"I Tread A Troubled Track, My Odds Are Substacked" Edition

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. I wrote for the Washington Examiner about the war as seen from Poland.

I wrote for The Critic about the transformation of the Klitschko brothers.

I wrote for UnHerd about how Western media have to keep some critical distance from Ukrainian claims.

For my paying subscribers, I wrote about fake masculinity gurus. I also wrote for my subscribers about Sarah Kane’s Blasted and the horrors of war.

RIP Christopher Alexander. The insufficiently influential champion of human-centred design has died. He inspired several of my favourite essays by the great Sarah Perry.

Summer of loathe? War in Ukraine, as well as resultant sanctions, could lead to a global food crisis with shortages of wheat and fertilisers. That is alarming enough, but let us also recall that rising food prices appeared to contribute to the launch of the Arab Spring. Western governments should seek solutions, though of course the greatest blame lies with the man who set fire to one of the world’s major granaries in March.

Springtime for Azov. Ironically, as Aris Roussinos writes in an interesting piece for UnHerd, the war that Putin claims will “denazify” Ukraine is emboldening the Ukrainian far right:

While they may be useful now, in the event of the decapitation or evacuation of Ukraine’s liberal government from Kyiv, perhaps to Poland or Lviv, or more likely, in the event of Zelenskyy being forced by events to sign a peace deal surrendering Ukrainian territory, groups like Azov may find a golden opportunity to challenge what remains of the state and consolidate their own power bases, even if only locally.

Putinocentrism. Sam Ashworth-Hayes cautions against the idea that the values and ambitions of one man explain Russian policy:

We are rightly wary of suggestions that ‘national character’ dominate foreign affairs, but we should be open to the point that no matter what political systems we impose on a people, so long as there is cultural continuity there will be a strand of continuity in outcome. 

Two can swing a blade. I like to embark on an occasional hatchet job and have had fun with bad books by Max Boot, Dave Rubin, Kevin Williamson and Hillary Clinton among others. Jonathan Gotschall pulls off an interesting feat for Quillette, though, with a counter-hatchet job. I have not read his book and cannot judge how good a case he makes against Timothy Snyder’s case against it but he is good, and funny, on the macho language that surrounds criticism. Admirers of hatchet jobs want to believe that a review can really kill a book, just as Whittaker Chambers famously killed Atlas Shrugged, which we never heard of again.

The beautiful consumptive. John Self explores the impact of tuberculosis on the literature:

Kafka died at the age of 40, Chekhov at 44, Mansfield at 34; TB infected and killed people young. This was one factor — the glow in the cheeks as the disease developed was another — that contributed to its being seen for many years as a romantic affliction; hence the image of the “beautiful consumptive”. 

The bad guy. Oliver Bateman pays tribute to the late Scott “Razor Ramon” Hall:

We might have assumed Hall was soaring, but he was merely falling forward, briefly held aloft in the air like a hapless opponent suspended at the precipice of his Razor’s Edge.

Have a lovely week,

Ben