Utopia, you are standing in it!

In 1836 the House of Commons published a series of reports of the new prison inspectors appointed under an Act of Parliament passed the year before. The 1835 Act, one of several interventionist initiatives of the whig government elected in 1832, was designed to drive up standards in the locally-run prison system. That the inspectors’ report was generally available, rather than hidden in decent obscurity, as the result of another praiseworthy new initiative – a decision by the House of Commons in 1835 to allow all of its publications to be sold to the public through agents. The inspectors’ remark concerning a book with explicit plates of human reproductive organs that was found in the possession of one of the prisoners in Newgate jail set off a chain of unintended consequences that led to a series of law suits that are collectively referred to as Stockdale v. Hansard, a…

After two black musicians accused the New York Philharmonic in 1969 of racial discrimination, the Philharmonic, and many other American orchestras, began auditioning prospective members behind a screen, so that neither the race nor the sex of the individual could be discerned. All that mattered was musical quality. (As I recall, women were told not to wear high heels so their sex couldn’t be sussed out by the clack-clack they made as they walked across the stage.)

Now, as a critic in the New York Times argues, while this procedure has been wildly successful in increasing the representation of women in orchestras, the proportion of blacks and Hispanics remain low. The solution, offered in an opinion piece by Anthony Tommasini, the Times‘s head classical-music critic, is to ditch the blind auditions and go back to the way things were. This argument has put me in a bit of a…

Anne of Cleves (1515 – July 16, 1557) was queen consort of England from January 6, to July 9, 1540 as the fourth wife of King Henry VIII. Anne was born in 1515, on either 22 September, or more probably 28 June. She was born in Düsseldorf, the second daughter of Johann III of the House of La Marck, Duke of Jülich jure uxoris, Cleves, Berg jure uxoris, Count of Mark, also known as de la Marck and Ravensberg jure uxoris (often referred to as Duke of Cleves) who died in 1538, and his wife Maria, Duchess of Jülich-Berg (1491–1543). She grew up in Schloss Burg on the edge of Solingen.

Anne of Cleves

Not much is known about Anne before 1527, when she became betrothed to François, Duke of Bar, son and heir of Antoine, Duke of Lorraine, although their marriage did not proceed.

In March 1539, negotiations for…

We cannot be free of wokeness in college, nor while reading the liberal media. Now we encounter it in America’s national museums as well.

I learned of the site at hand from a tweet, and then checked it out for myself to ensure it was kosher. The page in question appears at the website of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, a museum in Washington, D.C. that’s part of the Smithsonian Institution. (I’ve long meant to visit it, but haven’t been back “home” in a long time.)

I applauded the museum when it was conceived and then opened, but I had no idea it would be used as a vehicle to purvey Critical Race Theory, along with its narrative of structural racism, white privilege, microaggressions, white fragility, intersectionality, and so on, to the public. There are even video lectures by Robin DiAngelo and bell hooks. It…

The New York Times has a new profile of Steve Pinker, with a photo that, while nice, doesn’t include his cowboy boots. It concentrates mostly on the letter signed by 550+ academics calling for the Linguistic Society of America to rescind Pinker’s “distinguished fellow” and “media expert” status. Since I’ve discussed that letter in detail, I won’t go over it here, but simply give my take on some of the statements in the NYT’s generally fair profile. I’ll just add, by way of self-aggrandizement, that you read about that here  (as well as the letter in Harper’s that Pinker signed) well before it appeared in the paper of record. And the NYT’s report adds little to what I said. Further, you can read me for free!

Click on the screenshot to read.

The Times comments are indented, while mine are flush left.

The linguists demanded that the society revoke…

Four decades after the dismissal of the Whitlam government, letters between the Palace and the Governor-General of Australia have been made public. Anne Twomey explains that they show the Queen acted properly, neither advising or encouraging the government’s dismissal, recommending simply that he obey the Australian Constitution.

For more than four decades, the question has been asked: did the Queen know the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, was about to dismiss the Whitlam government, and did she encourage or support that action? The release of the ‘palace letters’ between Kerr and the palace can now lay that question to rest. The answer was given, unequivocally, by the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, in a letter to Kerr on November 17 1975. He said:

‘If I may say so with the greatest respect, I believe that in NOT informing The Queen what you intended to do before doing it, you acted…