The Lamp Magazine

1 day ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Jude Russo |Peter Hitchens |Robert Wyllie

It is a hot June day, and my good friend Mr. Tom Collins is helping me noodle on what might be worth laying out in digital ink for the few, the proud, the loyal regular readers of the Russo Low Life. On the domestic front, things are the usual pleasant shambles. I have just discovered the toddler licking ketchup out of one of those little plastic trays shaped like bottles you get at Chick-fil-A now. (Did they have these when I was a child?

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.

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.

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.

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.