The End Is Near! for Mark Galli Readers

The End Is Near!

The End Is Near! That is, the end of CT’s sponsorship of this newsletter. This is the last edition sent via CT’s servers. If you want to continue to receive The Galli Report, you need to sign up here. By the way, apologies to those who have been trying to use or comment on my website markgalli.com. We had some security glitches, which I have since solved. It is now a very secure site for host and reader! Do email me at mark dot galli at gmail dot com if you have any issues—it’s now up to me to solve these tech problems. This Too Will Pass It’s hard to find anything on the Internet that is not about COVID-19. Is it just me, or do other people want to read about something else from time to time? So my only coronavirus link for this issue is a wistful meditation on “The Advantages of Disadvantages: Or Don’t Let the Quarantine Slip through Your Fingers.” Let’s look at it from the positive side. The world will have a Sabbath. Cities will calm down. People will pause and return a little bit into their own bag of skin, into their own human dimensions… Explaining The Beatles I am from the generation that was deeply shaped by the music of The Beatles, and so I can never quite escape my early fascination with them. I get that this will elicit an “okay boomer” sigh, but I have yet to find another band that has shown more creativity and originality—and made just good popular music—in the 60 years since their arrival on the scene. Anyway, if you are not of this mind, forgive my fawning and ignore this link to a review of a book on the group that is more interesting than most. Explaining The Beatles is the West’s last act of theogony. All the episodes of the sacred biography are here, and most are devastated by [Craig] Brown’s expert shuffling of perspectives. The heart of the Beatles mystery is exposed not through the usual catalogue of songwriting sessions and studio techniques, but through alternate histories, passing encounters and the biographies of the massed ranks of Fifth Beatles – the helpers, disciples, witnesses and nearly men whose memories are like apocryphal gospels. A Fresh Look at the ’60s It's hard to know what to excerpt from a review that is bursting with insights. But here’s a start: Christopher Caldwell never mentions Donald Trump’s name in The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, but the book offers its own race-related interpretation of the ’16 election. And then there is this: But the real significance of the Civil Rights Act, in Caldwell’s account, wasn’t the act itself. There are cogent arguments for and against the constitutionality of different parts of the sprawling law. Its cultural and historical importance lay, rather, in the way its premises about and society came to dominate the minds of American elites. In short, reviewer Barton Swaim (editorial-page writer at the Wall Street Journal) gave me a lot of pause for thought about what’s gone right and wrong with America since the 1960s. Let Us Reason Together Here is an offering from a site I was unfamiliar with, called Pairagraph: Pairagraph is a platform for written dialogue between pairs of notable individuals: in essence, an online meeting place for the world’s most prominent figures across government, industry, academia, religion, and the arts. Our mission is to revive this dualistic and dialectic mode of discourse, which has fallen lately into a state of decay. For example, here is a dialogue between Lawrence Krauss (physicist, author) and John Haldane (philosopher, University of St Andrews) on “Is Secularism the Root of Society's Ills?” There’s Money in That There Mountain “How Mount Everest became a multimillion-dollar business” begins, It is said that from the 29,029-foot summit of Mount Everest, you can see the curvature of the Earth. But for the hundreds of climbers who vie to scale it, there’s another curve at play: that of supply and demand. In a relatively short period of time, the world’s tallest mountain has been transformed from a jagged, inhospitable beast into a valuable commercial asset. For the impoverished country of Nepal, Everest is now a multimillion-dollar industry, fueled by Westerners with a thirst for conquest and $100k to burn. What was once a desolate landscape is now littered with $550 oxygen tanks, thousands of pounds of frozen excrement, and 200+ dead bodies. I, for one, couldn’t not read it. Drone On We no longer have to risk our lives to get stunning views of the world. Just buy a drone. Or look at pictures created by them, as in this article “Scary Images Captured By Drones.” Grace and peace,

Mark Galli