Reviews and News:

In defense of Billy Joel's white fans: "I've been to Billy Joel concerts from Shea Stadium to Frankfurt, and I can confirm that pretty much all of his ticket-buying fans are white. But so what? So are Bruce Springsteen's. So are Bob Dylan's."

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Eat like an ancient Roman: "The Roman naturalist Pliny, a contemporary of the gourmand, reported that Apicius referred to flamingo tongues as being 'of the most exquisite flavor.' Apicius is also credited with inventing what is considered to be the world's first version of foie gras, made from pigs rather than geese."

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The politics of food: "We are all supposed to be health-conscious valetudinarians these days, at the same time that we're supposed to be gourmets. We're supposed to be wildly open to new foods, at the same time that we're supposed to avoid appropriating other cultures' cooking. We're supposed to be thin as Twiggy, at the same time that we're supposed to chow down with gusto. These are the kinds of issues a deep investigation of our culture and our food would need to take up. The human worry about the body will always find a focus. Where the Victorians tended to make sex the center of their bodily anxieties, we have transferred much of that to food."

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The end of solitude.

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In Case You Missed It:

Jeff Koons's banality: " Bouquet of Tulips is a gigantic forearm and hand (Koons says it 'references [sic] the hand of the Statue of Liberty holding the torch') clutching a bunch of pastel green, pink, yellow, blue and white balloon tulips—not exactly the sort of thing that springs to mind when one thinks about the Bataclan killings."

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"Dystopian literature is a moral genre, a critique not only of power but, in its most outstanding classics, of progressivism. Without being conservative or right wing, it is often antileft. This is so even though the early canonical authors of the genre—Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell—were men of the left themselves."

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Jed Perl reviews the Tate's Robert Rauschenberg retrospective in the New York Review of Books. The show proves, Perl argues, that Rauschenberg was a sham.

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A fascinating history of eclipses.

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Interview: Bill Kristol talks to Harvey Mansfield about the Gorsuch hearings and the limits of politics

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Classic Essay: Robert C. Koons, "Irving Babbitt and the Recovery of Classical Learning"

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