Archives for August 23, 2019

National Review has published a symposium in its latest issue called What We Love About America. The thirty-one contributors include Richard Brookhiser, Joseph Epstein, Mark Helprin, Megan McArdle, Lance Morrow, John Podhoretz, Kevin Williamson, and—yes—me. My piece is called “Western Movies”:

Taken together, the best Hollywood westerns come as close as anything ever has to comprising America’s creation myth, a tale of brave men and women who rode toward Monument Valley to make better lives for themselves and their children. Of course we all know it wasn’t as clear-cut as that, which is what makes their story mythic: It’s what we want to believe about American history. But if it isn’t all true, neither is it all false…

Read the whole thing here.

Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, is interviewed by John Lehmann on Monitor, originally telecast by the BBC on October 12, 1958:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“I think we are to God, if there is such a thing, like a microscopic cell in the left toenail of Garry Kasparov in the middle of a chess match. That cell has as much awareness of what Kasparov’s doing as we do of God’s activities. We like to presume we know about the universe, but we don’t know what we’re talking about. We have finite minds, and we’re dealing with something called infinity. The most one can hope for is to live a good life and try to leave things a little better than he found them.”

Artie Shaw (quoted in Gene Lees, “Artie Shaw: The Anchorite”)