Freespace

Talking about AB5 and censorship with Armstrong and Getty

I was on with Armstrong and Getty this morning to talk about the ongoing case against Californa's job-killing AB5 (in which I filed this brief). We also talked about the President's effort to censor Twitter and other things. If you missed it, you can listen online here.

Reading Twain to the Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans

I was asked to participate in a conversation at The American Mind over C. Bradley Thompson's essay "The Rise and Fall of the Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans." Thompson argues that the alt-right, to which the Claremont Review of Books has lent both space and credibility, shares with the 1619 Project crowd a hostility toward America's fundamental principles of classical liberalism. The alt-righties are, Thompson says, "pajama-boy Nietzscheans," who regurgitate the German's hostility to the classical liberal, bourgeois commercial republic, and like to fantasize from the comfort of the couch about moral authoritarianism and brutality of the Dark Ages. Oh, right, we're not supposed to call them Dark Ages anymore; it's "late antiquity." In any case, here's my reply:

Can it be a coincidence that Nietzsche and pajamas date to the same era? Or that Mark Twain, America’s greatest writer, despised them both? Twain’s final verdict on the German was “Damn Nietzsche!”—and his hatred of pajamas was no less. “The dreams which came in the fitful flurries of slumber” while wearing them, he wrote, “were such as distress the sleep of the damned, or ought to.” Snug pajamas made him miss “the refreshing and luxurious sense” of being “undressed, emancipated, set free from restraints and trammels,” and “in a sane interval” he “discarded” them “and led a rational and comfortable life thenceforth.”

To his credit, Nietzsche adored Mark Twain. Reading Tom Sawyer alongside Plato’s Laws in 1877, he told Paul Rée, “I love his [i.e., Twain’s] fooleries more than any German clevernesses.” He delighted in Twain’s “Americanness,” because “American laughter makes me happy, especially this kind…. Nothing German could make me laugh more.”

American laughter is, indeed unique...

Read the rest...

Talking about my favorite writer with Andrew Heaton

In the latest episode of his podcast, Alienating the Audience, I talk with Andrew Heaton about my favorite writer, John Varley, and his best single novel, Steel Beach. (I say “best single novel” because I’m even more fond of Varley’s Gaea Trilogy.)

This is not the Great Depression...yet

In this morning's Dispatch I talk about how government transformed the 1929 market crash into the Great Depression--and how it could do the same again today.

"Seeds"

The latest issue of First Things includes my poem "Seeds."