The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Nothing Will Come Of Nothing. Actually, it’s worse than that. Aurelien Towards the end of the 1970s, there was a movement in Britain called Punk, mostly expressed in music, but in some other forms of art as well. I never much cared for it, although it’s true that it was a useful corrective to the inane pomposities of Progressive Rock music earlier in the decade. But most commentators at the time correctly recognised that the quality of the music—often indifferent, at best—was less important than the power and authenticity of the anger and frustration that it articulated. Yet it must be hard today to understand where these emotions were coming from, in a society where unemployment, in modern terms, scarcely existed, where public services generally worked and where the country was still a major industrial power. Yet even before the reign of Thatcher began, the mood was one of sour anger and frustration. People demonstrated for the Right to Work, and Punk itself was often described ...

  The Class of 2026 AI is doing to the universities what Gutenberg did to the monasteries John Carter Caspar David Friedrich,  Monastery Graveyard in the Snow By the late middle ages monasteries were spectacularly wealthy. They were immune from taxation, and possessed vast land holdings thanks to generous donations made over the centuries by nobles looking to assure themselves a comfortable place in the afterlife. Many of them performed economic functions, such as brewing beer or providing financial services; some performed charitable functions, distributing alms to the poor or operating hospitals; some performed spiritual functions, such as hosting holy relics or maintaining elaborate ritual vigils to intercede with God on behalf of the people. But their primary utility, from the perspective of the wider society, was as repositories, preservers, and disseminators of knowledge. Their  scriptoria  ensured that books were copied from one generation to the next, prevent...