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1 month ago | 
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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2 months ago | 
quillette.com | John Lloyd |Sean Welsh |Razib Khan
In Britain, the wisdom of the country’s 2016 decision to leave the EU is still hotly debated. Remainers that Brexit has had a negative effect on the economy. Brexiteers counter that a growing number of economists believe Brexit has had little or no effect on growth, and that it will take another decade to understand the true costs and benefits of the decision to leave the Union.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Jason Andrew Garshfield |Michael Shermer |Marco Visscher |John Lloyd
The US presidential election cycle is a spectacle of carefully cultivated suspense. Yet despite this, elections have mostly followed a remarkably predictable pattern from the mid-twentieth century until now: the two major parties exchange control of the White House every eight years. It wasn’t always this way; in the past, there have been long stretches of one-party dominance.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
anglican.ink | John Lloyd
Archbishop Justin Welby, the leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide, resigned on 12 November after eleven years in office. An independent investigation found that he had failed to take action against the late barrister John Smyth, who had supervised Church of England (CofE) boys’ camps in the 1970s and ’80s. Smyth would thrash boys’ buttocks until they bled, allegedly to deter them from masturbating.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
quillette.com | John Aziz |Maarten Boudry |Steije Hofhuis |John Lloyd
“It didn’t start on October 7th.” These words have been repeated like a mantra by those who wish to justify Hamas’s actions of 7 October 2023, by suggesting that the savagery of that day was provoked by previous events. There is a subtle conflation at work here.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Maarten Boudry |Steije Hofhuis |John Lloyd |Benny Morris
Mind viruses seem to be all the rage these days. In his 2020 bestseller Parasitic Mind, evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad identifies “the tyranny of political correctness” and other “infectious ideas” that are harming our societies.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
quillette.com | John Lloyd |Benny Morris |Steve Salerno |Brian Stewart
A few hours after Donald Trump’s re-election as US president was confirmed, the former Democratic presidential candidate and governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, argued that the result would force Europe to grow up. “No question,” he told the BBC’s World at One, “Europe has to learn to stand on its own. The day of the United States setting the tone, especially in defence, is gone. This will put an enormous stress on the EU. The US is no longer going to be reliable to deal with Ukraine, with Russia. ...
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Claire Lehmann |Kevin Mims |John Lloyd |Samuel Kronen
On election day, I caught the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Sitting across from me an elderly woman wore a t-shirt with the image of Trump pumping his fist in the air with the words “fight, fight.” A small "I Voted" sticker was pressed onto her lapel. She sat with an easy confidence. There were no disapproving glances from other passengers. There was no tension. No conflict.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Kevin Mims |John Lloyd |Samuel Kronen |Greg Koabel
Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s debut novel, was published in 1984 and thus celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. If you are under sixty years of age, this probably doesn’t mean much to you, but by the time McInerney’s book arrived, literary fiction had been in the doldrums for most of the late 1970s and early 1980s. That period is fascinatingly documented in Dan Sinykin’s recent book, Big Fiction.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
quillette.com | John Lloyd |Samuel Kronen |Greg Koabel |Josh Feldman
Europe now faces the possibility of war in a way it has not since 1945. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were brutal but containable, even if the cost of containment was many thousands of dead and an uneasy cold peace that left the belligerents frozen in hostility. The ongoing war in Ukraine, the growing possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and the fighting in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, however, all threaten to escape the containment now sought by the US and become total war.
