Best Articles I Read in 2023
In no particular order:
"Whose Nature? Which Law?" Edward Feser blog (October 12, 2012).
What "natural law" means. “If a squirrel were rational, it would be natural and good for him to will to escape predators and to gather nuts for the winter and unnatural and bad for him to will to offer himself up to predators and to eat only toothpaste or stones.”
"Remembering Edward Shils," Commentary, Joseph Epstein (2019).
Absolutely first rate. It conveys the feel of intellectual friendship at the University of Chicago. “I miss my friend Edward Shils, as I miss many other now dead friends. But these others are dead for me in a way that Edward isn’t quite. He seems never to have left me, and I can write about him today in a way I couldn’t when he died—being enabled, by the passage of time, in the phrase of the House Un-American Activities Committee, to “name names” in a way that wasn’t possible then.”
"We Are What We Watch," Steve Sailer's blog (2020).
Who likes which movies? “The participants are mainstream Americans rather than cinephiles, unlike with the Internet Movie Database’s ratings. The most often liked movies in this female-majority Facebook archive are the Twilight movies, followed by Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and The Hangover (the film most frequently cited by men). While IMDb’s ratings are dominated by male tastes (for example, IMDb’s No. 1 is the prison movie The Shawshank Redemption, which features almost no speaking roles for women, followed by the first two Godfather movies), the majority of the Facebook participants are women, typically averaging in their 20s.”
"Grim Tales," Kari Gold, First Things (2000).
The modern child's loss of fairy tales, replaced by dreck. “Children need to hear beautiful language if they are to speak and write beautifully. They need to hear stories of love and courage and joy and sorrow so their imaginations are fired and their hearts expanded. They need to hear the language of Rudyard Kipling, the whimsy of A. A. Milne, the sorrow of Oscar Wilde, the mystery of Hans Christian Andersen, the wisdom of E. B. White, the terror of the Brothers Grimm, the wildness of Dr. Suess . . .”
"My Left Kidney," Astral Codex Ten (2023).
On donating a kidney to a stranger. Should we all do it? A very challenging article that reveals my selfishness. “We were giving them a lot of free kidneys. When I talked to my family and non-EA friends about wanting to donate, the usual reaction was “You want to what?!” and then trying to convince me this was unfair to my wife or my potential future children or whatever. When I talked to my EA friends, the reaction was at least “Cool!”. But pretty often it was “Oh yeah, I donated two years ago, want to see my scar?” Most people don’t do interesting things unless they’re in a community where those things have been normalized.”
"The Great Feminization of the American University: A response to Heather Mac Donald’s provocative new essay on the “mass nervous breakdown on campus,” Christopher F. Rufo (2023).
"When you have this victim narrative along a psychological line, all of a sudden individual psychopathologies, individual traumas, individual problems, individual personality disorders, something even like obesity, a kind of physical disorder or dysregulation, are elevated into marginalized identities that provide the moral center of these new victim narratives. So this opens the pathways quite significantly. It opens participation in this great narrative. Suddenly, you don’t have to be poor, you don’t have to be a non-white racial minority. "
"The Repaganisation of the West The return of Greco-Roman values," Ed West, The Wrong Side of History Substack (October 20, 2023).
"Christianity is really very strange and counter-intuitive. Paganism is normal. It’s not normal for a society to place such levels of moral shame on its aristocracy to behave itself, especially aristocratic men. It’s much more normal for powerful men to dominate and crush their enemies, and to sexually exploit women. Christianity’s emphasis on forgiveness and internal guilt is weird: indeed WEIRD is the acronym coined by Joseph Henrich to describe the way that Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic people behave compared to others. Similarly, the Christian taboos about suicide and infanticide are unusual."
"The Problem of West Bank Settlements," Tomas Pueyo, Substack (2023).
Very good maps and facts, even though I disagree with his views.
"Why-i-gave-up-my-professorship," Kai Jager, Substack (2023).
Universities are not scholarly places. "Academic staff must invest more and more time in administrative tasks on behalf of performance criteria, leading to a lack of time for actual student support, teaching or research. This includes administrative responsibilities for tasks traditionally assigned to administrative staff, such as the digital recording of grades, the processing of student sick notes for exams, the learning and processing of expense reimbursement software, etc. The university professor is turned into an office worker - including constant performance reviews and committee meetings with new "leadership" initiatives."
"REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky," John Psmith, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf Substack (July 17, 2023).
This will make you want to read it, and shows how relevant Russia's mental confusion in the 1880's is to us today. “Making excuses for terrorism became trendy. Lawyers and teachers and doctors and engineers held fundraisers for terrorists, donated to charities that supported insurrectionary behavior, and turned their offices into safe houses. Apparently chaos and death were one thing, but it was much, much scarier for your friends and neighbors to think you might be a reactionary.”
"Scott and Scurvy," Idleworlds.com blog, Maciej Cegłowski (3.06.2010).
"But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?"
"The Impossible Bronze Age Mindset," John Ehrett, American Reformer (2023).
Another kind of Nietzschism, the sort-of conservative kind, dissected. "It is a call for the deepest possible return of all: a breaking of the fetters of secular liberalism and Judaism and Christianity alike, a recovery of a more elemental way of being-in-the-world. The nostalgia of neo-vitalism is for humanity’s most ancient days: for blood and war and shamans and the fierce exultation of the kill."