Let’s get the alarming stupidity out of the way so we can get to what matters. A letter to the Board of the Poetry Foundation asks for the “immediate resignation of both President Henry Bienen and Board of Trustees Chair Willard Bunn, III.” Why? For stating that they “stand in solidarity with the Black community, and denounce injustice and systemic racism,” which was deemed by the letter signers to be “vague” and “non-substantive.” What do they want instead? All the money the Foundation has (“the redistribution of every cent”) and a “well-researched acknowledgment of the debt that the Foundation owes to Black poets [that] must also include a specific acknowledgment of the harm done in recent years to Latinx poets, trans poets, disabled poets, and queer poets.” Why does the Foundation do? Well, of course, they ask Bienen and Bunn to resign.

Glenn C. Loury, who teaches economics at Brown University, responds to a letter from the school’s administration decrying the “Structures of power, deep-rooted histories of oppression, as well as prejudice, outright bigotry and hate, directly and personally affect the lives of millions of people in this nation every minute and every hour.” Loury said he found the letter “deeply disturbing”: “They write sentences such as this: ‘We have been here before, and in fact have never left.’ Really? This is nothing but propaganda. Is it supposed to be self-evident that every death of an ‘unarmed black man’ at the hands of a white person tells the same story? They speak of ‘deep-rooted systems of oppression; legacies of hate.’ No elaboration required here? No specification of where Brown might stand within such a system? No nuance or complexity? Is it obvious that ‘hate’—as opposed to incompetence, or fear, or cruelty, or poor training, or lack of accountability, or a brutal police culture, or panic, or malfeasance—is what we observed in Minneapolis? We are called upon to ‘effect change.’ Change from what to what, exactly? Evidently, we’re now all charged to promote the policy agenda of the ‘progressive’ wing of American politics. Is this what a university is supposed to be doing? I must object. This is no reasoned ethical reflection. Rather, it is indoctrination, virtue-signaling, and the transparent currying of favor with our charges.”

J. K. Rowling writes about being attacked by the trans mob and why she supports charities that protect women: “Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now . . . I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much.  It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves. But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.”

Tom Holland writes about the mystery of Thebes: “For the span of two brief but dazzling decades, the 370s and 360s BC, it blazed as the leading power in Greece. Under the leadership of Epaminondas, a general and statesman whom Cartledge salutes as the ‘worthiest’ of all the ancient Greeks, the Thebans smashed the hitherto invincible Spartan war machine, liberated an entire population of slaves from Spartan rule, and built a formidably well fortified city from scratch. That this was swiftly followed by peripeteia, a collapse into defeat and ruin, only burnishes the fleeting record of Theban glory to an even more brilliant gleam.”

The excavation of a Viking site could rewrite the story of Iceland’s settlement: “The site, known as Stöð and located in Stöðvarfjörður fjord, shows human presence in Iceland decades before AD 874, the accepted date for when Iceland was permanently settled.” (HT: A. M. Juster)

Bruce Handy writes about Sealand in Airmail: “Sealand, a self-declared principality located in the North Sea on a small World War II–era anti-aircraft installation, is arguably the world’s foremost micro-nation. That is a little like being the world’s foremost heir to the Russian throne—a purely notional sort of sovereignty. In the realm of micro-nations—alleged countries, unrecognized by world governments, and even lacking the gravity of being called ‘secessionist’—Sealand occupies a niche somewhere between the Republic of Molossia, which began as a high-school lark and today consists of a guy’s house in Dayton, Nevada (plus ‘colonies’ in some scattered property he inherited), and the dream of a floating city for libertarian billionaires that Peter Thiel actually invested in a decade ago.”

Photo: Wat Phra Kaew

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