April has been a busy month. I finished an 8,500-word essay I started researching way back in September, 2020. I took detours up to Paris and Frankfurt. Most importantly, I’ve been enjoying the beginnings of spring here in the Spanish capital. Sunday was a spectacularly beautiful day. The whole city seemed to be out and about. I felt like that was the first time I was able to exhale all month.
I’m particularly pleased that I’ve already begun to order books for my next essay. The optimistic part of me thinks I can write this in a year, but, heck, what’s the rush? That said, I’m finding that some of my most productive times intellectually are the lulls between my focused reading, those weeks and months that I’m able to veer off a particular project and just read whatever strikes my interest. My reading over the last six months has been particularly rich and varied. I started the year reading Malcolm Gaskill’s fascinating study of a 17th-century witch hunt in Springfield, Massachusetts, called The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World. Before that, I absolutely loved Zena Hitz’s wonderful Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. I’ve found a new hero in the late political theorist Judith Shklar. I particularly enjoyed her essays in Ordinary Vices and Redeeming American Political Thought. I very much look forwarding to tackling all her work in the next few years. Other favorites include Forrest McDonald’s Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, Robin Corey’s The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, Jamal Greene’s How Rights Went Wrong, and Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. I also read two popular books on the history and legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Todd Purdum’s An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.
I will publish the new essay after it’s edited and I process feedback from some folks who are giving it a pre-read. Meantime, blue skies are luring me out into the streets and it’s about time to find a café table where I can watch the rest of the afternoon go by.
