The Art of Tetman Callis

“It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms […]

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“Cosmopolitanism is not a tribal trait; it is a virtue, as much as courage or honesty or compassion. Almost without exception, the periods of human civilization that we admire as we look back have been cosmopolitan in practice; even those, like the Bronze Age, that we imagine as monolithic and traditional turn out to be […]

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“After 9/11 in New York, a horrific but specific injury was deliberately levered into an apocalyptic panic. In the annals of courage and utter cowardice, none are more vivid than the contrasting pictures of Churchill on the rooftop of 10 Downing Street, coolly watching the Blitz, and Dick Cheney cowering in a bunker to make […]

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“There was a period in my life when I was spending time among great sleight-of-hand men, card magicians, in Las Vegas, and one of them slipped me a guide to card cheating that had been privately printed by a professional card cheat. (Card magic and card cheating are Siamese twins, and no great card magician […]

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“Editorial writers can seem the most insipid and helpless of the scribbling class: they sum up anonymously the ideas of their time, and truth and insipidity do a great deal of close dancing–the right thing to do is often hard but seldom surprising.  Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since […]

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“The big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow?  It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight?” — Adam Gopnik, “Facing History”

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“Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in ‘supermax’ prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo ‘exercise.’  (Lock yourself […]

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“For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say.  For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones.  More than half […]

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“A prison is a trap for catching time.” – Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”

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“We sometimes think that the historical imagination is the gift of seeing past — seeing past the surface squalors of an era to the larger truths.  Really, history is all about seeing in, looking hard at things to bring them back to life as they were, while still making them part of life as it […]

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“Learning isn’t a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.” — Adam Gopnik, “Broken Kingdom”

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“It takes more than full bellies to make fulfilled lives.  Without enough to eat, life is nasty; with merely enough to eat, it feels empty.  The escape from not-enough can highlight the emptiness of only-enough.” – Adam Gopnik, “Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat”

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“Cats and birds are wonderful, but they keep their own counsel and their own identity.  They sit withing their own circles, even in the house, and let us spy, occasionally, on what it’s like out there.  Only the dog sits right at the edge of the first circle of caring, and points to the great […]

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“Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.” – Adam Gopnik, “Life Studies”

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“Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never any good at doing in the first place—relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic […]

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“We have been outsourcing our intelligence, and our humanity, to machines for centuries.  They have long been faster, bigger, tougher, more deadly.  Now they are much quicker at calculation and infinitely more adept at memory than we have ever been.  And so now we decide that memory and calculation are not really part of mind.  […]

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“Why do classical economists believe that free trade is good for everyone?  Why does the amount of gold kept in the treasury not make much difference to a country’s wealth?  Why don’t better machines for making pins eliminate jobs for good, instead of making more jobs of another kind?  Why, for that matter, does it […]

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“We always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like.” — Adam Gopnik, “What Did Jesus Do?”

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