can’t get past: the idea that whatever’s going on, with someone, at whatever communication is happening at the level of dance, or whatever dance is a metaphor for, is only real insofar as it points to this other, better, higher thing. Are we really supposed to conclude that desire for someone obviates all the particularities that make them them, in favor of a passion for unmoved movers and parallel lines? If I could be convinced that this were the right way to be I could, I think, accept it with resignation; but I don’t understand how you can love somebody, or want somebody, if what you actually want from or through them is something that has nothing to do their their them-ness, if they’re just an occasion for the real relationship between you and math, or even you and God. How is that fair to Sebastian? How to Julia? Is God that kind of jealous God?
When Christ commanded that we love one another as He loved us, He means as subjects, not objects.