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Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevsky's Rooms

[ See previous essays on this novel. ] I mentioned in 2022 that I wanted to write an essay on this topic the next time I read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . I finished it the end of January and am allowing it to sit in my mind. I have several ideas in mind for reviewing the great novel but this was the most obvious and easiest one to write. This time I actually read two English translations simultaneously. I now own a nice paperback edition of the novel in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation from 1990. To augment it I bought the Kindle edition of the 1993 translation by David McDuff. I found PV to be superior to McDuff in terms of general reading experience though McDuff was often better at articulating dialog. I also thumbed through my old Andrew MacAndrew (1970) translation, which still serves me just fine. Before that, I have Constance Garnett’s 1912 translation, which is still noteworthy if a bit flat compared with these others. I picked up the novel again the week after...
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Trump Has No Plan

There was an article in The Guardian during the Obama years built around a single uncomfortable observation: that everyone in positions of authority is essentially making it up as they go, projecting an image of calm proficiency while improvising in something closer to controlled panic. The phrase that stuck was simpler than that. Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time. When Obama was president this caused me no alarm really. He may have ordered more global assassinations than any previous president (he took out bin Laden ), but he was a reasonable man even if you didn’t agree with Obamacare or whatever. To know this improvisational aspect of authority felt like an insider secret, a knowing wink at the gap between institutional surfaces and the messy reality underneath. The improvisation was real, but it was buffered — by process, by decorum, by advisors, by a kind of professional restraint that kept the adjustments behind the curtain. You had to infer it. The system proj...
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Listening to Lutoslawski: Part One

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Witold Lutoslawski. For rather random reasons, I made a New Year's resolution to devote 2026 to Witold Lutoslawski, one of my favorite “modern” composers. I have posted about him before (see here , here and here ). So I am working through his catalog chronologically, and this is a progress report through what I call “the first leg” of the journey — the early pieces up through and including his Concerto for Orchestra (1954) . Lutoslawski was born in Warsaw in January 1913, the youngest of three brothers, into a family of Polish landed nobility. His father Józef was a political figure, active in the National Democratic Party, intimate with its founder. The family had estates. They had standing. Then the war came, and then the Revolution, and then the Bolsheviks arrested Józef and his brother in Moscow, where the family had relocated. Józef was executed by firing squad in September 1918. Witold was five. The family returned to newly independent Poland to find their estates ruined. ...
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Camus and Indifference

It was about this time last year I started writing what I thought would be one book entitled Harmogenics . That turned into three books with the last, Raucous Reckonings , completed in October. I was late in the “final” revision of the text when I came across Albert Camus and his remarkable affinity with what I have in mind by "cosmic indifference." Short version: don’t slit your wrists. I have known of Albert Camus's philosophy as long as I have known Jean-Paul Sartre. Decades. But while I read and studied Sartre at different times of my life, I never studied or read Camus. I just knew he originated, more or less, contemporary philosophy of the "absurd." Camus gets designated an "existentialist," which annoyed him while he was alive, and then reduced to a single slogan about Absurdity. That reduction misses the point in a very human way. Camus wasn't trying to depress anyone. He was trying to keep people honest without lying to themselves for c...
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The Brutal World of Sam Harris: Part Two

[ Read Part One ] No leader in the world has accomplished more in the last few weeks than Benjamin Netanyahu. Two hundred Israeli fighter jets, some flying great distances, probably over airspace belonging to countries that officially forbid it. The largest air strike operation in Israeli military history. Ali Khamenei dead along with much of his regime. Decapitated. Netanyahu managed to marshal, through Trump whom he totally played, full U.S. intelligence support, two carrier groups, massive American air power, Trump publicly owning the whole thing. Trump made it about himself. Predictable. And Netanyahu knew this was the best way for him to get it done. Praise Trump and let him fire some rockets at live targets protecting the Israeli air force. Israel ran this operation. Netanyahu built toward this moment for decades — maneuvering, pressuring, waiting, leveraging every U.S. administration that came through, and finally finding one so supportive of Israeli strategic preferences tha...
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We Are All George Will

Every week there's another headline about AI detection. Universities buying software. Publishers running probability scores. Startups promising to tell you whether something was written by a human or a machine. Ninety-two percent likely AI. Flagged for review. Is this the right response to what's happening? Detection treats writing like contraband. It assumes there's a pure human product out there that needs protecting from algorithmic contamination. The detector becomes a customs agent inspecting sentences for statistical residue. It's already losing. Generators improve. Detectors update. Generators improve again. The surface patterns that once betrayed AI output are disappearing. Even when detection works, it doesn't work for long. And even when it catches something — what exactly has it caught? If I draft a paragraph, run it through a model for tightening, then reshape it in my own voice, what is the detector actually measuring? If a historian dictates notes in...
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