Last week I asked, “Is democracy trying to say something?” Here’s my attempt to say what the something might be.
A distinction
A peaceful transfer of power is a column of the republic, & it’s appropriate for political leaders to cooperate graciously with Trump now. But there’s no comparable duty for writers and intellectuals. To the contrary, by temperament and profession, we’re the canaries in the coal mine. Our calling is to say what we see happening, as soon as we see it, as forcefully as we can express it.
The Park Avenue Armory print fair
Albrecht Durer, Nativity, 1504, in the Emanuel von Baeyer booth
Titian, The Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, 1514-1514, in the David Tunick booth
David Hockney, Rue de Seine, Paris, 1971
We happy even fewer
Should ignorant and irrational people be allowed to vote? In “The Case Against Democracy,” in the 7 November 2016 issue of The New Yorker, I review Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy, which argues that they shouldn’t be.
Grandfather and skeleton
Years ago, when the worldwide web was new, I had a tiny little non-blog at Columbia, and on it I posted a scan of this photo of my grandfather. I’d made the scan in the school’s computer lab; scanning machines were then exciting and new, and it felt vaguely like theft of technology for me to use it for such a merely personal purpose. Reading through some old family letters this morning, I thought of the photo again, and decided I’d make a new scan, on our home scanner, whose technology is probably fourteen generations better than the machine I used twenty years ago. My guess is that the photo itself was taken in the 1930s, but I’m not sure.