Messages (Some in Bottles)
Walther Klemm The Gothic Revival in the Victorian age created significant demand for new stained glass, and one of the leading firms to supply that glass was...
A Magic Number
A number of editions of the English Bible are known today solely for their errors. As F. F. Bruce explains in his wonderful history of the Bible in English,...
Advent and Other Thoughts
Now that Advent is here, it’s an excellent time to begin reading Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being. In my Introduction to that edition — an...
Gospel of the Trees
Friends, please pardon me for sending you an additional email only 24 hours after my previous one, but I couldn’t wait a week to announce this. Ten years ago...
Pasts and Futures
Archaeologists have discovered 200 metal and ceramic artifacts from the Middle Ages in the village of Poniaty Wielkie, east-central Poland. Some of them show...
Nautical Mysteries and Divine Insanity
Naomi Alderman at the Spectator names Breaking Bread with the Dead as her book of the year! — alongside, as her fiction choice, Susanna Clarke’s wondrous...
Sound and Vision
I’ve been posting a few autumnal images to my micro.blog recently. I haven’t been writing much. This seems to be a season for catching my breath — in part,...
The Sounds of Tranquility
Paul Klee, Vergesslicher Engel (1939) There’s a great deal of racket in our lives right about now, so as the world works itself into a noisy frenzy, let’s...
Tribe of Tiger, Cherub Cat
A Siberian photographer’s award-winning photograph of a Siberian tiger. Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, New Jersey is empty. I wrote a post...
Check Your Pravilege
This is the 100th edition of Snakes & Ladders! Thanks so much to everyone who has come along for the ride, whether starting recently or from the beginning. I...
Affirmations and Renunciations
The New Atlantis, the fabulous journal of technology and society of which I am a Contributing Editor, has a newly and beautifully redesigned website. Please...
Trousers, Tweezers, and Wise Advice
This Friday afternoon I’ll be talking with my friend Yuval Levin of AEI about my new book. You can check out the livestream here. Comment is joining forces...
Pigeons, Donkeys, Commandments
This Friday, October 2, I’ll be talking about Breaking Bread with the Dead on Zoom with Cherie Harder of the Trinity Forum. If you’re interested in watching...
Happy Are Those
That’s an architectural model created by Edward Tuckerman Potter in 1888 as part of “a proposal for an apartment building with improved daylighting and...
Paper and Memory
Over the past couple of weeks my wife Teri and I watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — the 1979 miniseries, not the 2011 movie — and its 1982 sequel,...
It’s Pub Day!
Um, no, not that kind of pub, this kind: Click on that image to order. Or, if you’re not yet convinced, here’s an excerpt at the Atlantic. And here are some...
It’s Scotland This Time
Many thanks to the hundreds of you who asked for a copy of my forthcoming book — I wish we could have given one to each of you. In the end ten, rather than...
Silences (plus a giveaway)
Soon, soon you will be able to acquire the new book of mine that I call your attention to at the bottom of this newsletter. Here’s a commendation from the...
Texas Bookends
Modern life is a peculiar thing. Last week Teri and I, in a risk-taking mood, made the 80-minute drive to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, where we saw...
The Vicar of Large Things
Pawel Kuczynski, Audiobook Friends, if you’re like me, and I expect you are, you have often thought about the great variety of control consoles in LEGO...