World
Michelet on the Bastille
Excerpted from Jules Michelet’s History of the French Revolution, translated by Charles Cocks.
The Great Green Wall: An Interview with Filmmaker Jared Scott
The face of Africa’s Sahel, one of the most ecologically vulnerable areas in the world, is getting a makeover with a Great Green Wall of eucalyptus, cassava, and acacia trees. It is hoped that by 2030, the wall will restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land, sequester 250 million tons of carbon, and create 10 million jobs in rural areas. Jared Scott’s film The Great Green Wall, takes us on a tour of the land and the people who are making this miracle happen.
Burning Man
A clip from this 7 minute Q&A between Mike Pompeo and Nancy Amons–a reporter from a local news station in Nashville–made the national news late last week.
Burying the Dead, Raising Cain
The Age of Paine
“Where liberty is, there is my country,” declared Benjamin Franklin, to which Thomas Paine replied, “Where is not liberty, there is mine.”…
Radical Conservatism: Thinking Through V.S. Naipaul’s Haters and Counterparts (Pt. 2)
Part two of an essay that starts here.
In part one of this essay, I quoted a passage from Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas where he invokes Caribbean city streets inhabited “by people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them.” Such devotion was inconceivable to Naipaul. The life of Fr. Rick Frechette brings home the limits of the novelist’s imagination.
Taicha, Tenebrae and Corpus Christi
Dear Family and Friends: I don’t know if you have ever seen a child without a face.