A new magazine on the right

Plus: The state of higher ed, Greek myths and more

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As you may already know, Matthew Schmitz (formerly of First Things) and Sohrab Ahmari (formerly of the New York Post) have joined up with Edwin Aponte to launch a new online publication called Compact. They describe it this way:
Every new magazine should be an intimation of a possible future, a glimpse of how the world might be. Our editorial choices are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right.
Our name evokes our aspiration, and defines its limits. A compact…

As you may already know, Matthew Schmitz (formerly of First Things) and Sohrab Ahmari (formerly of the New York Post) have joined up with Edwin Aponte to launch a new online publication called Compact. They describe it this way:

Every new magazine should be an intimation of a possible future, a glimpse of how the world might be. Our editorial choices are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right.

Our name evokes our aspiration, and defines its limits. A compact is a political union drawing together different people for a common end. It is neither a contract nor a covenant, neither a market relation nor a religious sodality. It depends not on shared blood, but on shared purpose. We are concerned with advancing this properly political form of solidarity.

We believe that the ideology of liberalism is at odds with the virtue of liberality. We oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.

Damon Linker writes that “Time will tell if the editors and writers associated with Compact are willing to do the hard work of exploring honestly the numerous tensions and contradictions contained within this political vision” — that is in being against both the libertine left and the libertarian right — “and between this vision and the world in which we live.”

Knowing both Matt and Sohrab, I have no doubt they will, but is there an audience for it?

They are entering a crowded field. The Weekly Standard died in 2018. The American Interest closed in 2020. But in the past five years, we have seen the launch of American Affairs, the American Purpose (which, more or less, replaced the American Interest), the Bulwark, the Dispatch, and our very own Spectator WorldNational Review, of course, is still around, and so is the American Conservative and First Things.

The editors of Compact believe there is a space between these publications for another magazine of political commentary. There may be, but even if there isn’t, that won’t necessarily make Compact a failure. The success of little magazines is not in how long they last but in what they accomplish during their (usually short) runs.

What’s my favorite part of the publication so far? Its design.

In other news

Michael W. Clune writes in a fascinating essay at Harper’s about how scientists are trying to engineer dreams:

Despite some intriguing speculation, scientists haven’t yet come up with a clear, satisfying answer to the question of why we dream. Part of the reason is doubtless because, as any time spent studying neuroscience will show you, our knowledge of the brain is in its infancy. And part of it is due to the special limitations of dream research. Animal studies — sometimes referred to as the gold standard of neuroscientific research (think of the things one can do to rat brains that one can’t do to humans) — are of no help here. Like many pet owners, I believe that my dog dreams. But when I see her lying on the couch, muttering and growling with her eyes moving behind closed lids, I can’t wake her and ask her what she saw. When I spoke about the state of the field with the dream researcher Erin Wamsley, she described a kind of disappointment, a sense that the breakthrough insights into the nature of dreaming that seemed imminent a decade or two ago haven’t materialized. Over the past few years, this perceived impasse has led to the emergence of what a recent special issue of the journal Consciousness and Cognition dubbed “dream engineering.” To adapt Marx’s maxim, if hitherto the scientists have attempted to understand dreams, the engineers now seek to change them. In fact, the engineers argue that we can’t deepen our understanding of dreams unless we can change them.

The Dutch publisher of Rosemary Sullivan’s book on Anne Frank’s betrayers has pulled it from the shelves: “The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, by Canadian academic and author Rosemary Sullivan, immediately drew criticism in the Netherlands. Now, in a sixty-nine-page written ‘refutation,’ six historians and academics describe the cold case team’s findings as ‘a shaky house of cards.’ The book’s Dutch publisher repeated an earlier apology and announced Tuesday night it was pulling the book from stores.”

Jonathan S. Tobin also criticizes the book in Commentary: “The team was ’85 percent’ sure that the person who betrayed the Franks and the others in the annex was someone even those well-versed in the lore of the diary had never heard of. His name: Arnold van den Bergh. He was a Dutch-Jewish notary and a member of the Jewish Council of community members that had, like similar councils in every other occupied country and ghetto, collaborated with the Germans. The sole piece of evidence for this claim was an anonymous note sent to Otto Frank after the war.”

If you’re a wealthy artist living comfortably in the West, atrocities, like Russia’s attack on Ukraine, are a godsend. You could, of course, help privately by making a quiet but big donation to a humanitarian organization. Or you could follow the example of Marina Abramović, who is “reviving her famous performance piece ‘The Artist is Present’ to raise funds for humanitarian relief in Ukraine.” How often do you get to call attention to yourself and be praised for your ethical sacrifice at the same time without having to sacrifice much at all? It’s a no-brainer.

The kids are not alright: in Seattle, high schoolers walk out of school demanding the return of the mask mandate.

At UnHerd, William Deresiewicz is worried about how incapable students are of making (and understanding) coherent arguments:

Some years ago, I taught a course in public writing at the Claremont colleges, the consortium of elite liberal arts institutions in Southern California. My students were juniors or seniors, mostly humanities or social science majors, almost all smart, a couple genuinely brilliant. All, needless to say, were expensively educated and impressively credentialed. I assumed that they’d arrive with a fairly good idea of how to make an argument with an academic context and that I would be teaching them how to apply those skills to a very different set of rhetorical occasions. What I soon discovered was that none of them had much idea how to make an argument in any context. Nor were they particularly skilled at analyzing the arguments of others. They didn’t know how to read; they didn’t know how to write; and they didn’t know how to think.

And in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Johann Neem surveys the wreckage that “educational innovations” have wrought, among other things, in a review of a handful of new books on higher education:

While universities must find ways to reach nontraditional students, the answer is not to treat education like banking. We do not ask banks to change people’s hearts and minds. And because education is not like banking, universities must resist. Levine and Van Pelt might respond that students want convenience. Indeed, that is why professionals have a responsibility to understand the nature of their service. When companies like Wells Fargo offer customers easy credit even when they are aware that it will harm some of the most vulnerable Americans, we know that they have behaved immorally and irresponsibly, even if their customers wanted the money. But when Levine and Van Pelt invoke a similar, “customer is always right” mentality at ASU, SNHU, and WGU, they want us to call it innovation.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson reviews Richard Buxton’s The Greek Myths That Shape the Way We Think: “When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is a major theme of Richard Buxton’s bountiful, beautifully illustrated guide to eight Greek myths: Medea, Oedipus, Orpheus, Heracles, Prometheus, the Judgment of Paris, Icarus and the Amazons. Time and again, people have picked up these myths and viewed or skewed them according to their own particular interests.”