When you’ve lived long enough, you begin to see a pattern. In the 1970s, it was Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” followed quickly by “the new ice age.” Things seemed to calm until the late 1980s, when “global warming” was the new existential threat. When all of the predicted catastrophes failed to materialize, global warming morphed into “climate change.” This past week, a major climate change study published in Nature Magazine was retracted for serious errors. If all this did was to help to convince credulous reporters and sell newspapers, it would be one thing. But as an editorial in The Free Press points out, there is a cost to confused climate science.
American governments and politicians can engage some idiotic behavior, but the British are proving they’re masters at it. In the current Labor government, more than 6,000 people are employed in scanning social media posts. People are being arrested and given jail terms for pointing out the obvious. In Scotland, you can’t pray silently in your own home if you’re within a certain distance of an abortion clinic. (How do they know?) People are beginning to fight back, but the response of the highly unpopular government suggests this won’t end well. Writing in The Free Press, writer and journalist Dominic Green wonders if a new English civil war has already started.
Bradley Birzer, professor at Hillsdale College, has a new book on J.R.R. Tolkien coming out next year. In the meantime, he has an article at The Imaginative Conservative on how he grew up with the creator of hobbits, orcs, and ents. Read “My Life with Tolkien.” (And more Tolkien links are below.)
More Good Reads
America 250
Vanishing Ranks: Rawlings’ Rifle Regiment and the Struggle to Recruit for the Frontier – Tucker Hentz at the Journal of the American Revolution.
A Letter from William Prescott to John Adams – Phill Greenwalt at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.
The New Dominion: Virginia’s Bounty Land – Gabriel Neville at Journal of the American Revolution.
Writing and Literature
What Is Christian Literature? God’s Truth, Wherever You Find It and J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Against the World– Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
Conjurer of Worlds: The writer who made fantasy history – Michael O’Donnell at The American Scholar.
Jane Austen’s first biographer – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.
Life and Culture
‘We’re All Just Winging It’: What the Gender Doctors Say in Private – Leon Sapir at The Free Press.
American Stuff
The Shrewd Doctrine That Launched American Dominance of the Americas – Jason Clark at This Is the Day.
Step inside the lost Native American city that rivalled medieval London – James Osborne at History extra.
Democrats, Press Gloss Over Original “Double Tap” Operations – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.
Poetry
In Memory of Luci Shaw: A Conversation with Ben Palpant – The Rabit Room.
The Shapes of the World – poem by David Whyte.
“Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare,” pom by Edna St. Vincent Millay – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.
“Stubbornness is essential”: An interview with Daniel Cowper – Jason Guriel at New Verse Review.
50 States of Generosity: Indiana – Sandra Heska King at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Rise with the Sun – City Alight & Tim Challies
Painting: Woman Reading, wood print (1881) by Erik Wrenskiold (1855-1938).
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