Long Reads That Caught Our Eye This Week

We 💛 to read. . . Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser]( We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. Where The Killings Go Unsolved By Wesley Lowery, Kimbriell Kelly, Ted Mellnik and Steven Rich | The Washington Post The Post has mapped more than 52,000 homicides in major American cities over the past decade and found that across the country, there are areas where murder is common but arrests are rare. --------------------------------------------------------------- Christopher Dickson felt justice had been served. For weeks, he’d bragged around his neighborhood about winning $5,000 in a dispute settled on the TV show “Judge Joe Brown.” On a cool evening in July 2009, the 39-year-old auto mechanic emerged with his nightly tallboy from Dailey’s Package Liquors, a shoebox-shaped shop that sits in a violent 12-block swath of North Omaha. Under the store’s dark-blue awning, a man with a gun demanded Dickson’s cash. As Dickson tried to flee, the gun went off. Detectives canvassed the area — a mix of dilapidated duplexes, auto repair shops and corner liquors — for witnesses but never found enough evidence. Nine years later, no one has been arrested in Dickson’s slaying, one of thousands of homicides clustered in neighborhoods across the nation where killers are hardly ever brought to justice. [Read More]( Founding philosophy Michael Anton | The New Criterion A review of The Political Theory of the American Founding by Thomas G. West. --------------------------------------------------------------- Convention requires me to disclose that I have known, admired, and learned from Thomas G. West for more than twenty years. I also recently became his colleague as a scholar and lecturer at Hillsdale College. Moreover, Professor West and I studied many of the same subjects, with some of the same teachers. Cynics might therefore be tempted to discount the ensuing praise for his new book as logrolling by an ally. But I beg to be believed when I say that I would lavish acclaim on The Political Theory of the American Founding,whoever wrote it—though, in my judgment, only Tom West could have. West has spent the better part of a very productive life studying the American founding as deeply as anyone ever could. The result is the most important political book published in my lifetime, a distinction I expect it will hold even if I live another half century. West’s effort probably has been, and may yet be, surpassed philosophically or historically by two or three volumes. But no other book has brought these three strands of inquiry together in a way that meets the twin exigencies of timelessness and urgency. [Read More]( Why It’s Absurd To Pretend The Enlightenment Is Responsible For Racism Ben Domenech | The Federalist There is nothing new under the sun, just different justifications for similar ideas. The Enlightenment had their own for racism, just as all ages have. --------------------------------------------------------------- The ongoing argument over whether the Enlightenment is a good thing is hardly a new facet of American political life. Defenses of the Enlightenment have been written over and over in the past several decades, by various defenders of the liberal order and Western civilization. Here is an excellent essay on the topic from Walter Olson, writing two decades ago in the pages of Reason, that might as well have been written today. Here is a criticism running earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal that might well be read as a response to Olson. This is not a new argument, but an old one with a new generation of participants. [Read More]( The High Price of Stale Grievances Coleman Hughes | Quillette They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it. ~ Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Advice, 1960) As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. ~ Ekow N. Yankah (New York Times, 2017) In the fall of 2016, I was hired to play in Rihanna’s back-up band at the MTV Video Music Awards. To my pleasant surprise, several of my friends had also gotten the call. We felt that this would be the gig of a lifetime: beautiful music, primetime TV, plus, if we were lucky, a chance to schmooze with celebrities backstage. But as the date approached, I learned that one of my friends had been fired and replaced. The reason? He was a white Hispanic, and Rihanna’s artistic team had decided to go for an all-black aesthetic—aside from Rihanna’s steady guitarist, there would be no non-blacks on stage. Though I was disappointed on my friend’s behalf, I didn’t consider his firing as unjust at the time—and maybe it wasn’t. Is it unethical for an artist to curate the racial composition of a racially-themed performance? Perhaps; perhaps not. My personal bias leads me to favor artistic freedom, but as a society, we have yet to answer this question definitively. [Read More]( Reading Dangerously Ian Marcus Corbin | The Weekly Standard The illiberal philosophers and our fractured politics. --------------------------------------------------------------- It was with some disappointment that I closed my copy of Dangerous Minds, a very short, largely correct, almost useless book by an excellent scholar of political philosophy, the University of Toronto’s Ronald Beiner. The book, to be as fair as I can, seems to have been rushed to press to participate in the vast media circus revolving around white nationalist Richard Spencer and his thousand or so fascism-LARPing Internet acolytes. While a longer, better book might have been more helpful, this one’s glaring failures are illuminating—and can shed light on our contemporary national unease. The unease is palpable in places like mine. A few of my politically aware Boston friends—a small minority—have maintained a basic equanimity as the great Trumpian disruption crackles across our shining screens, day after #ThisIsNotNormal day, but a larger number pronounce themselves unable to sleep, mired in depression, crippled by rage, or sick with worry for the future of our country. The less perturbed often are those who have been blessed to live some part of their lives as ideological insurgents. I count myself among them. In my case, I was born to hard-living hippies who, when I was 2 years old, became teetotaling evangelicals, and before long became the pastors of a small, impoverished Pentecostal church. Through my childhood and adolescence we supported Republicans, laid hands on the sick, eschewed secular music, and mistrusted science. All of this would be unremarkable but for the fact we lived this wild religious melodrama in the Boston area, the bleeding heart of blue America. 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