The legalization of suicide in New York alas confirms my suspicion that decline will be protracted, intermittent, gradual but ultimately inevitable. Fantasies of some sublime series of events in which the moment is forced to its crisis—we just won't stand for *that*, whatever *that* happens to be—are just that: fantasies.

Just learned about this ongoing feature. I'm not going to make a list of 100 (or even ten) but the best book of the 21st century so far is Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman, by Minoo Dinshaw. (To quote Evelyn Waugh on a similar occasion: "Do I really wish to say that? By all means")

Out from behind the paywall for Candlemas bedtime reading is the winner of @thelampmagazine's Christmas ghost story competition. thelampmagazine.com/2022/02/03/be-… @thelampmagazine Here, in case you missed them, are the runners-up.

thelampmagazine.com/2022/01/21/30a/

. "Banned Books" crybaby routine (i.e., some library somewhere does not have a given book for whatever reason)

. Amazon is a private entity perfectly at liberty to do things like silently eliminate @RyanTAnd's book from its website years after publication.

Pick a story, bub.

https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1488934718276087816

I know these people generally shoot from the hip and are not interested in thinking through whether inherited aspects of their mythology (Hollywood Blacklist, "challenged" books) are incompatible with newer stories (Russiagate, "misinformation")—but this one seems obvious.

It’s an interesting question and one about which there is a great deal of equivocation. The novel properly speaking is a prose form that emerges in specifically English context and addresses the four Ms: morals, manners, money, and marriage.

https://twitter.com/arkmashton/status/1445557831344689152

It stands to reason then that its undisputed masters—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Austen, Dickens—would not be Catholic. A minority population laboring under civil penalties cannot speak to the general range of human experience, which was the novel’s focus.

When I talk about how the libertarian account of "coercion" is inadequate one of the things I have in mind is stuff like how it is no longer possible, say, to enter a ballgame without having a fully charged smartphone with at least two apps downloaded. "Well, there is competition. You could create your own professional baseball team/bank/government agency/airline/whatever and offer an experience that does not require people to carry devices that kill their attention spans and make them mentally ill. Let the marketplace decide."