Dear Colleague, I understand that you wish me to participate in your protests against the Trump administration’s proposed “compact” with American universities. I will do so on one condition: that you openly acknowledge (a) that you were completely comfortable with the Obama and Biden administrations’ use of “Dear Colleague” letters — e.g. — to strongarm universities into supporting their and your preferred political outcomes, and (b) that a chief purpose of your current prot...| The Homebound Symphony
Mark Liberman: For decades, people have been worrying about declines in literacy rates, and even steeper declines in how many people read how many books, especially among students. For a striking recent example, see Niall Ferguson, “Without Books We Will Be Barbarians”, The Free Press 10/10/2025 — that article’s sub-head is “It is not the road to serfdom that awaits — but the steep downward slope to the status of a peasant in ancient Egypt”. Although I mostly agree with the ar...| The Homebound Symphony
Last month, when I was suffering from a vertigo and unable to read for more than a few seconds at a time, my constant companion was the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald, and especially her four great Songbooks: Gershwin, Ellington, Cole Porter, and Rodgers & Hart. Collectively they constitute, I believe, one of the great achievements of 20th-century American art. Ella recorded other “songbook” albums, including an Irving Berlin one, but these four are the masterpieces. And I might note that t...| The Homebound Symphony
I wrote in my anarchist notebook: Jacques Ellul thinks that Christians should be anarchists because God, in Jesus Christ, has renounced Lordship. I think something almost the opposite: it is because Jesus is Lord (and every knee shall ultimately bow before him, and every tongue confess his Lordship) that Christians should be anarchists. I hadn’t remembered writing that, but came across the post this morning, just after posting on Phil Christman’s book. Do I think that Christians should ...| The Homebound Symphony
Phil Christman has said that Adam Roberts, Francis Spufford, and I form a kind of writerly school — though he has yet to define its parameters. I kinda hope he does that one day. UPDATE: Phil has written firmly to me: Now, listen here — I did not call you and Adam and Francis a “school!” I called you a Poundian/Wyndham Lewisian vortex and said that you don’t quite constitute an ism! If you were a school, I’d be trying to matriculate! Disagreements about politics are one thin...| The Homebound Symphony
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Two weeks ago I entered mortal combat with Covid, and have emerged victorious but not unscathed. This bout featured an unexpected symptom: persistent vertigo, especially when looking at text. Not a great situation for someone in my line of work! (And with my personal preferences.) But if I kept my computer screen at a certain distance and held my head still, I could without experiencing physical nausea read stuff on the internet. So for about a week what’s what I did, and the positive res...| The Homebound Symphony
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The starting point for my friend Tim Larsen’s new book The Fires of Moloch is another book, one published in 1917 and often reprinted over the next few years. The Church in the Furnace is a collection of essays by Anglican clergymen who served in the Great War as military chaplains. The chaplains were sometimes thought to be of a modernizing or liberalizing tendency because they were so straightforward about the horrors of the war — and what they believed to be the church’s unpreparedn...| The Homebound Symphony
This post by Kevin Kelly about publishing is interesting and informative, but it gets some things wrong. For instance, he says this about the traditional publishing route: The task: You create the material; then professionals edit, package, manufacture, distribute, promote, and sell the material. You make, they sell. At the appropriate time, you appear on a book store tour to great applause, to sign books and hear praise from fans. Also, the publishers will pay you even before you write your ...| The Homebound Symphony
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