A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard 1930-1932 (eds. S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke; Hippocampus Press, 2017). In my review of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories I mentioned his two-volume collected correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, for which I was of course not going to shell out the $60.| www.thepsmiths.com
Welcome to the NRP. We are curating the best of those extremely-online extremists known as the "New Right."| newrightpoast.substack.com
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Joseph Henrich (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Until 2002, diplomats at the United Nations didn’t have to pay their parking tickets. Double-parking, blocking a fire hydrant, blocking a driveway, blocking an| www.thepsmiths.com
The Philharmonic Gets Dressed, Karla Kuskin (illus. Marc Simont, HarperCollins, 1982). The least negotiable thing in the Psmith household — after death and taxes, but only barely — is bedtime. I won’t say we’ve become a well-oiled machine, because we have been outnumbered for many years and that has a way of throwing toothpaste in the gears, but we are| www.thepsmiths.com
Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Blythe (1969; NYRB Classics, 2015).| www.thepsmiths.com
How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world| The Verge
Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, Ashley Mears (Princeton University Press, 2021).| www.thepsmiths.com
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodard (Viking, 2011). We once lived for a few years in another part of the country. It was nice in a lot of ways — I have fond memories of that time, and not just because two of my babies were born there — but it was also| www.thepsmiths.com
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, Charles C. Mann (Picador, 2018). There used to be famines. Poor harvests and crop failures have been with us since the development of agriculture. Archaeological evidence makes it clear that farmers have always lived on the knife’s edge of subsistence, often hungry or malnourished, and it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge into famine: too much rain or not enough, volcani...| www.thepsmiths.com
A Field Guide to American Houses (Revised): The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America's Domestic Architecture, Virginia Savage McAlester (Knopf, 2013). One January a few years ago, I decided to learn about gardening. January, it turns out, is the perfect time to do this, because the ground is frozen and there’s no way you can be expected to actually| www.thepsmiths.com
The Cruise of the Nona, Hilaire Belloc (1925; Loreto, 2014). Late in the May of 1925, around midnight, Hilaire Belloc climbed into a tiny boat and put out to sea so that he would have some time to think. The sea gives ample time to think, especially if like Belloc you disdain the use of a motor. Some wag once jested that sailing is like being at war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of abject terror. I suppose in some sense that’s correct, but give me the boredom of the sailb...| www.thepsmiths.com
history.state.gov 3.0 shell| history.state.gov
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian: The Original Adventures of the Greatest Sword and Sorcery Hero of All Time!, Robert E. Howard (ed. Patrice Louinet, Del Ray, 2003). Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haire...| www.thepsmiths.com