Margaret Atwood

 From "The Blind Assassin":

The permission structure of anti-Semitism

 Trump’s Menacing Rosh Hashanah Message to American Jews

This Semitic sorting never ends well, because justifications for abusing Jews have a way of metastasizing. Permission structures for anti-Semitism are rarely restricted to their original target. Once a society starts accepting attacks on entire swaths of Jews—for being too liberal, too religious, too secular, too pro-Israel, too anti-Israel, too whatever—that acceptance will grow. And when Jewish existence becomes conditional on staying in the good graces of a non-Jewish actor or movement, it becomes an impoverished existence—provisional and precarious, forever looking over its shoulder.

CB: Emily Wilson's Homeric bros

 How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern:

And it rankles her that men whom she considers self-appointed guardians of the Western canon have questioned a woman’s fitness to do Homer justice. “Any woman who has lived with male rage at close range has a better chance of understanding the vulnerability that fuels it than your average bro. She learns firsthand how the ways in which men are damaged determine their need to wreak damage on others.”

Commonplace book: Ross Douthat's religious conspiracies

 New Yorker:

In one column, Douthat offered his own approach to assessing fringe ideas. “To be a devout Christian or a believing Jew or Muslim is to be a bit like a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that you believe there is an invisible reality that secular knowledge can’t recognize,” he explained. “But the great religions are also full of warnings against false prophets and fraudulent revelations."

'Now, as ever'

"A declaration made by the poet and scholar Eve Ewing in 2017, at an event in our stores, resounds. 'No more than ever,' she said, 'I am sick of people saying, Now more than ever. ... By saying, 'Now as ever," by looking not to the next new thing but to the last enduring thing, we are more likely to grasp our unique and not not so unique challenges..."

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

Common Book: The haze of war

"After a war, there were always recriminations about its consequences. But when it started, the haze of militarism, pride, and virtue obscured the possibility of moral choice—or even awareness that, in the end, you could lose." - Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.

A republic, not a democracy!

Chris Lehmann reviewing a new book about Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society:

Nor was this Welch’s only anticipation of the present-day reactionary temper on the right; he and his anti-statist allies saw social democracy as the harbinger of eventual Communist takeover, and so loudly insisted that the U.S. was never meant to be a democracy and that the embrace of democracy spelled certain ruin. Recommending The People’s Pottage, an anti–New Deal tract by his friend Garrett Garrett as “required reading” for all Birchers, Welch hailed its clear-eyed account of “the Communist-inspired conversion of America, from a constitutional republic of self-reliant people into an unbridled democracy of hand-out seeking whiners.” A common refrain of the Bircher faithful was that America is “a Republic … not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way!”

Common book: Social security vs. police security

“In a society that doesn’t provide everyone a lifeline, order will be maintained at the point of a truncheon. There’s a tradeoff between social security and police security." -- Paolo Gerbaudo, Dissent Magazine

Common book: John Banville's unguilty pleasures

 John Banville, NYT:

Common Book: Bad books

 The Tin Drum:

Common Book: These minds are made for rationalizing

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge:

Think of it this way: humans are equipped with some of evolution’s finest mental circuitry to protect us from changing our minds when doing so might alienate us from our group. We have hundreds of thousands of years of practice at believing whatever will keep us in good standing with our tribe, even if that requires denying, discounting, rationalizing, misperceiving, and ignoring the evidence in front of our nose.

Common Book posts are quotes from whatever I'm reading. Sometimes you'll get lots of them. Sometimes not so many. 

Common Book: Toughness

New York Review of Books:

The politics of crime will far more often favor “tough” over “smart” crime policies. As the Harvard law professor and former deputy attorney general Phil Heyman has remarked, “It takes a little time to explain why one thing’s smart and the other thing isn’t. It doesn’t take any time at all to explain why one thing’s tougher than the next.”

Common Book: Cornel West

"Intellect is an interrogation of the most basic assumptions and presuppositions. So intelligence makes immediate evaluations, intellect evaluates the evaluations."

And now, a timely reminder from Louise Erdrich

"It seemed to Thomas, as they sat in the sinking radiance, shucking bits of shell from the meat, dropping the nuts into a dishpan, that he should hold onto this. Whatever was said, he should hold on to. Whatever gestures his father made, hold on to. The peculiar aliveness of things struck by the late afternoon sunlight -- hold on to it."

The Night Watchman, pages 66-67