We’ve been members of the Missouri Botanical Garden since we moved to St. Louis more than 40 years ago. The original entrance was circa 1904, and then the new Ridgeway Center, airy and rather beautiful, was built in the 1980s. That was then, and this is now. The Ridgeway Center is gone, replaced by a rather large building in the Brutalist style. I thought Brutalism was a synonym for “big, ugly, 1930s Soviet style” architecture, but it actually derives from béton brut, the French term for “raw concrete.” Anthony Daniels at New Criterion has an article equating brutalism in architecture with tattoos, which might make more sense than first apparent. In the meantime, I have to keep reminding myself not to refer to the botanical garden here as “the mausoleum with plants.”
In 2014, former CIA analyst Martin Gurri published The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. His thesis was simple: the information age has seriously undercut traditional elites and hierarchies, to the point that public trust and credibility are gone. (One could also argue that traditional elites have done a pretty good job of botching things, too.) Gurri has an article in The Free Press that asks a related question: Trump. Again. The Question is Why?
From 1936 to 1975, William Maxwell (1908-2000) served as the fiction editor for The New Yorker. A few (only a few!) of his writers included John Updike, J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Shirley Hazzard. He was also a writer, publishing six rather wonderful novels, short stories, essays, and a memoir. In 1955, he gave a speech on writing magic and persistence in writing, and Literary Hub has reprinted it.
More Good Reads
Faith
Three Reasons Christians Should Oppose Abortion – Robb Brunansky at The Cripplegate.
It’s Okay to Just Pray – Tim Challies.
If an NFL coaching legend quotes scripture in a press conference, does it make a sound? – Terry Mattingly at Get Religion.
Life and Culture
Mac at 40: User experience was the innovation that launched a technology revolution – Chris Calimlim at The Conversation.
Southern Hospitality in the New Machine Age – Alex Taylor at Front Porch Republic.
The Epidemic of 2012 Before the Pandemic of 2020 – Eric Geiger.
American Stuff
No One’s Name Was Changed at Ellis Island – Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.
Writing and Literature
What’s So Great about The Great Gatsby? – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
Can Something Be ‘Great’, Even If You Hate It? – Daniel Lattier at The Imaginative Conservative.
Poetry
John Finlay’s Poetics of the Incarnation – James Matthew Wilson at Church Life Journal.
Pangs – Kirk Jordan at Rabbit Room Poetry.
‘On Living with Someone with Alzheimer’s’ and Other Poems – Vicki Roberts at Society of Classical Poets.
Art
Elwin Hawthorne, Artist – Spitalfields Life.
He Calls Me Friend – City Alight
Painting: Woman Reading a Letter to a Blind Man, oil on canvas by Louis Denis-Valvérane (1870-1943), Huddersfield Art Gallery.
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