I worry as much as anyone about the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on America. I am not on TikTok. This week, the House of Representatives, by a lopsided bi-partisan majority, passed a bill that requires Byte Dance to divest TikTok in the United States, or be banned. But the devil is in the details (it’s always the fine print). The bill does what it says, but it also expands the power of the President and the security agencies to go after far more than TikTok. The left but not the right might be fine with that if the President is Biden. But what if the President is Trump? The legislation could slice and dice both ways. See Matt Taibbi at Racket News on “Why the TikTok Ban is So Dangerous.”
You read it online (it’s difficult to find in the daily newspaper), and you think “all this anti-Semitism stuff is being exaggerated.” You might think that, and you would be wrong. Consider Ron Hassner, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. Times have changed, and the professor is now sleeping in his office.
It's a perennial topic of concern among poets, anyway. The death of poetry has been proclaimed for a long time, its revival on Instagram, YouTube, and the above-mentioned TikTok notwithstanding. Poet and writer James Matthew Wilson takes a look at the “somewhat exaggerated death of poetry.”
More Good Reads
Life and Culture
Gods of the Quid Pro Quo – Greg Doles at Chasing Light.
Old Ireland Stirs – Mehmet Çiftçi at The Critic Magazine.
Israel / Gaza
The war in Gaza is just the beginning – Douglas Murray at The Spectator.
How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers – Abraham Wyner at Tablet Magazine.
The Holiday from History is Over – Bari Weiss at The Free Press.
Poetry
“For Once, Then Something” by Robert Frost – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
The Edge You Carry with You – David Whyte.
Faith
Revival in the Making: God’s Central Means for Spiritual Renewal – David Mathis at Desiring God.
Patrick Loved Ireland Before Ireland Loved Patrick – Seth Lewis.
How Do Our Kids Stay Christian? – Cameron Shaffer at Mere Orthodoxy.
Latinos Are Flocking to Evangelical Christianity – Marie Arana at The Free Press.
American Stuff
Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson – reviewed by Nicole Penn at American Purpose.
Writing and Literature
Carson McCuller’s lonely passion – review by Scott Bradfield at The Spectator.
Revisiting In the Fog, an American’s Ode to England’s Foul Weather – Leslie Klinger at CrimeReads.
British Stuff
What are our cathedrals for? – Allan Breck at The Critic Magazine.
Art
Story – Sonja Benskin Mesher.
Jerusalem (Live) – City Alight
Painting: The Reading Lesson, oil on canvas by Pierre Jean Edmond Castan (1817-1892).
No comments:
Post a Comment