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First Things, The New Criterion, and The Lamp
I subscribe to three journals: First Things, The New Criterion, and The Lamp. The first two offer incredible deals: $20 a year, which comes with decades of online archives. It’s unbelievable when you consider popular Substack authors are commanding $50 a month for their work.
The Lamp, clocking in at $10 an issue, is not an incredible deal, but every issue is a work of art and worth the price if you incline toward such things.
The most recent issues of all three arrived at about the same time. I was like a politician presented with three call girls, with three lines of coke, with three non-detectable forms of graft: which to do first?
I did ’em all. Dipping into one; jumping to another; snorting a third. I have a long way to go, but amusing things I’ve learned so far:
*Orestes Brownson’s novel, Spirit Rapper, caricatured 19th-century radicals and featured a character named, “Thomas Jefferson Andrew Jackson Hobbes.”
*If you eat pink snow, you might hallucinate (note to the hedonistic: that’s a warning, a deterrent, not a promotion).
*Self-help books are such a rage, our nation’s ambitious young are reading older ones like Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. For the less ambitious…
