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Jul 25, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Jonathan Kay |Joel Kotkin |Gerfried Ambrosch |Josh Allan
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of High Frontier, the space-travel-themed boardgame first marketed by German-American aerospace engineer Phil Eklund under the name Rocket Flight back in 1999. As games go, High Frontier is long, complicated, and difficult to master. There’s lots of math. And success requires painstaking analysis and preparation—which can all be undone in an instant by even the slightest oversight or miscalculation. In other words, it’s a lot like real-life rocketry.
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Jul 25, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Joel Kotkin |Gerfried Ambrosch |Josh Allan |Allan Stratton
Age is a big deal. We saw just how big a deal it is from the deterioration of President Biden evident during the recent debate with Donald Trump. There’s a growing sense that the world is being run by a gerontocracy—Biden, Trump, Putin, Xi, Khamenei—worthy of the decrepit and corrupt Emperor Tiberius. The stage is being set for a global generational conflict.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Gerfried Ambrosch |Josh Allan |Allan Stratton |Peter Herman
As anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment surges around the world, the German Left’s commitment to combating antisemitism appears to be fading—a troubling trend driven, in large part, by a myopic focus on “Islamophobia” and by the growing influence of postcolonialism. While this reflects a broader pattern among Western progressives, it has especially troubling implications in Germany, given our history.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Josh Allan |Allan Stratton |Peter Herman |Liam Hunt
You can often infer more about the health of a society from the way it reacts to events than from the events themselves. When US presidential candidate Donald Trump was shot in the ear last Saturday while giving a speech at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—a shot that would almost certainly have killed him had he not turned his head at the last second—the responses from most mainstream public figures were refreshingly civil.
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Nov 16, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Robert Huddleston |Josh Allan |Adam Wakeling
A review of Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell, 464 pages, Penguin Random House (March 2023). “Humanism,” Sarah Bakewell tells us, “is a semantic cloud of meanings and implications.” As a philosophy, humanism encompasses the intellectual and cultural legacy of the Renaissance, humanitarianism, liberalism, atheism, and agnosticism, and the objects and methods of study of a loosely affiliated set of academic disciplines.
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Nov 15, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Josh Allan |Adam Wakeling |Greg Koabel
A review of Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements by Anthony Burgess, 416 pages, W.W. Norton (October 2014). Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821, but it has taken until 2023 for Hollywood to produce a definitive biopic of the man who came closer than anyone else to conquering the European continent. One could argue that the story was just waiting for the right director; that Ridley Scott is to cinema what Bonaparte is to world history.
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Sep 2, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Josh Allan |Riley Moore |Johnny Schmidt
Fifty years ago, on 2 September 1973, J.R.R. Tolkien died of a gastric ulcer at the age of eighty-one. The news received a surprisingly muted response from the press. While the obituaries acknowledged the extraordinary impact that The Hobbit (1937)and The Lord of the Rings (1954) made upon a generation of readers, they implied that their author’s death was likely to bring an end to his literary acclaim.
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Jul 18, 2023 | 
3ammagazine.com | Josh Allan
By Josh Allan. Rose Cleary, How to be a French Girl (Weatherglass Books, 2023)How to be a French Girl is the latest in a line of novels with sarcastic, ‘how-to’ titles that attempt to subvert the prim, self-helpy idealism of their namesakes. If you genuinely want to learn how to be a French girl, this probably isn’t the book for you. But if you’re in the mood for an authentic, unflinchingly miserable take on the millennial experience, then you’re in safe hands with Rose Cleary’s accomplished debut.
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Jul 6, 2023 | 
tinyurl.com | Josh Allan
It‘s been nearly a year since the JWST first started relaying images back to Earth. So far those images have comprised newly discovered galaxies, higher quality snaps of known nebulas, and more detailed surveys of distant constellations, showing off between them the diverse capabilities of the JWST, which is a hundred times more powerful than the Hubble telescope.
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Jul 6, 2023 | 
full-stop.net | Josh Allan
It‘s been nearly a year since the JWST first started relaying images back to Earth. So far those images have comprised newly discovered galaxies, higher quality snaps of known nebulas, and more detailed surveys of distant constellations, showing off between them the diverse capabilities of the JWST, which is a hundred times more powerful than the Hubble telescope.
