Wednesday Links 5/5/21
Happy May Day, everyone! I hope you had a lovely dance around the Maypole, whether you were celebrating the Floralia or the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Here a few things I enjoyed over the past week:
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(Food) Get ready for a new French food that gives me more dread than appetite: "French Tacos", a sort of tortilla-wrapped doner kebab-cum-poutine-cum-fondue. My sister Hannah assures me that the specimen her roommate acquired in Metz was exactly as dense as it sounds.
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(Music) This International Jazz Day, musicians improvised a collaborative piece from two castles across the river and border between Russia and Estonia.
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(Ethics) I wrote about an Justin Smith's superb essay on the ethics of meat eating and the sterility of public discourse about real convictions.
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(Law) I had forgotten (or never realized) that the classic line defending 'natural' limits on free speech such as "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" was part of the Holmes court decision upholding the conviction of a man for distributing pacifist pamphlets against the WW1 draft.
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(Fiction) I finished a collection of stories by the Italian writer Dino Buzzati over the weekend - each of them dealt with catastrophe, mayhem, betrayal or unease in slightly different, masterful ways. I can't find any of those stories online but here a taste - "Colomber". If you'd like to try to find stories from this collection I'd recommend "The Scala Scare" or "Catastrophe". Thanks to the reader who recommended Buzzati!
Alex