I saw a program the other day about an event I previously had known little about: the great New York blackout of 1977. Something about the story left me with a distinct feeling of unease. I don’t imagine many readers here are familiar with it, either. Let me describe some of the details.
Some weeks are better than others. I’ve had better weeks, but here are the results. Even disappointing movies are fun to write about.
A former NKVD agent describes a meeting with Joseph Stalin and the special assignment he was given. We reflect on the fact that power and glory are fleeting, and that they can vanish faster than most people believe.
Escobar: Paradise Lost (2014)
Director: Andrea DiStefano
A mildly absorbing crime melodrama about an innocent Canadian guy named Nick who marries Pablo Escobar’s niece and gets sucked into the family business. A theme like this has great potential if handled the right way, but it turns out that the director prefers formula to serious drama. Irritatingly fresh-faced young Canadian (Josh Hutcherson) is hanging around on the beaches of Colombia in the early 1990s with his brother, doing not much of anything but surfing and looking like a dipshit gringo target for extortion.
We have recently discussed a story from the life of the learned Ali Ibn Munqidh. His grandson Usama Ibn Munqidh (1095–1188) was a very famous poet, warrior and literary figure in medieval Islam and his memoirs are an almost unique portal of insight on how one culture saw the other. The scholar Philip Hitti describes Usama this way:
Mastery of language is indeed a powerful tool. This is especially true when the speakers hail from the same cultural background, and can make use of all those subtleties that would be lost on the non-native. This point is brilliantly illustrated by an anecdote told about Ali Ibn Munqidh, who became emir of the district of Shaizar in northern Syria in 1081. His surname was Sadid al-Mulk, and this is how I will refer to him in this article. We will see that words effectively deployed can literally save lives. This story is adapted from Ibn Khallikan’s short biographical sketch of Sadid al-Mulk.
Oklahoma City (2017)
Director: Barak Goodman
The 1990s seem to have an air of unreality about them now. Looking back, they seem like a time of missed opportunities: failure to reform the financial system, failure to improve the infrastructure, failure to understand the consequences of unrelenting interference in Middle Eastern affairs. The drama of 9/11–and everything that followed from it–superseded all that came before it. It blocked out from our collective memory the threat of domestic radicalism and replaced it the the overarching National Security State where everything was watched and everything was monitored.
In this podcast, a reader has a question about nature and nurture. Which one, he wonders, has the most influence in forming our identities? The answer is complicated, of course. But some general points can be stated. We close with a reading of the Epilogue to my book Thirty-Seven.
Disorder (2015)
Director: Alice Winocour
This is one of those great, slow-burning movies that slipped under the radar (at least here in the United States). It’s part character study and part suspense drama, but the end result is a very satisfying cinematic experience. Lead actor Matthias Schoenaerts is a great actor whom I’ve admired for a long time; he deserves to be a big star and I hope he continues on the trajectory he’s on. To get an idea of just how good he can be, you should check out the great horror film Left Bank (2008) and the drama Bullhead (2011).
A reader from Italy writes to say he is frustrated and angry with the deceit and fraudulence of a certain political figure on the world stage. We explain why it is best to take a detached, philosophical view of such men, since experience shows that they eventually bring about their own ruin. What matters is to be a man of substance, not a man of straw, a hollow man. We close by reading T.S. Eliot’s immortal poem, “The Hollow Men.”
Quintus Curtius 
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