Everyone involved knew their roles in this drama by heart, and fell right into them with gusto.

A brief, fascinating look at one “microcosm of the larger dynamic” of Trump 2.0 from Yuval Levin.

At the root of the contempt in which Donald Trump and his team hold many of the core institutions of our society is not how they view those various other actors but how they view themselves. The president and those around him appear to understand themselves as outsiders fighting the government, not as insiders running it.

A society of people shelling out billions on junk food and also on gym memberships, diabetes treatments, and Ozempic is one that may well maximize its GDP, but not its human flourishing or happiness.

And let us not allow ourselves to get tired of doing good.

Fun fact: “One of the oldest monastic libraries in the world, the Abbey Library of St.Gallen in Switzerland, has the following inscription over its door: ΨΥΧΗΣ ΙΑΤΡΕΙΟΝ (psukhēs iatreion), which translates as ‘healing place for the soul.’”

The library was founded around 937 and is one of the most important monastic collections in the world, holding 160,000 volumes, 1650 books printed before 1500, and 2100 manuscripts from the 8th to 15th century. You can view the e-codices of the original manuscripts here.

We need something better than liberal irony.

I also went back and put up an unshared post on liberalism, conservatism, and imagining toward utopias, most of which is over a month old. I think I had higher expectations for it than I ever found, and I wasn’t sure I was saying what I wanted to say.

Sneaking a photo • Don’t disturb the peace

Josef Pieper:

[Supernatural hope] alone can bestow on man the certain possession of that aspiration that is at once relaxed and disciplined, that adaptability and readiness, that strong-hearted freshness, that resilient joy, that steady preseverance in trust that so distinguish the young and make them lovable.

… As Saint Augustine so aptly says: “God is younger than all else.”

Note on Issue 34:

[C]ritics should not be “in the prediction business.” Neither, in our view, should philosophers, artists or historians, no matter how many have volunteered for such roles in recent years. From Silicon Valley to Substack, we have no shortage of prophets or pamphleteers these days, each of them eager to tell us why utopia or apocalypse lies right around the corner. What we lack, oddly enough, is thinking and writing that makes us more attentive to the world right in front of us—the here and now in all its mystery, strangeness and often tormented reality. Thinking and writing that helps us not to predict the future but to act as self-conscious citizens, who are both in touch with our historical moment and capable of determining our own course within it.