David Brooks: “I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.””
WSJ speaks to David McCullough: ““At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation.” Everything we have, he says, all the great institutions, the arts, our law, exists because those who came before us built them. Why did they do that? What drove them, what obstacles did they face, how are we doing as stewards and creators? “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.” This is a wonderful sentence because it is true and bluntly put. Ignorance is a form of ingratitude. History encourages “a sense of proportion about life,” gives us a sense of scale. “What history teaches, it teaches mainly by example.” To live in an era of momentous change and huge transitions is to experience great pressure. Knowing history, reading it, imparts “a sense of navigation,” a new realization of what we’ve been through and are made of. Those who came before us were tough: “There’s no one who hasn’t an ancestor who went through some form of hell.” In the end, knowing history “is an extension of life. It both enlarges and intensifies the experience of being alive.””
William Boyd: “The tropes of spy fiction are something that everybody can connect with very easily, whereas the tropes of horror or science fiction or ‘romantasy’ are something alien. We’ve all betrayed people and been betrayed and we all lie and we all pretend to be other people that we’re not.”
NYTimes: ““How was your weekend?” “Good, but I spent way too much time watching people make tiny food on TikTok.” “Whoa, like … dollhouse-size?” “Yes! If you want to learn to make a lasagna in a bottle cap, let me know.” “That’s hilarious! We could organize a tiny food potluck — and fit the entire spread on this coaster!” “Ha! And we’d need tiny furniture, too. Should we ask that guy over there wearing Carhartt to build it?” Our research shows that this sort of riffing pays off…Our aim in conversation, then, shouldn’t be to mine for surface-level commonalities or go on a charm offensive. Instead, we should ask ourselves, “What could we create together in this moment?””
