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And Just Like That, I Win the Debate with My Wife About Whether My 3,000 Books Take Up Too Much Room The Glorious Future of the BookIt’s still the best data center of them allThe Honest BrokerTed Gioia Free Copy for TDE Subscribers If you subscribe to TDE

The Way of the Cobblestone

Smooth makes things rough. Ease makes life more difficult. Soft makes us brittle. We lost something when asphalt replaced cobblestone. Every step on those old, gnarled stones forced a man’s body to shift, recalibrate, and work. The more cobblestonish the surface, the more micro-exertions. The more asphaltish the surface,

Albert Jay Nock, the Remnant, and Our Need to Read

Picture a man, tattered coat flapping, rummaging through a dumpster in an alley. You wince, don’t you? That flicker of disgust ripples through your gut. But hold on. Don’t judge him too harshly. He’s not much different from a stray dog, sniffing for scraps. That’s not

The Reading Paradox

The Hemispheres Create Paradoxes. One is Brewing Right Now: We're Reading More Than Ever But Reading Reading Less Than Ever

BYCU: Bands that Sell-Out to Beer

Later addendum: John Densmore's excellent The Doors Unhinged: Jim Morrison's Legacy Goes on Trial is only $2.99 on Kindle. 5 Band Beers 1. Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale (5.3% ABV) 2. Juice Runners Paloma Remix (5.9% ABV) 3. Hanson Brothers Beer

Escaping the Cocooned Mind

We’re all wrapped up in rationalist cocoons, spun not by our own hands but by the sticky threads of a world gone mad with reason. Our spit’s in the walls, sure, but we didn’t design the daggone things. We were born into them, raised in them, schooled

The Thrill of Competition Might be Vitamins for the Left Hemisphere of Your Brains

And in this modern age, you never need to nourish your left hemisphere

The Third Way Fever

This modern world’s got a fever, and it ain’t for more cowbell. It’s for third alternatives. Everybody’s itching for that elusive other option, like it’s the last ticket out of a burning city. Ray Oldenburg lit a fuse back in ’89 with The Great Good

Documentary Review. Join or Die

America’s crumbling civic soul gets a hard look in Join or Die, a documentary riffing on Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000). It’s a 100-minute dirge for the death of social capital, that invisible glue of community that once held this nation together. But for all its otherwise-excellent

And Now We See that Trump is a Gaslighter

Paul Kingsnorth nailed it in 2023 when he said the pandemic response rewired his brain. He saw the unholy trinity of power (Big Government, Big Business, Big Media) weave a narrative so tight it could choke a nation, the kind of thing you’d expect from a dictatorship, not the

Five Reasons to Drink at the Bar

In the twilight of Western civilization, where the sterile grip of the left hemisphere has throttled the soul out of our culture, the pub stands as a defiant outpost of human connection against the gnostic tide. The churches once held the line too, but many—mainline Protestants, Jesuits, and their

GKC and McGilchrist

I ain’t got a shred of hard proof, but I’d wager that G.K. Chesterton’s noggin was rigged with a hulking, boisterous right hemisphere that steamrolled the left like a runaway freight train. That jovial giant’s right hemisphere didn’t just outmuscle its analytical counterpart. It

Hand Me that Loaf of Nothing

America’s gone and lost its knack for wasting time, and we’re paying a butcher’s bill for it. Young folks, especially, ain’t lingering with each other, not in the aimless, sprawling way that used to stitch souls together. The fallout’s grim: depression’s up, suicide’s

Twisting Your Mind Back to Health

Grab some nicotine and check out some art. Your right hemisphere needs the help.

A Local Bar is a Good Place to Be

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a splendid ode to local bars last week [https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/insight/2022/01/09/A-good-place-to-be-A-local-bar-can-be-more-than-a-place-to-get-a-drink/stories/202201090022] . Two people, neither from Pittsburgh, recommended it to me. It's the type of thing that could only be written by someone with a Catholic

Thomas Sowell's Hemispheres

Picture Thomas Sowell, that old warrior of the mind, sitting at his desk, sifting through the wreckage of human folly. His right hemisphere? Hell if I know how it hums. Does he commune with the Tao, feel the pulse of the cosmos in his bones? Not my place to say,

Reading: Kicking Against the Left Hemisphere's Hegemony

Few things are more degrading than being a child of the modern age. “Prison wife” comes closest. It ain’t our fault we were born into this asphalt dystopia of algorithms and plastic. But we can claw our way out. We can break the chains. The trick is knowing what

Introduction to Profiles in Right-Hemispherism

In this left-brained madhouse we call western civilization, the right-brained are the outcasts, the oddballs, the glorious lunatics who refuse to salute the spreadsheet and the algorithm. They’re the ones who don’t fit in the cubicle, who won’t bow to the soul-crushing hum of the globalist machine.

Edgar Cayce: Sleeping Prophet

Edgar Cayce, the “Sleeping Prophet” (1877-1945), was a peculiar figure, a lanky Kentuckian who slipped into some kind of trance-like stupor and spouted answers to life’s mysteries like a backwoods oracle. Over 14,000 of his mutterings were scribbled down by diligent stenographers, responses to questions from 6,000

A Hemisphere Hypothesis Meditation on Pieper's Abuse of Language

Attempts to define the Tao are like a retard trying to stick his head out of a closed car window. Sad, pitiful, and comical. Until he gets so frustrated that he smashes the window with a hammer. Fresh air rushes in but so do shards of glass. Bust up the

Why June 1 is a Great Day to Honor the Copts

A little Coptic history, a feast day to remember, and a great drink I concocted from my garden produce.

Two Learned Men; Six Volumes

I only have the single volume "Section," but it's enjoyable

We Value Knowledge Like the Jerk-Off Values Porn

A mini-meditation on Josef Pieper's "Knowledge and Freedom"

More Snoring, Less Beltway Whoring

The Hemisphere Hypothesis won’t teach you how to wrench a lug nut off a busted tire and it won’t tell you how to deal with the beard in your daughter’s locker room. For all its highfalutin talk about brain wiring and reality, it’s about as useful

Are You Trapped in the World of Total Work?

Josef Pieper (with a G.K. Chesterton kicker) teaches us the importance of leisure It’s commonplace knowledge that many of our best ideas hit us in the middle of the night or in our first waking moments. While we are completely at rest, not obsessed with ourselves or our

The Silence of St. Thomas, by Josef Pieper

A Micro-Review/Essay

Majeres Applies McGilchrist

Back in 2009, Iain McGilchrist unleashed The Master and His Emissary upon a world too distracted to notice its own decay. This bestseller was merely a prelude to his magnum opus, The Matter with Things—a sprawling, 1,500-page odyssey that starts with the Master’s Hemisphere Hypothesis and ends

Pieper Primer

Christine Norvell at Front Porch Republic

Benedict in the City

My Kindle’s a cluttered attic, stuffed with a few books I pick at like a vulture when the mood strikes. Nothing I’d sink into, just odds and ends for those moments when the world’s noise gets too shrill. One of them’s E. Michael Jones’ Benedict’s

Way of the Right Brain: Chuang-Tzu’s Genius

Seven and a half centuries before Bodhidharma started Zen by melding Buddhism to Taoism, Chuang-Tzu danced through the world. This sly jester is second only to the old sage Lao-Tzu in Tao greatness. Chuang-Tzu championed wu-wei—the art of non-doing, of letting the world spin without your sweaty grip on

Montaigne: Smiling Skeptic

Montaigne spat on every dogma and system that strutted through the intellectual barnyard of his day. His motto: Que sais-je? (What do I know?) His answer, delivered with a smirk: Not a daggone thing. “There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.” Montaigne Logic? Pfft. He’

Gimme Silence or Give Me Death

Because without silence, there is no life

McGilchrist Finds Gnosticism . . . and the Thought of Eric Voegelin

I've maintained for years that these two thinkers needed to get together. It finally happened.

A Gardening Piece at The University Bookman

My dad received The University Bookman while I was growing up, so I was especially pleased to see one of my pieces appear here today.

The Everyday Problem That is the Left Hemisphere

The left hemisphere of your brain is a miserable little tyrant, a penny-ante dictator strutting around in the gray matter. Don’t believe me? Look at the everyday modern life that the left hemisphere has given us. It’s one big prick-fest, a carnival of impatience and irritation where every

Why I Don't Stay Informed

I'm glad the Establishment didn't succeed in destroying JRE during COVID. It’s pretty much the only way I stay informed to the extent I want to be informed. I agree with Nassim Taleb’s observation that there’s no reason to read the daily news,

The Stud that Was H.L. Mencken

Every so often, I plunge headlong into a Mencken spree, a vice I’ve nursed since the early 1990s when I first stumbled into Ann Arbor’s Dawn Treader Bookstore and smelled those old books (that odd but pleasing scent, I’m told, comes from vanilla releasing from the aging

The Battle of the Hemispheres

So, fear’s the new punk squatting in the pantheon of mortal sins. That oozing narcissism, born from the left hemisphere’s tyrannical stranglehold on our skulls, lights up our amygdalas like a cheap firecracker every time our little empire of self gets a scratch. It’s a meltdown, a

Why Weak Fools Can Dominate

Exploring the fool in Christ and the fool in Antichrist. Ivan the Terrible v. Nicholas of Pskov. Nietzsche v. Everyone

Four Reformers

I had a chance last month to booze it up at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, but by the time I came across it, I’d already guzzled enough gin to fill a Prohibition-era bathtub, so I skipped it. Bad on me. Sloppy Joe’s was Hemingway’s haunt

I Want My Son to Visit Vegas

Vegas is Sin City, where what happens stays, except the clap. But that shouldn’t spook a lad with a shred of Catholic spine.

AI's Little Victories Add Up to Huge Defeat

A malign pincer grips our weary souls as I peck out these words in the bleak dawn of early 2025. You feel it too. That dull ache in your ribcage ain't a cardiac event. It's the life force being throttled out of you by a twin-pronged

Why We Need to Meditate

So, you want to meditate? Here’s the raw deal, stripped down to the studs: 1. Plunk yourself in a chair—or on the floor if you’re one of those types—and shut your eyes. 2. Zero in on the air moving through your nose. Feel it, don’t

Freaking Out with the Left Hemisphere

Editor's note: It's my birthday. Please forward the Substack or this post to friends and family. The seven cardinal sins have shaken and shimmied ever since Evagrius—or maybe Origen, who knows—first jotted them down in some dusty desert hole. By the time Gregory the

Maybe We Should Thank the Buddhists for Mindfulness Meditation

Catholics keep flogging their tired old nag of a gripe about mindfulness meditation, even though heavyweights like Peter Kreeft and Kevin Majeres have given it their thumbs-up. Their big beef? “The Buddhists kicked it off!” Cue the pearl-clutching and incense-waving, as if that’s a knockout punch. It’s the

Gen-Z Needs Community Gardens

It’s dang near Chinese coolie labor time again, that grand American spectacle where hordes of lunatics, armed with shovels, hoes, and a rabid gleam in their eyes, descend upon their garden patches like it’s a sacred calling. Think of it as the nation’s biggest hobby—a manic,

A Meditation on Gnosticism Over at Substack This Morning

The guy who demands that everyone be rational becomes the most irrational of all. That’s an old Taoist zinger. It rang true when Lao-Tzu swayed atop his water buffalo to the misty hills of eternity; it’s true today as we clatter along in our mechanical Jacobins, guillotinely crisp

The Pilgrim Plague

Ah, the elite progressive white people. Those insufferable, self-righteous bastards who've managed to infect the American psyche with their millenarian madness for centuries. It's a flippin’ disease, a gnostic virus that's been festering in our national bloodstream since the first Puritan set his sanctimonious

Minimalists are Hoarders but with Better Hygiene

Few things feel better than disgust. It's the rocket fuel of reality TV, propelling us to smirk and gape at the human wreckage on display: the obese, the addicted, the mentally ill, the hoarders, and that woman who won't eat anything except cheesy potatoes. It'

Scratching with Modernity

Why are some people such jerks? Or, to borrow from our British cousins, so disagreeable? I mean "disagreeable" in the most expansive way possible. I'm talking boors and bastards, cretins and creeps, every person labeled with a derogatory term derived from the nethers of the human

14 Funny Passages from David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster

which means that some staff photographer came in and popped a flash in the face of a traumatized kid at prayer.

Get Ready to Re-Write History

The Don is declassifying. The Elon is dismantling. The Establishment is defecating. Can America handle the truth? We think we’re going to learn who shot JFK, but we better be prepared to learn that Oswald shot from the jealous apex of an Oswald-JFK-Marilyn Monroe love triangle. And Marilyn was

Shellenberger on Carlson

You used to be able to draw a line across California. South of Santa Cruz, where those Lost Boys hung out, things started to stink of something right-wing. By the time you hit Orange County, you were in Oklahoma. San Francisco was Peter Coyote and sandal-wearing freaks. Los Angeles was

The Hemispheres in the Garden

I lost a lot of money in the 2008-2009 crisis. I was doing alright but lawyers throughout Michigan were shuttering their practices. I knew it could become difficult to sustain my homemaker wife and seven young children. An acquaintance asked me if I’d ever tried square-foot gardening. I hadn’

The Five Parts of Existence Strikes Back and The Hemisphere Hypothesis

Part I  What is the Tao? The Tao, also called “the act of existence (actus essendi),” “the first principle of Zen,” and the region on the other side of Aldous Huxley’s doors of perception, is the nameless reality that is logically, conceptually, and in reality prior to everything else.

Edgar Cayce

Edgar Cayce, the “Sleeping Prophet” (1877-1945), was a peculiar figure, a lanky Kentuckian who slipped into some kind of trance-like stupor and spouted answers to life’s mysteries like a backwoods oracle. Over 14,000 of his mutterings were scribbled down by diligent stenographers, responses to questions from 6,000

Why the Left Hemisphere is Ineluctably Drawn to Abstractions

The left hemisphere’s primary goal is to allow its host to survive. Practical considerations drive the left hemisphere. You might think this means the left hemisphere isn’t much interested in abstractions or idealized notions. Such things, at first glance, aren’t practical. But the thing is, abstractions are

Introducing Blaise Pascal: The First Anti-Modern

If we’re going to battle against modernity, we need to recognize our champions. Pascal might have been the first.

Something Tells Me I’d Really Enjoy the Private Letters of Two Men I Didn’t Even Know Existed

It helps to be aware of one’s ignorance. That’s one reason I like to read Joseph Epstein, who wrote a delightful essay for the current issue of the new Catholic journal, The Lamp that brought my level of awareness to the brim. The topic? The letters of George

Left Hemisphere Attack on Small Business?

Jeffrey Tucker at Zero Hedge (via Epoch Times)

At Substack: McGilchrist Explains Huxley

If the left hemisphere's grip on people's minds can be loosened, McGilchrist says, their perceptions will change. They will see "into the depth of things . . . all at once [and] recognize them for what they are, no longer overlaid by our projections." When this happens,

Scrolling Blog: Late 2024 Entries

The True Christmas Story that Never Gets Old And the vile reality that is the State that makes it compelling The Christmas Truce of World War INever forget the Christmas truce of World War I, when troops refused to be pawns of empire for one blessed day.Mises InstituteJohn V.

Eric Scheske's Substack Has Launched

Many of you just received an email from the Substack platform. I hope that's alright.

The Seven Deadly Sins are Dispositions of the Left Hemisphere

Primer: Understanding the Hemisphere HypothesisMany smart people think Iain McGilchrist has effected a Copernican revolution in metaphysics. I tend to agree. Here’s a summary of the revolution.The Daily EudemonEric Scheske When you throw that vase against the wall and scream "f****! (fudge), you're sinning. The

AI and Our Need to Get Mentally Jacked

Picture this: Four Sikhs stride into a title office to close a deal to buy a convenience store. Two elders had beards flowing like an Old Testament prophet. Nothing new there. But the two young Sikhs? Their golf shirts were stretched taut over bulky biceps and pecs. I’ll confess,

Six Maniacal Observations from G.K. Chesterton

They'll help make sure you don't think like a maniac

Scrolling Blog: June-July 2024

July 12, 2024 People who still believe that the news media tell them the truth and that their nation and their world work pretty much the way they were taught in school are just as brainwashed and deluded as any QAnon cultist. Caitlin Johnson Caitlin Johnstone on SubstackPeople who still

Deadpool Doesn't Matter

Endgame ended me. After that, I pledged never to watch another Marvel superhero film. And it wasn't because I barely survived the CGI waterboarding. And it wasn't because Brie Larson, adorable in 21 Jump Street, was insufferable as Captain Marvel, giving us the biggest fall in

How Many Beers Does It Take to Find the Tao?

C.S. Lewis would’ve said “zero.” It’s the Tao that helps you find the beer. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.

The Left Hemisphere Deranges People Out of the Local, Driving Them Through Rationalism into the Clutches of Ideology, including Nationalism

The community is embodied existence: you rub against the white trash and the petty; you rub against flawed humans like yourself. You have to deal with it . . . in reality, not in a rational idea. When you escape it through abstraction, you become the anti-Mother Teresa

The Left Hemisphere Ruins Literature

D.H. Lawrence might have had the John Thomas of a degenerate, but he had the soul of an artist. I guess it’s no surprise. His father was an illiterate, hard-drinking coal miner. His mother was educated and refined. It made him earthy but reflective. He appreciated cutting-edge ideas

History of Western Civilization in Just Five Minutes

My first Substack project. It might take ten minutes, btw.

Preparing for Catholicism's Preeminent Role in the West after Democracy Collapses?

Kevin Vallier's analysis of Patrick Deneen's newfound Statism in this podcast episode is really interesting. Deneen wrote Why Liberalism Failed. It got a lot of press, especially after Obama included it on his 2018 reading list. Obama liked his insights but disagreed with Deneen's

Thomas Sowell's Hemispheres

My first attempt to flush out the phenom that is Thomas Sowell

Loper Bright: Relentless War Against the Left Hemisphere

Chevron is Dead: Audio0:00/429.2702041×💡Chevron deferred to rules and experts, two things cherished by the left hemisphere. The death of Chevron is a victory for the right hemisphere. Chevron is dead. Thank goodness. It might have been the biggest Supreme Court victory for the right hemisphere ever.

Celebrating the Overlooked

I appreciate any effort to rescue the neglected noble: those little things that are good but nobody notices. It could be a person, it could be a garden.

Tolkien's Little Hero: Fatty Bolger

Paul Schweigl at Front Porch Republic

The Dorothy Parker and Florence King Reincarnate

But she's going on maternity leave

The Anti-Drinking Campaign Picks Up Steam

Excerpts from two recent articles

Cells of Peace

I keep a handful of books on my Kindle that I read from sporadically. These aren't books that I dive into, but rather books that I read at odd moments when I don't feel like reading anything else. One of them is E. Michael Jones'

Is Substack a Weapon to Preserve Truth?

A Substack montage

"No Amount of Alcohol is Good for You--That Much is Clear"

The idea that moderate drinking is healthy has been debunked . . . currently

No Amount of Alcohol is Good for You?

“No Amount of Alcohol is Good for You--That Much is Clear”The idea that moderate drinking is healthy has been debunked . . . currentlyThe Daily EudemonEric Scheske About a year ago, a friend of mine started evading my invitations to grab a drink. It was only when we caught up for a

Capitalism and Communism are Flipsides of the Same Coin?

Rod Dreher calls Niall Ferguson's first column for The Free Press a "banger" and he's right. Ferguson highlights an alarming number of similarities between the last years of the Soviet Union and the United States today. Does it mean the United States is reaching

The Left Hemisphere Larps

LARPing, Reality, and FraudThis nascent essay needs work, but it’s a decent blog post. The essay could take a few directions. E.g., Fantasy role-playing is fun, but now take your character into the real world. You’re Kick-Ass, coming to beat that inner-city thug, only to find yourself

Rationalized Ideals of Silence Crashing Against the Rock of Reality

Or rather, "Rationalized Ideals AGAINST Silence Crashing . . . ".

Bill Kauffman on the Subjugation of Canada and Neil Young's Sanity

Bill Kauffman at The American Conservative

Slanting History Since 400 BC

A Substack Montage

Cocaine Beer Coming?

If it were anywhere else in South America, the nondescript house with buckets of coca leaves soaking in liquid could be mistaken for a clandestine cocaine lab. But this is La Paz, Bolivia, and the fruity aroma of coca steeping in barrels signals that you’ve arrived at the government-authorized

Existence Strikes Back Project Glossary

A work-in-process. Very early stages. I envision the final product will be ten times this long, if not longer. I haven't even begun to include The Hemisphere Hypothesis, but I hope to start soon.

We're on Information Overload. Here's One Solution

One forgotten ancient suggests what we might do with all of today's information

Read Your Way Out of Left-Hemisphere Hegemony

Encourage Urban Gardening

I have a client in Detroit who keeps a small stash of money at his son's house, along with a few guns, on the west side of Michigan, in a rural farming community. The reason? "When things collapse and Detroit erupts, I'll boogie out and

We Either Flee Devils or Fight Them

Toward the end of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield tells himself he will move out West and shut himself off from everyone and everything, possibly by posing as a deaf-mute. If he pretends to be a deaf-mute, he reasons, people would have to write messages to him on

The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy: A Micro-Review

If I had to come up with a list of books whose title makes the book sound far drier than it is, I'd nominate Gilson's The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy. Merton fans may recall that he bought the book in his pre-Catholic days, then nearly hurled

Cynar and Tonic

Peter Suderman at Cocktails with Suderman (Substack)

Disappearing Asparagus

Cindy Carcamo at L.A. Times

Knowledge Through Experience is Still Knowledge

Nassim Taleb's Assault on the Left Hemisphere's Pretensions: Samples

Magic in Everyday Renaissance Europe

Laura Miller at Slate