—The Avenger--The brother of an American killed in the 1988 Pan-Am Lockerbie terrorist bombing goes on a decades long quest to uncover the truth. Robert Nozick is mentioned.
***Because you didn’t ask-The New Yorker is where I go for high-quality writing, excellent reportage and eclectic editorial choices, though I stay for the frequently stale humor, dreary secular sermonizing, and polished cosmo-modern New York City brownstone activist enviro-evo-pop-neuro-social-science-secular-creative-writing-postmodern establishmentarianism.
Unlike NPR, in whose broadcasts can be heard the constant far-off, folksy hum of ‘This Land Is Your Land’ keeping the collective time, the New Yorker reminds me of a tone-poem spoken by a rather accomplished poet over a be-bop beat, with an NYU faculty member sitting-in on drums for an exploration of the latest word on the street, Daddy-O.
Other excellent pieces published in the New Yorker on Islamic terrorism:
The Man Behind Bin Laden by Lawrence Wright, a deeply researched piece.
Dexter Filkins on ISIS and the Kurds.
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–The election of Jeremy Corbyn (Labour opposition leader in the British Parliament) may have actually caused a man to utter these words:
‘Left-wing thought has shifted towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic. It is insupportable.’
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John Gray loves to take on post-Enlightenment hubris of a certain sort:
‘If The Evolution of Everything has any value, it’s as a demonstration that, outside of science, there isn’t much progress – even of the vaguer sort – in the history of thought. Bad ideas aren’t defeated by falsification, and they don’t fade away. As Ridley’s book shows, they simply recur, quite often in increasingly primitive and incoherent forms.’
Addition: Ridley and Gray have butted heads before regarding Ridley’s last book:
‘John Gray, in his review of my book The Rational Optimist accuses me of being an apologist for social Darwinism. This vile accusation could not be farther from the truth. I have resolutely criticised both eugenics and social Darwinism in several of my books. I have consistently argued that both policies are morally wrong, politically authoritarian and practically foolish. In my new book I make a wholly different and more interesting argument, namely that if evolution occurs among ideas, then it is ideas, not people, that struggle, compete and die.’
Repost-Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-‘Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’
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The sizes of the sun and planets, as well distances between them done to scale in the Nevada desert. Via David Thomspon: