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Paul Murphy's avatar

1 - I was sorry to see the powerlineblog announcement about you not writing for them anymore - the recent daily charts were usually enlightening and your TWIP always entertaining.

2 - I dropped my subscription to Scientific American when the science disappeared from in the late 80s - never bought Time Magazine, but the principle is the same: both abandoned the educated reader.

3 - still there's hope: DIE is dying; the web has many interesting sites; and classical learning is making a rapid come back (viz: CLT's growth rate) in everything from home schooling to the smaller post-secondaries.

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Doplar's avatar

Steven was certainly my favorite writer and personality at Powerline, along with Lucretia and 3 Whiskey Happy Hour. Now that 3 WHH has been monetized, in order to comment, I will be missing them there. So I will follow them here for as long as I am able to comment (for free) on occasion. Things change, and in my world it seems, rarely for the better. People who know me criticize that I am too frugal/cheap for my own good. But I feel they do so only because I have more money than they do. ;-)

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Bryan Stephens's avatar

This is the sort of thing I read and send to my friends.

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Max Cossack's avatar

Time Magazine was popular in the era of the "middlebrow." We live now in an era when those who deem themselves "intellectuals" celebrate the lowbrow.

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Thomas Robinson's avatar

Thank you for treating us seriously. I will miss you at Powerline.

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Robert Bryce's avatar

Great stuff. This line resonates today, particularly when it comes to the issues of energy and climate: "a select group of anointed people, who have in common a hatred for the world as it is."

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Rascal Nick Of's avatar

Good stuff. Loved reading Chambers’ Witness. Technology has destroyed peoples’ attention spans, so its hard to make a living writing like that because its just not appreciated for how enriching it is. Ive been reading Powerline since almost its inception. I was not surprised to see that youve separated from Powerline and I think it was a wise decision.

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Michael Smith's avatar

As a child I recall Time magazine arriving at our house every Tuesday, and later, Sports Illustrated every Thursday. Real substance and solid writing, the kind that might pull a young mind in and expose it to ideas and topics it otherwise might not seek out.

Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

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RAM's avatar

The Hoovers translated this medieval work:

https://hoover.blogs.archives.gov/2016/04/13/de-re-metallica-translated/

Another Chambers-Time effort:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQSjV4DZ-Gg

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Tim Hurlocker's avatar

Hmmm, no mention of that rascal Rousseau as a primary source of this "confusion." Much of the difference between the American and French Revolutions can be philosophically illustrated by the warm-to-frosty relationship of David Hume and Jean Jacque Rousseau in 1766, with their very different views on human nature. There is a chapter of my historical dramatization, "Henry Scott, Third Duke of Buccleuch," that discusses Hume and Rousseau and their meeting in Paris.

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RAM's avatar
Mar 14Edited

We expected Time to be Lucid.

Here's a very comprehensive religious/philosophical/mystical text from a renowned Italian rabbi in the mid-1700s, who was a real Renaissance man.

https://www.amazon.com/Way-God-Classics-Library-English/dp/087306769X

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Mike Doherty's avatar

Luce-id!

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Max Cossack's avatar

I am in a small group studying that very text. Coincidence.

Like many others, It is available in translation for free here:

https://www.sefaria.org/Derekh_Hashem?tab=contents

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RAM's avatar
Mar 14Edited

Luzzatto had a knack for orderly clarification. The translator of the book version, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, was a physicist. Luzzatto's works on reasoning, logic, and language are in this book:

https://www.feldheim.com/way-of-torah

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Doplar's avatar

If Whittaker, and so many other intellectuals of the past, could see the world we are living in now - with the onset of the internet - they might just throw down their pencils and go way, way underground.

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alexander.helphand's avatar

that was great.

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