TLP Weekend Edition (November 29-30, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
📚 “Why ‘The West?’”by Yuri Slezkine. In the New York Review of Books, one of our favorite authors (see The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution) provides a fascinating intellectual history of the concept of “The West” through a review of a book by the same name written by Georgios Varouxakis. Slezkine explains how there is no “West” without the external threat of Russia and internal fears of decline.
The story Varouxakis tells suggests that Russia provoked anxiety by being big, ugly, and culturally (and racially) proximate at the same time. The new post-Christian canon, such as it was, threatened to dissolve the boundary established by sacred rites and scripts. War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazovmay have been “loose, baggy monsters,” but they had become part of a common civilizational repertoire (Henry James, who coined the phrase, felt the same way about the great Victorians). A new magic spell was needed. “The West” was born with two congenital conditions, both diagnosed by Comte on day one: chronic aversion to Russia and the “continuous revolt of individual reason against the totality of human antecedents.” The first has to do with space, the second with time; the first with the limits of its domain, the second with the mystery of its origins. “The West” makes no sense without an antagonist in the East, and there is no better (worse) enemy than a false friend. Because its name emerged amid the ruins of a collapsed civilization as a code for its fractious heirs, the West appears to be in perennial decline. “Christendom” has a content, “Europe” has a shape, both had a past. The West remained to be defined.
America to the rescue. The US imported certain elements of the mother country’s bardolatry and made some strides in the creation of its own (Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha was written in the meter of the Kalevala, and serious efforts were made on behalf of Mark Twain, not least by Twain himself), but the only sacred texts seen as a proper foundation for a messianic culture that was no longer wholly Protestant were legal-political. American universities abandoned the Christian-cum-classical curriculum at about the same time as the Europeans, but instead of replacing it with a national literary pantheon (one imagines Longfellow in the place of Pushkin and Twain and Melville in the places of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), they introduced Western civilization courses (represented as the prehistory of American liberalism) and lists of “great books,” which included the King James Bible, a few Greek and Roman texts, and selections from major European pantheons, all in English translations. The problem of Russian presence (Russia is not part of the West, but Chekhov is) was solved by silence. In The Western Canon Harold Bloom defined “canon” but not “the West” (and included Tolstoy as “the most canonical of all nineteenth-century writers”), in The Rise of the West McNeill defined “civilization” but not “the West” (and included Russia as “Europe’s outlier,” neither part of the West nor a separate civilization), and in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World OrderHuntington listed five existing civilizations universally recognized as such (Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, and Western) and added that in the contemporary world it would be “useful” to include the Orthodox, Latin American, “and, possibly, African” ones (presumably so as not to leave much of the world unaccounted for).
After World War II the former Latin Christendom acquired its first core state and common army since the fall of Rome, but “the West” remained a ghost. NATO was an extension of American power into Europe posing as a mutual defense alliance (with no mention of the West in its founding treaty); Western civ made few inroads into a Europe that continued to divide history into national and universal. The realm the United States pledged to defend and represent was the “Free World,” which went far beyond the West to embrace the entire planet, with the temporary exception of the Evil Empire. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union stood for “progressive humanity” as the vanguard of everyone’s future. The name of Yuri Gagarin’s spacecraft, Vostok 1 (East 1), referred to sunrise, not a part of the globe.
📖 The Great Silence: The Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox, by Milan Circovic. Where are they indeed, or as Fermi himself put it, “Where is everybody?” This is a real puzzler, and many, many solutions have been proposed by many, many smart people. Circovic covers it all and will convince you that this is a truly mind-bending paradox that is extremely hard to resolve. Unless you are already engaged in regular conversations with the space people—your personal resolution of the paradox—strap yourself in and give this one a try.
“Enrico Fermi formulated his eponymous paradox during a casual lunchtime chat with colleagues in Los Alamos: the great physicist argued that, probabilistically, intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms had time to develop countless times in the Milky Way, and even to travel across our galaxy multiple times; but if so, where are they?”
(Note: for a free and quite thorough introduction to the subject, try Wikipedia’s excellent entry on the topic.)
☢️ A House of Dynamite, on Netflix. Director Kathryn Bigelow (of Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty acclaim) is back with another excellent film. A nuclear warhead has been launched out of the Pacific Ocean and is headed toward the U.S. mainland, but it is unclear what country is behind it. As the film unfolds, it follows several different groups, including the soldiers at Fort Greely, officers at the White House Situation Room, the top military brass and secretary of defense, FEMA officials, and the president himself. With 18 minutes until impact on the homeland, these groups work to respond to the incoming missile and grapple with the ethical questions that inevitably follow. You can watch the trailer here.
🏏 The Ashes (Test 2 of 5), Australia vs. England, from The Gabba, Woolloongabba, Australia. With the end of a great MLB season stateside comes the start of international Test cricket from the warmer climes, which Americans can watch thanks to the streaming of virtually any sporting event in the world these days. This biennial matchup between two cricket powerhouses dates back to 1882 and is hosted across Australia through early January. Australia scored an epic win after a monster “century” by Travis Head in the first Ashes Test in Perth, and England will be looking to square the series in Brisbane.
If you’re not familiar with the game, you don’t really need to know everything about cricket or watch all of the insane number of hours it is played in this format to enjoy the lads in white bowling and whacking some balls. Test 2 runs December 3-8 and is available on Willow TV in the USA.
🎶 In the Wee Small Hours, by Frank Sinatra. Blue Note recently reissued a totally remastered version of this classic Sinatra record to mark its 70th anniversary—and it sounds amazing!
Frank Sinatra’s seminal 1955 Capitol Records album In The Wee Small Hours is a melancholy masterpiece of lost love and heartbreak that was a pivotal album in the legendary vocalist’s career. Produced by Voyle Gilmore, the album embodied Sinatra’s artistic growth into a more mature singing style with stunning renditions of Great American Songbook standards given sublime arrangements by Nelson Riddle. Sinatra conceived of In The Wee Small Hours as a full-length album, rather than a collection of singles, creating one of the first-ever concept albums and becoming one of the first pop albums to be released as a 12-inch LP. The album was met with immediate critical and commercial success, reaching #2 on the Billboard charts and bolstering Sinatra’s career resurgence following his signing to Capitol Records in 1953 and his Academy Award win for his role in the film From Here to Eternity.
Pour yourself some Jack (as Frank would), and enjoy “The Chairman of the Board” in his most captivating mood.
I always feel smarter on Saturdays due to TLP. Did not know about the wee hours. At least relative to Sinatra.
Anytime I hear an update about the Ashes, I remember the famous draw in Cardiff back in 2009. Was operating in Helmand with UK Forces at the time and decided if war was like a game, then it must be like cricket. Have to know when to declare and move on.