Sublime

Barack Obama recently described the kind of coverage he once received as a state politician in Illinois. “Even as late as 2008, typically when I went into a small town, there’s a small-town newspaper, and the owner or editor is a conservative guy with a crew cut, maybe, and a bow tie, and he’s been a Republican for years,” Obama recalled. “He doesn

he is one of the most important political thinkers on earth today.

Our current mood of discarding the past, usually on some self-righteous ground, has to do with our engineered inability to concentrate and tolerate.

If Reddit and 4chan are the juveniles, Taki’s Mag is the adult in the room.

“What our readers hunger for,” I was told by Clifton Fadiman, a pillar of the club’s board of judges from 1944 until his death in 1999, “is books that explain. William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich explained a whole age to us.” A majority of the club’s biggest sellers, Fadiman pointed out, have been books that readers found helpf

Douglas R. Hofstadter, whose ten-year-old Gödel, Escher, Bach shows few signs of fatigue. Several years ago the Club, not even blinking at the title, offered his Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, which ponders such imponderables as the nature of human creativity and the limits of artificial intelligence.

In 1919, Lippmann wrote a despairing essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Basic Problem of Democracy.” Democracy’s founding ideal—that of a well-informed citizenry capable of making reasoned judgments about national problems and plans—had come into being in a much simpler time, he argued, when most concerns were local and people had direct exp