May 31, 2026

I HURT MYSELF TODAY, TO SEE IF I STILL FEEL:

May 31, 2026

The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained (David French, 5/31/26, NY Times)

[M]illions upon millions of people are enduring democracy as “the worst form of government” without the necessary balanced understanding (that citizens in the mid-20th century had gained through firsthand observation) of “except all those other forms that have been tried.”

So even fascism and communism — for some people, at least — are no longer avatars of atrocity, but dynamic alternatives to a sclerotic present. In their frustration, all too many people are attracted to the theoretical benefits of authoritarianism, and they don’t have the experience or the education to understand its actual and inevitable defects.

They do not understand the link between their fashionable and transgressive ideologies and the oceans of blood that fascism and communism spilled across the globe.

In this ahistorical context, even political violence can seem justified — perhaps even a bit daring and romantic — unless you’ve lived through, say, the riots that swept American cities in the 1960s, a cataclysm that was far more violent, deadly and prolonged than anything that happened in the United States in 2020.

The compromises and restraints of diplomacy, which can often mean granting painful concessions to terrible regimes, can seem like a fool’s errand, unless you’ve witnessed the indescribable horrors of world wars.

The problem is rather different than Mr. French describes: it is the atavism of the Last Men. Life is so affluent and boring, thanks to the triumph of liberalism, that these people are willing to embrace violence just to make their lives more exciting.

Energy

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May 31, 2026

Trump vowed to kill wind power. Under his watch, America will produce more than ever (David Charter, May 29 2026, The Times uk)

The United States will have the capacity to produce record amounts of wind power under President Trump despite his vow to “terminate” all renewable energy windmills.

Experts say the industry is “winning” a fightback in the courts against Trump’s war on wind, with offshore wind farms expected to generate six gigawatts of energy by the end of Trump’s term — 34 times the capacity of the 174 megawatts in place when he came to office in January 2025.

Baseball Books

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May 31, 2026

How a Road Less Traveled Led to Baseball’s Boys of Summer: Anne Keene reflects on a soulful interview between author Roger Kahn and poet Robert Frost that sparked one of the game’s most human narratives. (Anne Keene, 3/26/20, The Saturday Evening Post)

In 1960 The Boys of Summer author Roger Kahn was in his early 30s when he drove along backroads bordering streams in the Green Mountains to spend the afternoon with New England poet Robert Frost. When the sportswriter reached the end of a dirt road, he got out of his car and walked up a hill to Frost’s cabin, where he lived alone, from May until the leaves changed in the fall, when the poet returned to Cambridge.

At the time, Kahn was a celebrated sportswriter who covered the Brooklyn Dodgers for the Herald Tribune in the early 1950s. He based The Boys of Summer on players such as Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, Pee Wee Reese, Preacher Rowe, Carl Erskine, and Roy Campanella. Twenty years after his Boys retired, Kahn caught up with his middle-aged Boys as they struggled through life.

Kahn had met Frost at the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference at Middlebury College in 1951, where the poet pitched to the writer in a summer baseball game with the spine of the Green Mountains in the background. It was there, on that grassy field, when a love for America’s Pastime connected two artists who appreciated the delicate, often brutal plight of the aging athlete.

The World Series was a month away when the 86-year-old snow-headed poet greeted Kahn, wearing blue slacks and a ragged gray sweater. With a face as weathered as the mountain, Frost cut a strapping agrarian frame from years of laboring behind a plow, and daily hikes through the woods, where he conjured phrases about the road less traveled.

The Saturday Evening Post’s “A Visit with Robert Frost” interview drew a response that stunned both Kahn and Frost. Hundreds of letters poured into the magazine from readers. Many enclosed the November 19th feature, asking Kahn to autograph it because they knew he captured Frost in his purest form toward the end of his life.

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