Quillette

01/09/2024

On this day in 1939 N**i Germany invaded Poland and began World War II.

The animation industry was perhaps the United States’ most potent cultural weapon during World War II.

01/09/2024

Australia's homicide rate vs the rest of the world.

29/08/2024

There’s a reason New Jersey and Maryland played such outsized roles in American rail history, Alff notes: Both are “squashed between larger states,” while lacking New York’s “drainpipe to the interior.”

In a new book, David Alff traces the origins of the railway line that joined Boston to Washington, D.C., transforming a young nation in the process.

28/08/2024

Like his similarly multi-talented compatriots Jean Cocteau and Marcel Pagnol, Guitry was not so much a Renaissance man as a born filmmaker with a lot of distracting hobbies (writing and starring in plays, for example). He regarded cinema as a minor art form without any authentic tradition or history, and this attitude enabled him to pursue his idiosyncratic vision without the inferiority complex that often marred his attempts at literary work. The freedom and confidence of his movies can be exhilarating: you feel him having fun with the medium, unburdened by any sense of obligation towards the theatre, or by Lucien Guitry’s legacy.

Sacha Guitry disdained cinema as an art form, but with a slew of recent Blu-ray releases, his acidic comedies are finally receiving the attention they deserve.

28/08/2024

On this day in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington.

King’s sophisticated understanding of racism bridges two worldviews: that racism is primarily systemic and as well as interpersonal.

27/08/2024

The key to balancing tradeoffs between cooperation and parochialism lies in understanding that not all groups are created equal. Groups with voluntary memberships that allow people to be part of multiple, transient, and overlapping communities—for example, sports fans, chess clubs, or single-issue political organizations—tend to generate widespread cooperation both within and between groups because their members are also part of larger communities. Patriots fans, for example, also tend to be sports fans in general and your support for the Great American Outdoors Act need not subsume all of your other political beliefs or your entire identity. These types of groups allow diverse, large-scale societies to thrive by drawing people with varied beliefs, interests, opinions, and backgrounds together. These between-group connections encourage people to confront each other’s humanity and help to curtail out-group hatred. In contrast, groups that are formed around fixed, unchanging and non-overlapping identities—for example, s*x, race, or ethnicity—while fostering tight bonds between their members, will tend to sow division and cultivate hatred between groups. These groups are likely to breed resentment, foment animosity, and promote tribalism. The degree to which different types of groups cultivate cooperation or hostility in large, diverse societies like the United States can be best appreciated by talking about something that sociologists call “social capital.”

Social capital is a measure of the collective of human relationships achieved through shared identities, values, norms, or understandings. In short, it gauges how much people in a community trust each other, and the modern world runs on it. Places with the highest social capital are countries in Scandinavia like Finland and Iceland, ranked first and third in the world, respectively, while the United States ranks 142nd, right between Guinea-Bissau and South Sudan.

A politics based on membership in a particular religious, racial, or social group rather than broader groupings of people with the same political views was a dubious luxury that our species can simply no longer afford.

27/08/2024

Tickle vs. Giggle:

Women-only spaces are valuable, and we should prevent biological males from accessing them, whatever their stated gender identity.

Women-only spaces are valuable, and we should prevent biological males from accessing them, whatever their stated gender identity.

26/08/2024

One month to go! 🥂

Come meet the Australian-based Quillette team and over one hundred like-minded readers and writers at our Sydney Quillette Social.

Get tickets on Humanitix - Quillette Social Sydney hosted by Quillette. Location TBA. Friday 27th September 2024. Find event information.

26/08/2024

Where did we come from? How did we get here? And where should we go?

A video essay by Theo Brown.

Where did we come from? How did we get here? And where should we go?00:00 Introduction01:00 The Enlightenment Vision4:41 The Counter Enlightenment8:40 The Po...

26/08/2024

The notion that Ukraine is a hopeless cause has been dramatically refuted by the audacious incursion into the Kursk Oblast.

The notion that Ukraine is a hopeless cause has been dramatically refuted by the audacious incursion into the Kursk Oblast.

26/08/2024

Nietzsche warned us about the dangers of defining our values in opposition to something else.

https://quillette.com/2024/02/15/beware-the-little-lambs/

25/08/2024

"Like most artists whose careers are now approaching their fiftieth anniversary, Elvis Costello has made a few mistakes, a few lousy albums, a few regrettable missteps, and so on and so forth. But he ’fesses up to a lot of them with sometimes coruscating honesty..."

Elvis Costello at three score and ten.

25/08/2024

This year, 27 July marked the 230th anniversary of an event that still reverberates in history and remains known by a date from the long-extinct French revolutionary calendar: 9 Thermidor. On that day, a revolt in the nearly two-year-old French National Convention toppled the radical Jacobin regime led by Maximilien Robespierre and ended the Reign of Terror.

9 Thermidor was a victory over a bloodthirsty tyranny claiming to act in the name of progressive ideals.

25/08/2024

On this day in 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche died from a stroke after years of ill health.

My sense is that Nietzsche is best understood as a radical individualist; one who insists passionately that our duty in life is to become what we are. But what kind of person is that?

25/08/2024

"We do not coordinate around reality but around versions of reality hewn by words. The result is awkward for the scientist but convenient for the lawyer."

With its thousands of problem-solving, information-discarding, thought-terminating conventional categories, a language is a great collection of off-switches for the mind.

25/08/2024

On this day in 1918, Leonard Bernstein was born.

Netflix somehow managed to turn the most talented, beloved, and complex American musician in history into a two-dimensional domestic villain.

24/08/2024

"In a world where not everyone shares a disposition that values peace, self-determination, and individual human rights, not every conflict can be justly resolved with negotiations. Hard power and deterrence will sometimes be required."

Only when we understand the fragility of liberal democracy will we be properly motivated to defend it.

24/08/2024

"My own family and their close friends are moderate Muslims by any measure. Yet they certainly believe in Islamic supremacy. As I grew up, they often told me that Islam would eventually spread across the whole world, and everyone would become Muslim."

The problem here is not a subset of Islamic thought, but the fundamentals of Islam itself.

23/08/2024

"These persistent failures to establish a points-based immigration pathway for international students reflect a longstanding trend away from meritocracy in the US immigration system."

The current system is not only economically counterproductive but incentivises people to become illegal immigrants.

23/08/2024

"In a way, the paleocons were true-believing Trumpists long before Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator and announced his bid for president in June 2015."

John Ganz’s lively new book provides a valuable account of the intellectual origins of Trumpism.

22/08/2024

"Lasky deserves to be remembered as an indefatigable defender of the liberal spirit, who helped a free Germany arise from the darkness. He was never forgiven for it by the GDR’s propagandists, but he lived long enough to celebrate the collapse of their police state and to write its epitaph."

Melvin Lasky was an indefatigable defender of the liberal spirit during the recovery of postwar Germany.

21/08/2024

"What we are left with is nearly three hundred pages of unstructured storytelling, filled with the trivial concerns and complaints of a fundamentally unrelatable metropolitan magazine editor."

Nikkitha Bakshani’s debut novel ‘Ghost Chilli’ is an ideologically confused work that seems to endorse the racial essentialism it purports to satirise.

21/08/2024

Many German leftists, mindful of the country's past, still support Israel. But they risk being outnumbered by antisemitic Muslim immigrants and by decolonialist radicals.

Many German leftists, mindful of the country’s past, still support Israel. But they risk being outnumbered by antisemitic Muslim immigrants and by decolonial...

21/08/2024

After scrutinising the results from 21 NYRR races, my co-authors and I found that s*x-based performance differences between the men’s and women’s categories are preserved among male and female runners who self-identify into the non-binary category.

Not surprisingly, males who identify as non-binary are faster than the females who identify as non-binary. Moreover, the males and females in the non-binary category are slower—as distinct groups—than the males and females in the men’s and women’s categories, respectively.

Read more here:

https://quillette.com/2024/08/14/for-competitive-us-runners-a-non-binary-identity/

*xnotgender

20/08/2024

"amid the orchestrated terror and excitement, the question still nags: why us, Universe? What did we do?"

John Krasinski’s dystopian horror trilogy imagines a biblical plague visited on the din of modernity.

19/08/2024

On this day in 1991, Soviet hardliners staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup collapsed within a few days but ended the Communist Party’s decades-long rule of Russia.

Gorbachev’s legacy is partly to blame for the tyranny into which Russia has since slumped.

19/08/2024

"He loved developing heretical ideas, and had a gentle, humble persistence, which was captivating. As he later put it, “I’ve found the most efficient way to test ideas and get hard criticism is one-on-one conversation with people who know more than I do.”"

Over the past 60 years, our understanding of the physics of elementary particles has changed radically. James Bjorken played a key role.

19/08/2024

On this day in 1934, Adolf Hi**er became the Führer.

In the spirit of the Handbook on German Military Forces, I offer readers this brief field guide to the various kinds of “N**is” who inhabit the world of 2018.

18/08/2024

"the effect of extending equal prizes to non-binary categories primarily serves to privilege a subset of slower runners (mostly men) on the basis of their professed identities."

The New York Road Runners club now allows mid-grade men to earn prize money by opting into race categories reserved for athletes claiming to be neither male nor female.

17/08/2024

"The noir genre arose as a retort to the image of postwar America as an idyll sustained by Fordist economic growth. It uses a crime as a metaphor to explore the darker, subterranean impulses and anxieties that lie beneath the veneer of civilisation."

Chinatown is noir at its bleakest, yet most stylish.