Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 5, 2025 · Last modified July 6, 2025
The opening lesson I offer whenever I teach any kind of classic literature, in a classroom or privately, and whether fiction or philosophy, is always some version of this: “There are ideas in this book that might strike us as immediately strange, morally uncomfortable, or completely contrary to our modern way of looking at things. When you see such ideas, always remind yourself...
President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” has passed the United States Senate, surviving the No votes of the only three Republican senators who are apparently still able to muster a bit of shame. For the GOP, in abject obedience to the MAGA mob and its cult leader, has just produced one of the biggest and most beautiful instantiations of everything that is wrong with...
There has been no greater gift to the American Left than Donald Trump, for he and his personality cult embody everything that the Left tried for decades to pin, falsely, on American conservatives, without much success. Suddenly with Trump, every leftist lie about conservatism became an all too horrible truth, every untenably vulgar smear all at once an inescapably vulgar reality. Except for...
The danger of political identity.— The moment one begins to identify oneself with a party, movement, or faction, one has also begun to shift one’s intellectual center of gravity from the solid ground of the mind’s own observations and perceived needs to the anxious and ever-shifting social imperatives of remaining a partisan in good standing, imperatives that perforce become increasingly compelling and emotionally...
J. D. Vance, in the aftermath of the U.S. bombing of Iran, took to the airwaves to prove to all the skeptics that his status as a bestselling author does indeed place him in the same intellectual echelon as other bestselling authors, and perhaps even, dare we say it, in the exalted intellectual echelon of the best-selling of all bestselling authors, Donald J....
Donald Trump has decided to follow the lead of Benjamin Netanyahu in bombing Iran, with the purported aim of destroying or at least weakening Iran’s nuclear weapons program. A few questions spring to mind. Everyone knows that a military escapade is the strategic stanch of choice for every political leader bleeding popular support at home. Netanyahu himself has the most obvious vested interest...
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” as we moderns are so fond of saying. There is probably no serious adage about the soul which is subject to a greater gap between the number of people who cite it and the number who understand it. Apart from that sad fact, however, it is notable that late modernity has gradually transformed the expression from general...
Donald Trump attended the G7 economic summit, as American presidents always do. And as Donald Trump always does at such summits — unlike all other American presidents — he used his opening public remarks at the conference to advocate yet again for the interests of Russian “President” Vladimir Putin and to berate America’s major democratic allies for not including and embracing the notably...
Having outlined my basic premises and principles in Parts One and Two, I have arrived at a point where I may finally reply directly to the last of your original questions, which, once again, was… 3. Then what makes something advanced? I would like to know the examples of advances from your point of view. You phrase the question in two parts, which...
Here in the second part of this discussion, having explained that the concept “advanced” admits of various measurements, corresponding to the various senses in which a new technology may be judged relative to its antecedents, I took a moment to prepare the pathway to a more specific reply to my student’s third and final question about my views concerning which innovations, according to...
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