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1 week ago | 
quillette.com | Brad Strotten |Bradley Strotten
A review of The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda, 288 pages, Arcade Publishing (May 2025)In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot writes, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It’s not feelings of personal injury and past trauma that we mine for poetic inspiration, it’s the archives of the canon.
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Feb 27, 2025 | 
quillette.com | Jonathan Kay |Greg Koabel |James Kierstead |Brad Strotten
“I find this story astonishing as an outsider,” a British historian told me on social media last week. “Can I just confirm what I believe to be the case: There is no proof of any burials… just GPR [ground-penetrating radar] ‘anomalies’ [that] haven’t been investigated? The 215 children are, as things stand, entirely notional?”The answer, in a word, is yes.
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Feb 25, 2025 | 
quillette.com | Brad Strotten |John Lloyd |Ronald Dworkin |Gerfried Ambrosch |Bradley Strotten
A review of We Do Not Part by Han Kang, 272 pages, Hogarth (February 2025)“Here they come,” wrote Kingsley Amis of Colin Wilson’s debut book, the bold existentialist anthology, The Outsiders, “tramp, tramp, tramp—all those characters you thought were discredited, or had never read, or (if you are like me) had never heard of: Barbusse, Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Hemingway, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Tolstoy [and] Dostoevsky.”This was textbook Amis.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Kevin Mims |Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Evelina Silveira
Arm-in-arm, the three of us prowled cobblestoned streets in the pitch black of a moonless night, hurling rocks at factory windows. Inebriated by our socialist fervour, Jennifer, Karl, and I followed each missile with a shouted slogan, damning the capitalist managers who, come morning, would bear witness to our brave act of anti-capitalist defiance. But when morning broke, those managers never arrived—because their factory existed only as a dream. Still, I was giddy upon waking.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Kevin Mims |Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton
A review of Sonny Boy by Al Pacino, 384 pages, Penguin Press (October 2024)When I’m reading celebrity memoirs, I’m usually tempted to skip the first few chapters. I generally don’t care about the family history, the toddler years, or the misadventures of adolescence. I want to jump to the parts of the story I know best—the books they wrote, the films they made, the songs they played, and so on. I’m glad I overcame that temptation when reading Al Pacino’s new autobiography, Sonny Boy.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |Bradley Strotten
A review of I Will Live by Lale Gül; 320 pages; Virago (August 2024)Lale Gül’s autobiographical debut novel Ik ga leven (“I Will Live”) was first published in Dutch in 2021 when the author was just 23. It became an immediate bestseller and was published in English translation last month. The story follows the dramatic unveiling of Gül’s fictional counterpart, Büsra, a twenty-year-old Muslim rebel living in the Netherlands and chafing against religious and cultural authority.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Nick Enfield |Leon Hadar |Oscar Clarke |Brad Strotten
Reality matters because our survival depends on it. To navigate reality, as individuals, we first reduce its complexity through the interface of sensory perception. But to coordinate around reality, in concert with other people, our speciesâ forte is to add another interface, a further level of transformation: the interface known as language. We present reality to each other in language-delineated pieces. As the mathematician Friedrich Waismann said, language is the knife we use to cut out facts.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Leon Hadar |Oscar Clarke |Brad Strotten
Introduction: In this weekâs episode, I spoke to John R. Wood, Jr., the national ambassador for Braver Angels, an organisation that brings together Democrats and Republicans, in an attempt to help them understand each other better, with a view to strengthening the American civic state. John is also a columnist for USA Today and a former Republican nominee for Congress, as well as former vice-president of the Republican Party of Los Angeles.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Leon Hadar |Oscar Clarke |Brad Strotten |Thomas Larson
My socialisation into polite liberal society‚ÄĒmy crunchy, Quaker-school education and my progressive cultural milieu in a Northeastern American metropolis‚ÄĒhelped to forge my worldview. I was, after all, the product of a culture and a generation in which the liberal world presided over the most peaceful and prosperous societies in the history of humanity. Liberalism seemed to be the natural order of things.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Leon Hadar |Oscar Clarke |Brad Strotten |Thomas Larson
A review of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz, 432 pages, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (June 2024)In the early 1990s, I was a research fellow with the Cato Institute and served as the Libertarian Party’s shadow secretary of state. It was a great time to be a believer in personal and economic liberty.
