Chris Navin

Full review here.

What are you looking for in a novel: Ideas and the deployment of ideas? A reflection of your life/times/society? Good prose? Characters that pop into your life? Glimpses of the author? Pleasure?

‘The deeper divisions, as Wolfe’s novel compellingly presents them, are between those who believe that happiness consists in one form of pleasure or another — including the aesthetic pleasure of sensitively glimpsing one’s own sensitivities and the sensitivities of others — and those who, like Tom Wolfe and his heroes, believe that happiness consists in the exercise of courage, self-control, and the other qualities of mind and character that constitute human excellence.’

A New Yorker review here.

See Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny’s for a rich account of the 60′s. I remember reading ‘A Man In Full‘ a while back, and having mixed feelings.

Here’s a quote from Italo Calvino:

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

With Marco Rubio in the news, and all this politics surrounding immigration, change, and culture, I think Gloria Estefan is a window into Cuban culture, music, honor, immigration as it mixes with American culture.

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What about Miami politics?

Full post here.

The two have a back and forth on how they see current American politics. Here’s Fukuyama:

‘A lot of the increasing homogeneity of the parties and the fact that they overlap very little is that there are very few House districts that are competitive anymore. That’s not an accident.’

A Reason video on gerrymandering. Do we really want politicians incentivized to redraw their own districts, and thus stifle intra-party debate?

If not, who decides how we keep up with moving populations?:

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From Via Media: Texas Vs. California 6-0, 6-0, 6-0. Maybe one last dance with Moonbeam wasn’t the best way forward, but then again, maybe no one can stop the union and green alliance with the incentives of California politics.

Related On This Site: Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working. Check out his series at The American Interest. Technology is changing things rapidly, and maybe, as Charles Murray points out, it’s skewing the field toward high IQ positions while simultaneously getting rid of industrial, managerial, clerical, labor intensive office jobs. Even so, we can’t cling to the past. This is quite a progressive vision but one that embraces change boldly.

Francis Fukuyama has started a center for Public Administration at Stanford…it’d be interesting to imagine a conversation between Eric Hoffer and Fukuyama: Francis Fukuyama At The American Interest: ‘Mexico And The Drug Wars’…Has Fukuyama turned away from Hegel and toward Darwin?