Best Dozen Articles I've Read in 2023

(See also Best Articles 2021 and Candidates for Best Dozen Articles I've Read in 2022 and Best Things of 2022 and Best Things of 2023 and the nascent Best Dozen Articles I've Read in 2024)

• 1 "Whose Nature? Which Law?" Edward Feser blog (OCTOBER 12, 2012). What "natural law" means.

• 2 "Remembering Edward Shils," Commentary, Joseph Epstein (2019). Absolutely first rate. It conveys the feel of intellectual friendship at the University of Chicago 1970-90.

• 3 "We Are What We Watch," Steve Sailer's blog (2020). Who likes which movies? A numerical analysis.

• 4 "Grim Tales," Kari Gold, First Things (2000). The modern child's loss of fairy tales, and what replaces them.

• 5 "My Left Kidney," Astral Codex Ten (2023). On donating a kidney to a stranger. Should we all do it? A very challenging article that reveals my selfishness.

• 6 "The Great Feminization of the American University: A response to Heather Mac Donald’s provocative new essay on the “mass nervous breakdown on campus,” Christopher F. Rufo (2023). "When you have this victim narrative along a psychological line, all of a sudden individual psychopathologies, individual traumas, individual problems, individual personality disorders, something even like obesity, a kind of physical disorder or dysregulation, are elevated into marginalized identities that provide the moral center of these new victim narratives. So this opens the pathways quite significantly. It opens participation in this great narrative. Suddenly, you don’t have to be poor, you don’t have to be a non-white racial minority. "

• 7 "The Repaganisation of the West The return of Greco-Roman values," Ed West, The Wrong Side of History Substack (October 20, 2023). "Christianity is really very strange and counter-intuitive. Paganism is normal. It’s not normal for a society to place such levels of moral shame on its aristocracy to behave itself, especially aristocratic men. It’s much more normal for powerful men to dominate and crush their enemies, and to sexually exploit women. Christianity’s emphasis on forgiveness and internal guilt is weird: indeed WEIRD is the acronym coined by Joseph Henrich to describe the way that Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic people behave compared to others. Similarly, the Christian taboos about suicide and infanticide are unusual."

• 8 "The Problem of West Bank Settlements," Tomas Pueyo Substack (2023). Very good maps and facts, even though I disagree with his views.

• 9 "Why-i-gave-up-my-professorship," Kai Jaeger, Substack (2023). Universities are not scholarly places. "academic staff must invest more and more time in administrative tasks on behalf of performance criteria, leading to a lack of time for actual student support, teaching or research. This includes administrative responsibilities for tasks traditionally assigned to administrative staff, such as the digital recording of grades, the processing of student sick notes for exams, the learning and processing of expense reimbursement software, etc. The university professor is turned into an office worker - including constant performance reviews and committee meetings with new "leadership" initiatives."

• 10 "REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky," JOHN PSMITH Substack (JUL 17, 2023). This will make you want to read it, and shows how relevant Russia's mental confusion in the 1880's is to us today.

• 11 "Scott and Scurvy," Idleworlds.com blog (3.06.2010). "But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?"

• 12 "The Impossible Bronze Age Mindset," John Ehrett, American Reformer (2023). Another kind of Nietzschism, the sort-of conservative kind, dissected. "It is a call for the deepest possible return of all: a breaking of the fetters of secular liberalism and Judaism and Christianity alike, a recovery of a more elemental way of being-in-the-world. The nostalgia of neo-vitalism is for humanity’s most ancient days: for blood and war and shamans and the fierce exultation of the kill."

ALSO RANS:

• "How George Floyd Actually Died," The American Spectator (2023). This article say fentanyl had nothing to do with it, and suggests heart failure due to adrenal problems.

• "She's the One: Measuring female marriageability," BRYAN CAPLAN, Bet on It blog (JUL 31, 2023)

• "Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Stephen Kotkin)" (1922) and "The Power of the Powerless (Václav Havel)", Charles Haywood. Related to each other.

• Economists and Covid, Jay Bhattacharya.

• "Elon musk worse than hitler," Titania McGrath, The Critic (2023).

• "The British Colonial Mindset," Ed West, Substack (2023).

• "WHO WAS THE REAL SARAH RECTOR, “THE RICHEST BLACK GIRL IN AMERICA?”" Martin City Telegraph (January 19, 2020).

• "Why the Culture of the So-Called Great Books is Hostile to Trans People: Naomi Kanakia on the Intellectual Cult of the Transphobic Rationalist."

• "The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements: A letter of note from Isambard K. Brunel, civil engineer," Jason Crawford blog. (April 21, 2023). A good article on the danger of regulation. Good for my book. If people follow rules, they will do so blindly, so they'll still be dangerous, plus they will block innovation.

• "Fiddling America Away," Victor Hanson (2023).

• "/multiple-concussions-may-have-sped-hemingways-demise-psychiatrist-argues," Smithsonian (2017).

• "Why I Look at Data Differently:A lesson on residual confounding" by Emily Oster. Describes a study on breastfeeding and IQ which shows how the correlation shrinks and vanishes moving from no control variables to demographics to demographics and parental IQ to looking just at siblings.

• "Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?" blog entry (2022).

• "Scroll and Codex,"

• "most-famous-pirates-of-all-time/ "

• Lawsuits as a way around Civil rights laws, Bryan Kaplan blog post on the Texas abortion law and the Civil Rights Act.

• "W.H.O. Do You Trust?" Scott Atlas on WHO and on the Fauci-Collins conspiracy to hide the origins of covid.

• "How Hard Work Destroys Character: The case against making talented young people do menial labor," American Greatness, Josiah Lippincott (March 27, 2023).

• "2022 GMC Hummer EV Edition 1 Pickup: A Truck With Moves Like a Porsche GM’s all-electric revival of the Hummer brand weighs more than 9,000 pounds and does 0 to 60 in about 3 seconds." WSJ Dan.

• "An Apologia for English Food," Stone Age Herbalist, Twitter. THe comments too. 2023.

• "Classical Education’s Woke Co-Morbidity," Matthew Freeman, The AMerican Conservative. On how the CLassical Learning test's organization has been infected by wokeness. (2023).

• are-there-trustworthy-protestant-universities/ (2023).

• "Why-the-english-department-died" Quillette (2023).

• how-the-deep-state-took-down-nixon (2023).

• "Interview: Ukrainian colonel Oleh," Pravda.com.ua (1 March 2023). Excellent interview-- very honest, mostly about the nitty gritty of how Ukraine used heavy artillery in 2022.

• Soviet army , Big Serge Substack (2023).

• "Harvard’s Double Standard on Free Speech," John Tierney, City Journal (2023).

• "Thinner on Paper," Peter Hitchens on being fat and on the old newspaper business in London (2022).

• "10-myths-told-by-covid-experts-now-debunked/" NY Post (2023).