Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 28, 2025 · Last modified September 3, 2025
Listening to a friend’s description of a disappointing social engagement with a former work colleague, in which she confessed, though without any great sense of self-recrimination, that she herself was “being boring” during that evening’s dinner conversation, I was compelled to reflect upon my own life as a social entity, such as it is, or rather to reflect on the sense in which...
The American voting public, roughly a hundred and forty million people, is divided neatly down the middle between a faction that wishes The United States of America to cease to exist and dissolve itself into the United Nations, after abjectly apologizing for its existence while shamefacedly redistributing all of its wealth to the rest of the world in an act of penance for...
In 2022, comedian Dave Chappelle hosted Saturday Night Live and caused quite a stir with an opening monologue that was both highly entertaining and, at moments, politically on point in the way intelligent stand-up comedy can occasionally be. On that night, the controversies he stirred up, primarily with his comments on “the Jews,” but secondarily with his refusal to do the simplistic “Trump...
There is no art without limits. Absolute freedom of expression, attractive as it may be as a theoretical principle, ought never to be allowed into the arena of artistic endeavor. Art thrives on finding ways to imply what cannot be said and to reveal new beauty within the constraints of existing forms — and existing norms. Even the artists whom we have come...
The Village People are performing at the U.S. president’s inauguration celebrations. Very appropriate. The Village People are a group of campy, unmasculine performers who have built a popular entertainment career that has extended long past its sell-by date by donning the costumes of various “real man” types — the hard hat, the police officer, and so on — and dancing around while laughably...
Cause and effect. — Prod people into desperation by denying and disemboweling everything they ever held dear. When they actually become desperate and begin to act as desperate men do, accuse them of being extremists and assert the need for stern measures to tamp down their irrational outbursts. Voter’s dialectic. — “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Fool me...
Beware the biographer who presumes to imply that he understands his subject’s mind and thought, or can explain to us how his subject’s private life affected his work. Such a biographer, in an act of the worst sort of egalitarian envy, is daring to place himself on the same level as his subject…
Self-refuting bromide.– “Everyone does it.” Even if that were true in principle in some circumstance, it would become false the moment an intelligent person heard it, since he would immediately and instinctively commit himself to being a counterexample. For by definition, “what everyone does” is either a trivial material necessity (and therefore beyond the purview of such a moral declaration) or a mindless...
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 9, 2025 · Last modified January 31, 2025
Of war and worms.– I have taught a Russian girl whose serious beau, whom she hoped to marry, was a Ukrainian fighting on the front lines to defend his homeland against Vladimir Putin’s — not “Russia’s,” so let us please put that lie away for good, but Putin’s — brutal and unprovoked assault on her boyfriend’s country. He had already been wounded and...
In a recent essay, “The Ultimate Labor-Saving Device,” I recounted my response to a student’s questions about artificial intelligence, related to my previous piece, “The Intellectual Welfare State.” A central theme of that earlier discussion was the likely, or perhaps inevitable, retarding effects of increasing AI dependency on human intellectual development. This time, prodded by the same thoughtful student’s subsequent correspondence, we cut...
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