So, there’s Noah Millman’s post Biden Gives Up On America: The emotional subtext of the president’s nepotistic pardon.. And he links to comments from John Ganz and Ross Douthat.

I have no desire to comment specifically except to say this: Alongside what is surely some justified doubt, anxiety, and anger across the country and the world for any number of reasons, I’m worried about an exponentially malignant epidemic of self-fulfilling cynicism. One of the questions for myself going into the new year: How to maintain open and honest valuation, as well as real criticism, while avoiding cynicism and — somehow, somehow — spreading a little joy.

Wish me luck.

Just yesterday I was asking the bookstore clerk if they had this in stock. (They didnt.) Today, it showed up in the mail.

Note to self: Try to remember what you’ve ordered online.

Aaron Horvath’s piece in the fall issue of The Hedgehog Review is excellent. And it comes full circle from start and finish.

I remember sitting in the library and reading Ken Stern’s With Charity for All for a class discussion on genocide and humanitarian aid. It’s the appearance, the charade of excellence, not genuine need that generates big gifts, as Jack Shakely reminds us in a review of Stern’s book. Horvath reminds us that the trouble that plagues charities goes much deeper than the obvious scams. The charade of excellence is a feature, not a bug.

It’s a thin line… between a reality described by their abstractions and a reality constituted by their abstractions. And the more they, and we, fall under the spell of the latter, the more difficult it becomes to imagine how else we might contribute to meaningful social change.

A few other quotes here, one of which made me laugh out loud.

Caveman cartoons are truly one of my deepest little joys. A couple goods ones lately.

Justin Chang:

Even so, we are not not entertained.…The arena battles have an agreeably batshit, can-you-top-this conceptual absurdity; you won’t soon forget a scene in which Lucius fends off a deranged baboon, or when the Colosseum is reconfigured into a kind of third-century Sea World, complete with snapping sharks. In planting us squarely in the splash zone, Scott and his collaborators pander so unabashedly to our bloodlust that it rings all the more hollow when “Gladiator II” suddenly fancies itself a civics lesson, entreating its characters to mourn their failing empire and dream of its glorious rebirth. We get it, we get it: there’s no place like Rome.

On Abraham, Agamemnon, and the Greek word sumpneō.

Elias Crim’s recent essay in The Hedgehog Review is excellent, but it’s also a treasure trove. Follow the references!

The Land of Immigrants

“Two normative conceptions of human practical rationality”:

“My argument,” says Martha Nussbaum, “will be, very roughly, that tragedy articulates both norms, A and B, criticizing A with reference to the specifically human value contained in B; that Plato, finding the risks involved in B intolerable, develops a remarkable version of A, and then himself criticizes it as lacking in some important human values; that Aristotle articulates and defends a version of B, arguing that it meets our deepest practical intuitions about the proper relationship to luck for a being who is situated between beast and god and who can see certain values that are available to neither.”