Lucina Schell at The Quarterly Conversation:

Before Leonora Carrington became a famed surrealist artist and writer, she went mad. In the late 1930s, the English debutante was living with her lover Max Ernst (more than 20 years her senior) in a farmhouse in Provence, when Ernst was imprisoned on a visit to Paris and sent to a concentration camp. As the German army advanced, Carrington fled across the Pyrenees into Spain, where, after exhibiting increasingly deranged behavior, she was interned in an insane asylum in Santander. Down Below is Carrington’s brief yet harrowing account of her journey to the other side of consciousness.

It was André Breton who encouraged Carrington to write down her experience. Liberation of the mind was the ultimate aim of surrealism, and Carrington, already consecrated as a surrealist femme-enfant, a conduit for her much older lover to the realms of youth and mystery, had now traveled further than any of them and lived to tell the tale. While she was predisposed to find artistic merit in her experience of madness, Carrington’s reasons for telling her story seem more personal and therapeutic: “How can I write this when I’m afraid to think about it? I am in terrible anguish, yet I cannot continue living alone with such a memory…I know that once I write it down, I shall be delivered.”

more here.

Patrick McGuiness at The Guardian:

Thom Gunn was one of those poets you studied at school in the 1960s or 70s if your teacher had their finger on the pulse: Plath, Hughes, Heaney and Gunn. He had his first collection, Fighting Terms (1954), accepted for publication while still an undergraduate at Cambridge, and brought out his second, The Sense of Movement, in 1957 – the same year as Ted Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain. Gunn and Hughes were prolific and famous enough, in 1962, to share a joint Selected Poems from Faber. Gunn met his life partner, Mike Kitay, an American visiting student, at Cambridge, and moved with him to California in 1954. By the time Gunn died at his home in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, he had lived in the US for nearly 60 years, and had become – as he put it – an “Anglo-American poet”.

In “To Thom Gunn in Los Altos, California”, his friend Donald Davie wrote: “Conquistador! Live dangerously, my Byron, / In this metropolis / Of Finistere. Drop off / The edge repeatedly, and come / Back to tell us!”

This homage captures something of Gunn’s aura in the 1960s: explorer, risk-taker, connoisseur of edges. Davie nicely turns the cliche around by evoking a poet who “drops off … repeatedly” and returns to tell the tale. Ted Hughes stayed in England, dug in and dug deep; Gunn flew to America and spread himself out.

more here.

Donna Zuckerberg at the TLS:

Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way and The Roman Way, originally published in 1930 and 1932, are classics in their own right. Praised for their lucidity and accessibility, her books served as an introduction to classical antiquity for the general American public for much of the twentieth century. Although less well known in Europe, Hamilton achieved such popularity in the United States that, when I tell people that I study Classics, most people over the age of fifty who are familiar with the subject tell me that Hamilton was their entry point. The Greek Way was a favourite volume of Robert Kennedy, and – he claimed – a text that helped him process his grief after the assassination of his brother. Hamilton’s works underlie one traditional American approach to the Classics. Do they deserve re-publication?

Hamilton herself is a figure about whom much has been written lately (for example, the excellent chapter by Judith Hallett in the volume Women Classical Scholars, 2016). She had two distinguished careers, first as headmaster at Bryn Mawr, then as a writer about the ancient Mediterranean. It is tempting to compare Hamilton to her British contemporary Jane Ellen Harrison, but while Harrison’s work on Greek mythology became the foundation of scholarship on the subject, Hamilton’s work on mythology and classical civilization was unapologetically popularizing.

As with most classic works, Hamilton’s books present something of a conundrum to readers today: they are obviously products of a different time. Mary Beard, in her SPQR (2015), has compared studying ancient Rome to “walking on a tightrope, a very careful balancing act. If you look down on one side, everything seems reassuringly familiar . . . on the other side, it seems completely alien territory”. Reading Hamilton is a similar experience.

more here.

John Banville in The Nation:

The vigorously kicked-up dust has long since settled, and one wonders anew what all the fuss was about. He sent himself to Paris in the 1920s, which was the place to be just then. He shrewdly latched on to a lot of influential literary people and later learned how to be a celebrity by associating with stars of the screen and the corrida. He wrote a clutch of good stories and a handful of novels ranging from fresh and original through mediocre to abysmally bad—although the posthumously published The Garden of Eden is nearly very good, in its weird way. He mythologized himself as the Great American Novelist, despite the fact that none of his novels is set in America (except To Have and Have Not, a minor work) and he was arguably at his best in the medium of the short story. Later in life, he blundered into depression, alcoholism, paranoia, and manic delusion, and killed himself. At best, much of his life was only of passing notoriety—or so one would have thought—and yet the legend lives on, as tenacious as ever. How to account for it?

More here.

Skye C. Cleary and Massimo Pigliucci at IAI News:

When every day many of us wake up to read about fresh horrors on our fresh horrors device, we might find ourselves contemplating the question as to whether, as Albert Camus supposedly put it, one should kill oneself or have a cup of coffee. If there is any philosopher who is famous for contemplating suicide, it’s Camus who, in a more serious tone, proposed that, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”[1]

The existentialists and Stoics are notorious for being at loggerheads on many issues. Yet Simone de Beauvoir, who was much less famous for her views on suicide than Camus, gives an example that shows the existential answer isn’t so far removed from the Stoic one – a fascinating case of philosophical convergence, two millennia apart.

In 1954, Beauvoir was awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize for her book The Mandarins, in which the main character Anne contemplates suicide. When once she saw the world as vast and inexhaustible, she now looks at it with indifference: “The earth is frozen over; nothingness has reclaimed it.” Her great love affair has collapsed, her daughter has grown up and no longer needs her, and she finds her profession unfulfilling. It’s not only that she feels her life no longer counts, but also existing is torturous and her memories are agony. Suicide seems like an escape from the pain. Clutching the brown vial of poison, Anne hears her daughter’s voice outside and it jars her into considering the effect of her death on other people. “My death does not belong to me,” she concludes, because “it’s the others who would live my death.”

More here.

Duncan Kelly in the New York Times:

A. C. Grayling, a British philosopher and critic whose subjects range from 17th-century epistemology to 20th-century war crimes, has come to tell us what he knows: that at one time we admired and understood representative democracy, and not without reason, but that in the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, democracy has been “made to fail.” Why has this happened? Because of insufficient checks on the power of political and economic elites, a failure in the civic education required of an informed populace and the ideological distortions created through the lobbying efforts of special interests.

Representative democracy ticks more of the boxes citizens want from their government than any other system we’ve tried to design. But when we forget this, rancorous populism and plebiscitary politics take hold, and we need to be given an old-fashioned history lesson to warn of the dangers ahead. As Grayling reminds us, democracy, understood as the rule of the majority, has never been sufficient in itself. Plato, Aristotle and Machiavelli all knew that more was needed, whether that meant enshrining constitutional rules to avoid the arbitrary exercise of power, imposing standards of behavior on elected officials or supporting a healthy ambivalence toward rulers by the ruled.

More here.

From Orion Magazine:

AS THIS ISSUE of Orion goes to press, the United States is preparing to reverse the commitments it made to fight climate change via the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. The move confirms what many have feared: that the willingness of this country to take federal action against climate change is vanishing, even as the carbon dioxide level of Earth’s atmosphere breaks new records. It’s difficult to remember an era in which America’s political institutions were as broken and the stakes were as high as they are now. Perhaps it’s time, then, to look for help elsewhere, to turn to a source of aid far older than our government: religion. If a changing climate poses an existential threat to life on Earth—and by the best accounts, it does—what might we learn from some of humanity’s oldest means of contemplating existence? Can religious life help us understand something new about our relationship with the natural world? Can it give us fresh insight into how, as individuals, we might navigate a moment in time that often feels bewildering and out of control? Orion editor Scott Gast discusses these questions and others with Rabbi Ted Falcon, Pastor Don Mackenzie, and Imam Jamal Rahman—representatives of three of the world’s major religions—who are known collectively as the Interfaith Amigos. Since 2001, the three have authored several books, including Getting to the Heart of Interfaith and Religion Gone Astray, and have spoken to audiences around the world about the possibility and opportunities afforded by interfaith dialogue.

Scott Gast: I’d like to begin by asking each of you to describe, in general terms, the role of the natural world in the history and practice of your different faiths.

Imam Jamal Rahman: Muslims rely heavily on verses from the Holy Qur’an, and several times the holy book says, “There are signs of God in nature.” In fact, there are more than seven hundred verses in the Qur’an which concern themselves with nature. Several chapters start with the names of animals or natural phenomena. And in some chapters God takes a mysterious oath, which invokes nature: “By the fig and the olive,” “By the Dawn.” Spiritual teachers in Islam take this to mean that nature is a holy, sacred manuscript, and if we honor and respect her, we can learn how to live. For example, the Qur’an asks, “What is a good word?” Well, a good word, it says, is “like a tree, with roots going deep into the earth, with branches going out into the sky, and yielding fruit by permission of its Sustainer.” And how shall we do the essential work of inner transformation? Little by little, says the Qur’an, much like the movement of the sun in the sky. There is a verse about personal transformation that some Muslims know by heart: “By the rosy glow of sunset, and the night and its progression, and the moon as it grows into fullness, surely you shall also travel stage by stage.”

The Qur’an also says, “Oh, human being”—doesn’t matter what your religion—“you are God’s representative on Earth.” And it emphasizes, “You are there not to sow corruption on Earth, but to enjoin the good and forbid the evil.” There is a remarkable verse that puts human beings into their proper place in the cosmos: “The creation of the heavens and the earth,” it says, “is a greater matter than the creation of man, but man understands not.” So, we have to be caretakers; it’s a spiritual obligation. As the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, “The earth is like your mother. Honor her. Protect her.”

More here.

Jon Gertner in The New York Times:

TWENTY MILES EAST of Reno, Nev., where packs of wild mustangs roam free through the parched landscape, Tesla Gigafactory 1 sprawls near Interstate 80. It is a destination for engineers from all over the world, to which any Reno hotel clerk can give you precise, can’t-miss-it directions. The Gigafactory, whose construction began in June 2014, is not only outrageously large but also on its way to becoming the biggest manufacturing plant on earth. Now 30 percent complete, its square footage already equals about 35 Costco stores, and a small city of construction workers, machinery and storage containers has sprung up around it. Perhaps the only thing as impressive as its size is its cloak of secrecy, which seems of a piece with Tesla’s increasing tendency toward stealth, opacity and even paranoia. When I visited in September, a guard at the gate gave militaristic instructions on where to go. Turning to my Lyft driver, he said severely: “When you complete the drop-off, you are not to get out of the car. Under any circumstances. Turn around and leave. Immediately.”

To hear its executives tell it, Tesla is misunderstood because it is still perceived as a car manufacturer, when its goals are more complex and far-reaching. But at least some people have bought into these grand ambitions. This summer, Tesla’s stock-market valuation at times rose above those of Ford and General Motors, and its worth exceeded $60 billion. It did not seem to matter to investors that the company had never made an annual profit, had missed its production targets repeatedly and had become enmeshed in controversy over its self-driving “autopilot” technologies, or that Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, had conceded that the value of his company, of which he owns about 22 percent, was “higher than we have the right to deserve.” Tesla was a headlong bet on the future, a huge wager on the idea of a better world. And its secretive Gigafactory was the arsenal for a full-fledged attack on the incumbent powers of the car and fossil-fuel industries. The factory would help validate Musk and his company’s seriousness about leading humanity’s turn to greener technologies, with a vision now encompassing solar roofing tiles and battery packs for home and industry. Most crucial, it involved producing millions of Tesla cars and trucks, all of which would be sleek, electric and self-driving.

More here.

Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker:

About a third of the way through “The Center Will Not Hold,” Griffin Dunne’s intimate, affectionate, and partial portrait of his aunt Joan Didion, which premières on Netflix this week, a riveting moment occurs. Dunne, an actor, producer, and director—and the son of Didion’s brother-in-law, the late Dominick Dunne—is questioning Didion about “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” her essay describing the hippie scene of Haight-Ashbury in 1967. That essay consisted of a fragmentary rendering of a dysfunctional social world that had been improvised by vulnerable children and predatory grownups, framed by Didion’s elegiac, magisterial summation of a civilization gone off its rails: “Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.” It was the work for which Didion was best known and most esteemed in the many decades of literary production that preceded “The Year of Magical Thinking,” the memoir of marriage and bereavement that, when it was published, in 2005, granted her a vast, popular success.

In one of several genial interviews, Dunne asks Didion about an indelible scene toward the end of her Haight-Ashbury essay—which, as any student who has ever taken a course in literary nonfiction knows, culminates with the writer’s encounter with a five-year-old girl, Susan, whose mother has given her LSD. Didion finds Susan sitting on a living-room floor, reading a comic book and dressed in a peacoat. “She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick,” Didion writes. Dunne asks Didion what it was like, as a journalist, to be faced with a small child who was tripping. Didion, who is sitting on the couch in her living room, dressed in a gray cashmere sweater with a fine gold chain around her neck and fine gold hair framing her face, begins. “Well, it was . . .” She pauses, casts her eyes down, thinking, blinking, and a viewer mentally answers the question on her behalf: Well, it was appalling. I wanted to call an ambulance. I wanted to call the police. I wanted to help. I wanted to weep. I wanted to get the hell out of there and get home to my own two-year-old daughter, and protect her from the present and the future.After seven long seconds, Didion raises her chin and meets Dunne’s eye. “Let me tell you, it was gold,” she says. The ghost of a smile creeps across her face, and her eyes gleam. “You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.”

More here.

Brian G. Keating at Edge.org:

What is this cosmic hubris that makes us feel so important about the Universe and our place within it? This is the question that I'm grappling with right now. I'm trying to experimentally shed some light on these extremely heated discussions that have taken over cosmology in the last few months with a debate about the deep past of cosmology and the implications for the future.

Specifically, what concerns me is whether we can drill down to the first moments, nanoseconds, microseconds, trillionths of a second after the Big Bang. And if we do, is it really going to tell us something about the origin of the Universe, or is it merely tacking decimal places onto the primordial collection of stamps? My question is one of bringing data. When people were waxing philosophic and having existential crises of faith about their equations, Feynman used to say, "Shut up and calculate." And that meant that the implications of what you were doing metaphysically, philosophically, and otherwise didn't matter; what mattered were the answers that you got at the end of the calculation.

A lot of what my colleagues and I do is shut up and measure. We build equipment that you can’t buy online. We have to design things from scratch that have a very specific purpose. I’ve noticed lately, and it's of grave concern to me, that many of the scientists, especially young scientists, are in the mode of trying to prove a theory. And that is a very dangerous aspect of science. The thought of being associated with the physicists who have created these ideas that are speaking to the essence of meaning as a human being is intoxicating. How did it all begin? It’s the most primitive question the human mind can ask. It’s natural to want to be associated with that. And further, it’s natural to think that we live in the first time in the history of humanity in which it’s possible to answer these questions using modern technology.

More here.

David Kretz in The Point:

The most compelling political performance artists in Germany do not like to be called “artists.” Nor do they prefer the label of “activists”—a term they reserve for gradualists, clicktivists, and the letter-writers of Amnesty International. Founded in 2009 by the philosopher Philipp Ruch, the Center for Political Beauty makes its base of “operations” (Aktionen in German) in Berlin, with changing groups of volunteers and partners throughout Europe. Its members, who wear suits and charcoal war paint, are organized into “assault teams” aiming to establish “moral beauty, political poetry and human greatness [Großgesinntheit].” They call themselves “aggressive humanists.”

The Center initially made a name for itself when it launched a campaign in the style of “Wanted” posters promising a reward of twenty-five thousand Euros for information leading to the arrest of the von Braunbehrens and Bode families, who share ownership of the arms corporation Krauss-Maffei Wegmann. Controversially, the company had proposed exporting several hundred Leopard 2 tanks to Saudi Arabia. One member of the board stepped down from his post after the exposure, and eventually the deal was abandoned on account of public pressure.

The Center has risen to new national prominence during the recent refugee crisis.

More here.

Nina Burleigh in the New York Times:

Someone should write an opera about her: La Fallaci, beautiful, extravagant, courageous survivor of war and tempestuous love affairs, speaker of truth to power. But for now, Cristina De Stefano’s new biography of the Italian journalistic superstar Oriana Fallaci — unabashed hagiography to counter the writer’s late-life reputational demise — must suffice.

Fallaci was born in 1929 to working-class parents and proved her dauntlessness as a tiny, pigtailed bike messenger for anti-Fascists in World War II Florence, when she was just 14. By her early 20s, she was in Rome covering Hollywood on the Tiber, honing her craft on fizzy stories about European royals and Italian movie goddesses. Eventually she began traveling frequently to California, lounging poolside with more movie stars and filing more stories. She got herself assigned to cover NASA and the astronauts she adored (one of whom, De Stefano speculates rather fancifully, fathered one of Fallaci’s pregnancies, which ended in a miscarriage).

Fallaci then moved on to the subjects that made her famous: war and global politics. Golda Meir, Henry Kissinger, Deng Xiaoping, Ariel Sharon and Ayatollah Khomeini were just a few of the world leaders and statesmen who submitted to her trademark hourslong interviews, enduring her provocative questions while sharing breaks with her ubiquitous cigarettes.

Her interviews remain studies in speaking truth to power. Interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini, she famously called the chador a “stupid, medieval rag” and took it off, provoking the Ayatollah to leave the room. (It is a testament to her journalistic power that he came back the next day.)

More here.

Kenneth Roth at Human Rights Watch:

No one pretends there is an easy way for the European Union to manage the flow of asylum seekers and other migrants arriving by boat from Libya. Yet there are certain basic principles of human rights—and decency—that should guide the EU response.

The Mediterranean crossing from Libya toward Italy has become the world’s most dangerous. Some 103,000 people have survived the journey this year through late September, but 2,471 have drowned or gone missing.

What would lead anyone to risk such a perilous journey? Some flee persecution or violence at home. Others, fleeing crushing poverty, hope for a better life in Europe. But all have traversed Libya, one of the world’s most inhospitable places for migrants.

Divided today among three competing authorities, Libya has become a smuggler’s paradise and a migrant’s nightmare. Non-Libyan migrants seeking transit to Europe are typically corralled and kept in squalid, overcrowded detention centers where malnutrition and illness are widespread, and forced labor, beatings, sexual abuse and torture are rife. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that more migrants are killed crossing Libya these days than die at sea.

International refugee law prohibits forcibly returning anyone to such conditions, which is why boats rescuing migrants—whether operated by the EU, Italy, or nongovernmental groups—don’t return them. So far, most have been taken to Italy.

Some, such as Italy’s 5 Star Movement and the far-right Northern League, criticize these rescue efforts as a “pull factor,” but there is no evidence that ending them would deter the migrants from embarking. It would, however, increase the drownings.

Many of the other ideas offered for managing the flow have been similarly flawed.

More here.

(Note: Thanks to dear friend Syeda Imam.)

Jeremy Adelman in Aeon:

From all sides, the message is coming in: the world as we know it is on the verge of something really bad. From the Right, we hear that ‘West’ and ‘Judeo-Christian Civilisation’ are in the pincers of foreign infidels and native, hooded extremists. Left-wing declinism buzzes about coups, surveillance regimes, and the inevitable – if elusive – collapse of capitalism. For Wolfgang Streeck, the prophetic German sociologist, it’s capitalism or democracy. Like many declinist postures, Streeck presents either purgatory or paradise. Like so many before him, Streeck insists that we have passed through the vestibule of the inferno. ‘Before capitalism will go to hell,’ he claims in How Will Capitalism End? (2016), ‘it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.’

In fact, the idea of decline is one thing the extremes of Left and Right agree upon. Julian Assange, avatar of apocalyptic populism, gets kudos from neo-Nazis and social justice crusaders alike. He noted to one reporter how American power, source of the planet’s evils, was in decline like Rome’s. ‘This could be the beginning,’ he whispered with a smile, repeating it like the mantra of an avenging angel. Rome’s decline looms large as the precedent. So, world historians have played their part as doomsayers. At the same time as the English historian Edward Gibbon’s first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) was published, the American colonists said good-bye to their overlords; some read that as an omen. The First World War brought endism into the modern age. The most famous rendition was the German historian Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918). The carnage of Flanders and the influenza plague of 1918 – which wiped out up to five per cent of the world’s population – made The Decline of the West more than timely. Spengler added a spin: he predicted that, by the end of the century, Western civilisation would need an all-powerful executive to rescue it, an idea that autocrats have seized upon with repeated glee ever since.

It is almost part of the modern condition to expect the party to be over sooner rather than later. What varies is how the end will come. Will it be a Biblical cataclysm, a great leveller? Or will it be more gradual, like Malthusian hunger or a moralist slump?

More here.

Jennie Yabroff in Signature:

In 2014, men and livestock began disappearing from Kocho, a small village in Northern Iraqi occupied by members of the religious minority Yazidi. The culprits only took a few animals at a time – a hen and some of her chicks; a ram; a lamb. In August that same year, the Islamic State invaded the region. They killed most of the Yazidi men, and sold the young women as sex slaves, or sabaya. While rounding up the Yazidi to send them to their deaths or torture, one militant told a village woman she shouldn’t be surprised; they had been warned. “When we took the hens and chicks, it was to tell you we would be taking your women and children. When we took the ram, it was like taking your tribal leaders, and when we killed the ram, it meant we planned on killing those leaders. And the young lamb, she was your girls.”

One of those girls symbolized by the young lamb, survived the ordeal. Nadia Murad was twenty-one when Islamic State invaded her village. She watched her brothers be murdered, and lost her mother to the genocide. She was sold as sex slave and was raped repeatedly by the man who bought her, and, when she tried to run away, by his guards as well. She finally escaped, and went on to testify about her experience, and the experience of all the Yazidis who suffered under the Islamic State. In her new memoir, The Last Girl, she writes that her hope is to be the “last girl in the world with a story like mine.”

Murad begins her memoir with gentle, evocative scenes of life in her sweet, quiet village with her family and beloved mother. It is only when her town is rounded up and forced into a school that she realizes how tiny her village really is; when Islamic State takes her and the rest of the young women to Mosul, it is the first time many of them have left their village.

More here.

Alex Pentland at Edge.org:

The big question that I'm asking myself these days is how can we make a human artificial intelligence? Something that is not a machine, but rather a cyber culture that we can all live in as humans, with a human feel to it. I don't want to think small—people talk about robots and stuff—I want this to be global. Think Skynet. But how would you make Skynet something that's really about the human fabric?

The first thing you have to ask is what's the magic of the current AI? Where is it wrong and where is it right?

The good magic is that it has something called the credit assignment function. What that lets you do is take stupid neurons, these little linear functions, and figure out, in a big network, which ones are doing the work and encourage them more. It's a way of taking a random bunch of things that are all hooked together in a network and making them smart by giving them feedback about what works and what doesn't. It sounds pretty simple, but it's got some complicated math around it. That's the magic that makes AI work.

The bad part of that is, because those little neurons are stupid, the things that they learn don't generalize very well. If it sees something that it hasn't seen before, or if the world changes a little bit, it's likely to make a horrible mistake. It has absolutely no sense of context. In some ways, it's as far from Wiener's original notion of cybernetics as you can get because it's not contextualized: it's this little idiot savant.

But imagine that you took away these limitations of current AI.

More here.

Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center:

In her book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,which has been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the Duke University historian Nancy MacLean advances the surprising thesis that the hidden figure behind the contemporary libertarian-leaning political right was the economist James M. Buchanan . Buchanan is far from a household name, though he has been influential in economics and political science, and was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1986 “for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making.” MacLean argues that Buchanan, animated by Southern segregationist impulses and backed by dark Koch-brothers cash, quietly and effectively sought to undermine democracy — to put it “in chains” — to keep America safe for white supremacist plutocracy.

Scholars sympathetic to Buchanan’s project have swarmed. They say MacLean’s book is a slanderous, poorly argued, thinly sourced, intellectually shabby conspiracy theory. MacLean is overly fond of Infowars-style dot-connecting, but I’m not going to pile on. Instead, I’d like to focus on a couple of big things MacLean gets right: the libertarian-influenced American right is hostile to democracy, and it is a big problem.

The fact that MacLean’s pretty badly wrong about why (she’s a stranger to the right, with a hostile agenda) shouldn’t keep us from grappling with the significance of the small-government, free-market right’s antipathy to democracy. I’d like to offer a more sympathetic, if not much less critical, account of the libertarian-leaning right’s grudge against democracy.

More here. [Thanks to Steven Pinker.]