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2 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | Joseph Epstein |J. Vance |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
Alasdair MacIntyre began to mean something to me as a third-year university student, since After Virtue hit harder than anything else on the syllabi for PHIL 372 Contemporary Ethics and PLPT 407 Liberalism and Its Critics at the University of Virginia. The former was wonderfully taught by his last dissertation student, Rebecca Stangl.
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2 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | Joseph Epstein |J. Vance |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
Melancholy has settled in at the Russo manse. Journalism won the Preakness, but Pimlico is now closed indefinitely for renovations—that is to say, destruction and new building on the site—and vaguely described efforts to spruce up the track’s down-at-the-heels neighborhood. Disinterested observers expect this to go about as well as any other urban renewal project in Baltimore. Wednesday saw preschool graduation, which yanked a crystalline bead or two from your humble correspondent’s gleaming orbs.
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3 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
Now that hardly anyone actually reads Lewis Carroll, it is perhaps once again possible to speak of the old East Germany as a country which was “Through the Looking Glass.” Half a century ago, this was a terrible cliché, though anyone who passed from one side of Berlin to the other quickly found that (as so often) it was a cliché because it was true. Every feature of life at first appeared the same as on the other side. But then it turned out to be wholly, profoundly different.
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4 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
In the blue afternoon the bird appeared, perched on a high roof in the capital of the world. It was a seagull, dancing in the sun. Perhaps it felt lonely, for it was soon joined by its mate and their hungry offspring. Indifferent to the cheers below them in the ruined circus and to the old men who lurked in the gilded ossuary chattering and marking bits of paper destined for oblivion, the mother spat out the corpse of a rodent, which the chick happily devoured.
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Heather Mac Donald |Joseph Epstein |Douglas Murray |D. S. Carne-Ross
Recent stories of note:“‘Mark Twain’ review: The Most American Writer”Jay Parini, The Wall Street JournalMark Twain, in almost every image of him, sports a voluminous head of hair, thick eyebrows whose strands extend over an inch, and an unmissable mustache framing his stern-looking mouth. Writing for The Wall Street Journal that “almost everything about Twain seems exaggerated as well as true,” Jay Parini does not refer to Twain’s hair, of course, but the statement applies all the same.
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4 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
America has finally joined the ranks of great Western civilizations and produced a pope, along with the Italians, the French, the Germans, the Greeks, the Dutch, the Jews, and, somewhat inexplicably, the Poles.
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1 month ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Mary Rogers |Peter Hitchens
The sad fact of it is that any idiot can write a book. If you write two hundred words a day for a year, taking off on the weekends (don’t want to strain the system), at the end you will have a manuscript of respectable proportions that you can inflict on contest judges, agents’ slush piles, and so forth. It’s comparable to becoming fit; but, unlike becoming fit, I’ve actually done the book thing a few times.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Jesse Tisch |Akiva Schick |Joseph Epstein |Abraham Socher
Free Press 304 pp., $29.99 Simon & Schuster 464 pp., $20.99 Memoir is risky business. Its reputation? Slightly dubious. Its vices? Vanity, indiscretion, omission. Don’t trust it, said Orwell, unless it reveals something shameful. Even then, you might wonder why someone probes their past, poking around in the attic of their psyche. Why not let demons rest? If anyone understands these hazards, it’s Joseph Epstein, a great practitioner and skeptic of personal writing.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
commentary.org | Joseph Epstein
Whenever I am among people discussing politics and the discussion begins to turn contentious, I generally remind my companions that "I have never lost a political argument" and, after a brief pause, add, "but, then, neither have I ever won one." The reason for this seeming paradox is simple: To win an argument you need reason, and, when it comes to politics, you cannot, as Jonathan Swift had it, reason someone out of something into which he or she has not been reasoned.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Joseph Epstein
How many people recall the name Douglas Ginsburg? In 1987, Judge Ginsburg, then 41, was nominated by Ronald Reagan for a seat on the Supreme Court but withdrew from consideration soon after it emerged that he had smoked marijuana as a college student and professor. Judge Ginsburg retained his seat as a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where he continued to serve with distinction and is still a senior judge. He has also taught at various law schools.
