HOGELAND'S BAD HISTORY

In late 2024, as The New York Timesrecently reported, Humphrey Barclay was going through a collection of old family papers he’d been storing in his apartment in London when he came across documents received by his 18th Century ancestor David Barclay, Jr., a British merchant closely tied to government and involved in trade with the American colonies.

A recent story in The New York Times Magazine got my attention by showcasing one of my pet peeves. The online headline was “Ode to the New York Dive Bar: Is the Beer Cheap? Is the Bathroom Scary?” Online subhead: “Dive bars have a rich history, but they face an uncertain future with rising costs and changing social patterns.”

I’m linking below to a revised version of a post I sent out the other day, as a paying-subscriber exclusive, on Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review of Danielle Allen’s book Radical Duke, and I’m also temporarily unlocking it, so now all subscribers have access.

A weird but revealing article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker discusses the historian Danielle Allen’s new book Radical Duke, under the headline “Did a Rowdy English Nobleman Mastermind the American Revolution?” The answer to that question is a firm “No,” and while I find it hard to believe that Danielle Allen’s thesis is “Yes,” Gopnik’s certainly is. S…

María Corda in “The Private Life of Helen of Troy” (1927) As you may have heard, there’s a high-end movie adaptation of The Odyssey on the way, directed by Christopher Nolan, with Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, who, in the poem, and in the mythology the poem is based on, is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Front-page and just above the fold (yes, I get the print version), under the kicker “News Analysis,” today’s New York Times presents this headline: “Founders Had a Blind Spot, and Trump Is Exposing It.” The piece is about the absence of checks on executive power in this country, and it’s true generally, of course, that the Trump presidencies have taken every one of the many inherently crappy things about our system of government to such unbearable extremes that the inherent crappiness has now...

The other day I came across Charles Murray, Professional Smart Guy (PSG), talking on social media about why the Electoral College is good. PSG’s tend to like the Electoral College. The way they see it, the system that the framers of the Constitution designed for electing the president was one of many masterstrokes for encouraging a proper blend of democratic representation with non-representative control by the PSG’s of the day—to encourage, that is, as little democracy as possible.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Representative from New York, is getting dumped on by the right-wing press, and by commentators of various kinds on social media, for claiming, in a discussion at the Chicago Institute of Politics, that the American Revolution was fought against “the billionaires of their time,” meaning against aristocratic and royal elements in British government that American colonials felt oppressed by.

This Saturday, at 4:00 PM Eastern, I’ll be talking with the Thomas Paine Historical Association about the startling role played by Thomas Paine—way beyond “Common Sense”—in the rollercoster ride to independence in the spring and summer of ‘76. To watch, free of charge, on Zoom, register here. Hope you can tune in!

Pretty much how life was. Robert Altman’s movie “Nashville” came out in 1975, but it was set a year later, during the Bicentennial, and served as a comic dystopian vision of a future only a year away. I saw the movie maybe four times in ‘75, on the big screen, of course, because that was the only way to see it. “Nashville” was my introduction to Altman.