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The Daily Eudemon: Essays for the restless mind in a crumbling age (Public). Its Scrolling Blog: A throwback to TDE's early days in 2002.
First Person Who Says "Conspiracy Theory" Loses
I'm proposing this rule in response to Huckabee's defense of his poor defense on the Tucker Carlson Show.
By the 1980s, it was widely conceded that the first person to call the other person a "Commie" or "pinko" lost the debate.
By the early 2010s, the same applied to "Fascist" or "Nazi."
I'm now proposing it for folks who call the other side "conspiracy theorists."
This Headline Slayed Me
Tyler Durden
GKC on Paradox
Paradox spiced Chesterton's essays like the word "f***" did The Wolf of Wall Street. There's a lot of it. Arguably, too much of it, so much of it that Hugh Kenner wrote an entire book about it: Paradox in Chesterton (which, I learned while typing this blurb, is back in print as of 2025).
I draw on GKC a lot here at TDE, sometimes even knowingly, like yesterday, when I appealed to paradox for this year's Lenten practices.
I was pleased when I then stumbled across this line from GKC in Ahlquist's newest book, I Also Had My Hour, which I started this morning:
Paradox lies at the very roots of existence; we are all born the children of paradox, just as we are all born the children of two isolated and irreconcilable sexes.
The Return Eudemon
Travel is the dangdest thing: It stimulates ideas then kills the time and energy to put them to paper. I returned yesterday evening from a four-day trip to South Carolina, where I walked my heels off and soaked up as much sun as an albino can without catching fire like a vampire at dawn. I came back, stuffed full with things to write about, then didn't have the energy or time to write about them.
Tomorrow, TDE returns for real. I'll have an Ash Wednesday essay. I promise. Well, I kinda promise. Life's vicissitudes are such that I scarcely like to promise what I'll do in the next hour, much less 24 hours from now.
Monday Substack
Eric Scheske
Latest Kuntsler
If Dorothy Parker's acidic bon mots were, as Vanity Fair once declared, the olives of the martini age, James Howard Kuntsler's essays are the nicotine of the digital age. His essays are worth reading for the style alone, but the substance also fascinates me: Has there ever been a man so aciduously pessimistic about the state of things yet so optimistic that things are about to change?
James Howard Kunstler
The circuses — last week’s Grammy Awards, the Winter Olympics tonight, Sunday’s looming Superbowl — give off an odor of utter cultural exhaustion. What will it finally take for Western Civ, and its avatar, the USA, to stop embarrassing itself before God and history, and find better things to do?
Why Does Hollywood Cotton to China?
Even after the 1938 Kristallnact, during which Nazis destroyed Jewish property and sent tens of thousands of Jews to prison camps, "[N]early all of the Hollywood studios continued dealings with the Nazi regime until the start of World War II. In many cases, studios altered films that might offend the Nazis rather than risk losing the valuable German and Austrian markets."
The Book of Unusual Knowledge, p. 9.
The (Almost) Weekly BYCU Column
The 20-year tradition of writing about drinking on Fridays stumbles along.
Eric Scheske
On Wuthering Heights
I've never read it, but I didn't much care for Jane Eyre. With all the advertising for the mega-movie coming soon, it seems worthwhile to recall this contemporary criticism of the book.
NHL Star Trevor Zegras is Hilarious. Great Deadpan.
Kerouac was Beaten to Death?
For doing black face?
I thought I knew pretty much every biographical detail about Kerouac’s life, but apparently not. Just read about his death:
Most biographers and his fellow Beats attributed it to an abdominal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis. And no one disputes that alcoholism rotted Kerouac’s internal organs and immune system. But down here, another explanation took root.
“About a month before he died, Kerouac went to the Cactus Bar, which was on the African-American side of St. Petersburg,” Burchenal says. “Somehow or another, Jack started speaking in the slang and voices of the characters from Pic. Understandably, the guys in there thought that he was mocking them, and took him out to the parking lot and beat him up so bad that he never recovered. That’s really what killed him.”
Jeff Weiss
[“Pic” refers to Jack Kerouac’s short novel Pic, whose narrator is a young African-American boy named Pictorial Review “Pic” Jackson, written in Black vernacular/dialect.]
BYCU
The year 2026 is reportedly becoming the year of “soft partying,” which includes run clubs, cold-plunge meetups, morning “coffee raves,” bakery dance parties, and other low-booze social activities designed for young adults who want connection without the hangover. Apparently 22 percent of American adults planned to do Dry January in 2025, a new high, as “sober-curious” goes mainstream. Wow. I do not relate. I just turned 25 and I only have about two more years to be “getting-obliterated-curious.” Sascha Seinfeld
Quote
"Seeking internet fame is like being a drunk guy who streaks across a football field." Sascha Seinfeld
I'm Getting TDS
And I've been mocking the TDSers for years. But now it's like he's been co-opted by the military-industrial complex and, not content to be a pawn like all his predecessors since Kennedy, is "one-upping" them. I honestly can't figure out what's going on, though, tbh, I pretty much stopped trying back in 2020.
Quote
"Human beings are the animals that have to do things they don't actually have to do. The name we use to describe these things is culture."
Justin Smith-Ruiu, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality (Chp. "What are Drugs," p. 103).
Eric Scheske
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I'm Not Alone
Eric Scheske
I'm Back, I Think
The Eighth Day is fraught with religious connotations. For me, today, it hopefully marks the end of a devilish virus that started small and picked up steam like the proverbial snowball until I was ready to tap out of life altogether. But I think it's over and, hopefully, brain activity can now resume. We'll see.
Monday's Substack Essay
My goal was to publish a handful of essays here every week, then pick out my favorite to email on Substack, but it hasn't quite worked out. We'll see how the year goes.
Always: Thanks for reading and spreading TDE.
Eric Scheske
Wodehouse in Vogue?
I just got done shopping at Ann Arbor's Dawn Treader Used Bookstore. I asked for P.G. Wodehouse books. Not only did the youngish clerk know of whom I spoke, but she also said they have a dashedly difficult time keeping him in stock.
Okay, she didn't say "dashedly," but the rest of my account plum accurate.
There's hope for our Internet-addled age.
An addendum to the essay about Ben Shapiro has been added (12/30/25).
Eric Scheske
How I Focus Now
The cube is a pomodoro timer. You set it for the desired time period, then do nothing during that time period except focus on the task at hand.
The 2 mg nicotine pouches? Those are, my sons assure me, proof that I can't be their father because I obviously lack male genitalia, but I like the slight focus nudge they provide without over-stimulation. Besides, I'm still reeling from the 9 mg pouch my youngest son conned me into trying last summer after I'd had my fourth drink of the evening.
Merry Christmas
“After the magi had met the child, they were told in a dream to go home another way. To change course.” Martin Shaw
Martin Shaw
Are You Scratching Your Head About Nick Fuentes' Popularity?
Scratch no longer. Brett Cooper provides an explanation, at least a partial one. When you combine this episode with the last decade of incessant gaslighting and the totalitarian Covid response, most of the puzzle pieces fall into place.
The NCAA Continues to Create Debacles
The games last night couldn't have gotten worse if you slathered Tulane and James Madison with meat grease and set lions on them. I love a Cinderella story as much as the next guy, but come on. Cinderella can't be a crippled and blind girl with no teeth. The poor thing's gotta have a prayer, but the NCAA ain't no fairy godmother. It's just a wicked stepmother that embodies everything that makes America ungreat: cronyism, corruption, and incompetence.
The Friday BYCU Column
Eric Scheske
Happy Valley Forge Day
https://drunkard.com/todays-reason-to-drink-december-19/
One of the hardest winters in American history started on this day in 1777:
To stave off desertions and boost morale, Washington tried to provision his men with as much rum, spruce beer, rye whiskey, hard cider, wine and brandy as possible, but due to major supply problems they generally had to rely on a daily pint of locally-produced corn liquor, that is to say, moonshine.
If You Got the Email Post Today . . .
My apologies for the egregious clerical mistakes at the bottom of the post. It totally ruined the ending.
Oh well, the running joke these days is that the surest way to catch clerical errors is to click "publish." Sigh.
It's corrected here.
Eric Scheske
To the left hemisphere, any answer is better than no answer.
Monday at TDE
Eric Scheske
Monday at Substack
A nearly-identical version of this essay appeared here (at TDE) last week.
That is my current approach: I write essays here as often as possible, then select my favorite to run at Substack the following Monday.
A new essay will run at TDE later today. I will be explaining my new "TDE philosophy" and why its essays have taken such an, ahem, aggressive turn.
Eric Scheske
Simple Santa Hack
If your child is getting older and suspicious about all the Santas he's meeting, tell him, "They're not the real Santa."
BYCU
Eric Scheske
Latest
Eric Scheske
Just Discovered This Young Man
David Brady
The Dry Holdouts
Monday Essay
Closely-related to my intro: That's why they say a good venue contains a big gathering area where the extroverts can metaphorically chest pump all that energy into one another, but also has small and semi-secluded areas where a guy can escape the whirl.
Eric Scheske
Happy Thanksgiving
I don't know if this was a real ad. It's hard to believe, but the Ad Council is a coalition of Mad Men who volunteer their time to promote the government's narrative on social issues, so anything this fraudulent is believable.
Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup
Chicken from a 3D printer.
Daisy Luther
Viktor Frankl was Inmate 119,104
He got to Auschwitz late in the game. Don't tell the Groypers or they'll use it as proof that fewer than 200,000 Jews were sent there (smile).
Eric Scheske
This is one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I’ve ever seen
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 23, 2025
pic.twitter.com/rz5khySnfN
WHY🤣 😭 pic.twitter.com/mMetITMKpa
— Sara Rose 🇺🇸🌹 (@saras76) November 18, 2025
True?
Brownstone Institute
The mere fact that it could be true should be enough to disband this LSD-pushing, Mafia-tied, file-destroying, torture machine that conducted "Operation Midnight Climax" on unsuspecting johns in San Francisco in pursuit of their mind-control games.
I mean, it was fun when the CIA did such things to foreigners and hippies but . . .
Joel Richards
The Return Eudemon
My first trip behind the Iron Curtain. Budapest, Prague, Krakow . . with a Vienna kicker. I'm still gearing up new things for TDE but right now, I'm still stymied by tech problems. Stay tuned. TDE isn't dead, not by a long shot. Weak, ineffectual, and lame? I suppose, but I'm committed to changing that. For now, I'll just continue with the TDE way: brutal honesty to the point of self-deprecation, in hopes honest prose connects with readers.
Mark Your Calendars
December 16 is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Of all England’s great writers, she holds the most attention. The reason is simple. She invented the modern novel in order to answer fundamental questions about how to be good, happy, and flourishing in a commercial society. She reigns supreme because no-one else invented so much or had so much to say to readers about their lives.
Henry Oliver
Books are Tactile
Eric Scheske
Monday Essay
Could physical books have saved the Zizians? Beats me, but I think maybe, and no matter, they’re a cautionary tale for the rest of us about online reading.
Eric Scheske
Eric Scheske's Outside Modern Limits Subscriber Chat
This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.
How to get started
- Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.
- Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
- That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
Monday Substack
It's a riff off perhaps the best essay in the current issue of County Highway: "Everyone is in a Cult." Subtitle: Welcome to the schizophrenia factory, which is significant: siloed left hemispheres and schizophrenia exhibit some serious Venn. One of McGilchrist's favorite reference points is Louis Sass' Madness and Modernism, which looks at mental illness and modern art. I'm halfway through it, and it's been great, but at the same time, it's one of those books that seems to make its point compellingly in the first 75 pages. After that, it feel like a case of "piling on," so it's back on my shelf for now. I have hopes of finishing it later, but alas, many bookmarks in similar books in my library stare at me every morning.
Eric Scheske
County Highway is a Freak-of-a-Classic Publication
I'm on my third issue. It's a literary magazine disguised as a newspaper. The front page features a handful of articles that entice the reader enough to prompt him to accept the prompt at the bottom, "Continued on page X." You turn to page X . . . and see the first 700 words on page one was merely the iceberg tip, like the essay I finished reading this morning about Lord of the Barnyard, which clocked in at nearly 8,000 words.
But the prose is superb (as far as I can tell . . . I guess it's arrogant of me to think I'd recognize great prose . . . the "like knows like" phenomenon, quietly applied to pat myself on my (oh-so finely tuned) literary back). The subject matter is varied and interesting and always--freakin' always--totally alien to me, like I've been living under a rock for the past 30 years (maybe I have been, but the rock is called "earning a living to support a large family).
Anyway, it's Friday, so here's a drinking excerpt from that "Barnard" essay, about the anguished author, Tristan Egolf, who wrote the great American classic that no one in America knows about, being told by his French publisher that he'd written one of the great novels. Vindication after years of tortured self-doubt. What's he do? He continues his anguish, burying it under more cigarettes and booze.
He was waiting for publication, he wanted to meet his French translator, but nothing was happening. He grew impatient. Illness stalked him, he became convinced he had lung cancer, complained of severe chest pains. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, drank more than he should have. He sometimes banged on James and Shelly’s door in the middle of the night, after walking down to Montparnasse from the heights of the eleventh arrondissement. His apartment was something of a pigsty, dead bottles littering the ground, ashtrays ringed with cigarette butts overturned on the bed. Gradually, abetted by alcohol, he slid into delirium. When Marie checked in from London, he raved over the telephone. He was agitated, thought he was being watched, followed, but by whom? Nightmares filled his head, he was trapped in gruesome imaginings.
He later wrote a second acclaimed novel, then, unsurprisingly I suppose, killed himself before publishing his third.
Follow
Chandler Fritz
That "essay," incidentally, is apparently an excerpt . . . from a "novel"? A nonfiction novel? I'm cornfused . . . the literary world keeping one (or twenty) steps ahead of me at all time.
Adrien Bosc
A Vivid Reminder of Why Amazon Shouldn't Modify Kindle Books Once They're Downloaded
But of course, the Digital Elite don't much care what we all think.
I prefer to read books that are page-stoppers, that cause me to stop and contemplate a striking idea, an elegant phrase, an admirably constructed sentence. A serious reader reads with a pencil in hand, to sideline, underline, make a note. Joseph Epstein
Peace Through Air Power
From Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind
In an interview with the Khartoum Times, Air Marshal Italo Balbo (1896–1940), the creator of the Italian air force, insisted that air power was the best guarantee of world peace. No nation would dare to go to war, knowing that its women and children, its wives and mothers, would face destruction from the air.
Monday Column
Readers will notice a theme these past few weeks: reading. It'll continue for a few more weeks. My hope is to assemble them into a Kindle book before the end of the year. We'll see.
Eric Scheske
And Just Like That, I Win the Debate with My Wife About Whether My 3,000 Books Take Up Too Much Room
Ted Gioia
Free Copy for TDE Subscribers
If you subscribe to TDE newsletters, you will be receiving an email with a free PDF download of Western Civilization: Ten Dates in Ten Minutes.
I have also changed the price of the book to 99 cents. I didn't understand the pricing policies when I selected "$2.99." So wait a few days and the price should adjust to 99 cents.
New Book at Amazon
Eric Scheske
Musk slays me.
I gotta go back and watch Tropic Thunder. I remember that I gave it a "5," but maybe it deserved better.
From Civil Rights Tranny Terrorism
The splendid stylist Kuntsler lays it out.
James Howard Kunstler
I'm back. Due to a death in the family and other vigors of life, TDE was nearly abandoned for two weeks. I still have plans to rejuvenate TDE, so patience is welcome even if not deserved.
For today:
I think my Substack essay is one of the more compelling things I've written this year. Low bar, that, but I offer herewith . . .
Monday Substack
Smooth is the enemy of body, soul, and mind.
Eric Scheske
Bonus observation for TDE readers: Micro-exertions irritate the hell out of the left hemisphere. That'll be the topic of a future post.
Five Minutes
Heaven help the time-conscious when the person they're waiting for says "five minutes."
Why One Reads
"One reads in order to asks questions," Kafka once said in a letter to a friend. Manguel, A History of Reading, p. 89.
Save the Em Dash!
It's being unfairly kicked and bully in the anti-AI mayhem. Poor guy never hurt nobody.
Falling Down
Visitor: "What do you guys do in the monastery?"
Monk: "We fall and get up again."
That's meditation, according to Huberman and Majeres.
Meditation is distraction and monastic life is falling down.
Meditation is getting distracted, noticing it, and determining to get back to a distraction-less state.
Monastic life is sinning, repenting, and deciding to sin no more.
Monday Column
Eric Scheske
The Morally-Decayed People Attacking Big Balls
They hate Trump so much, they can't even acknowlege an obvious heroic act.
Mike Solana
BYCU
Old Mission Peninsula is one of the loveliest places in Michigan. Marie and I spent an evening going up and down it two years ago, hitting watering holes.
But it's historically built on agriculture. And then the grapes came with their Dionysian charm. And then the agro-tourism came. And then the tension came: the newcomers who wanted to re-shape it to fit their money-making image and the oldtimers who wanted it to stay rural and agricultural.
The old timers had the votes and their elected officials brought the clout. But then the newcomers invoked the U.S. Constitution to jam its image down the Peninsula's throat: and get a $50 million judgment.
The U.S. Constitution ought not play a role in such matters. The selective incorporation doctrine has tried to make every locality in the U.S. the same and it's awful. But then again, it's nice to have some sort of legal recourse against petty local tyrants who act arbitrarily and capriciously, like I've seen happen so often at the local level.
Anyway, the Wall Street Journal tells the story about the $50 million judgement here (subscription required):
Excerpt:
Guest events had to be tied to agriculture. “My wife wanted to teach a Spanish class—just sit here and go over Spanish terms and talk about wine and stuff and yeah, like, ‘no, that’s not agricultural,’” so the plan was denied, he said.
Chateau Chantal, a turreted, European-style vintner and bed-and-breakfast with spectacular vineyard and bay views, can host weddings only if all attendees sleep on-site—limiting the size to about 44 people. “That is just not the kind of number most of the clientele are looking for,” said Marie-Chantal Dalese, president and chief executive.
O’Keefe is still baffled by some policies. “We’re allowed to have amplified music, but only ‘mood’ music, no louder than a whisper at the property line,” he said. “We’re allowed to have 75 people for an event, but I don’t know if that means an event outside, or does that include my entire winery?”
A Note to Readers
Please keep popping back in periodically
TDE continues. In fact, TDE is undergoing a revamp. The thing is, I'm still working out what that revamp will look like. I've been assembling material to launch an "all out assault" on Substack, which I had planned for August, but instead of being ready to launch, I put on nearly ten pounds of gin, such are the demands of a large immediate and extended family, as well as a friend circle whose circumference is as wide as I can accommodate without bursting the seems of my pants.
In any event, TDE is alive and, I think, well, even if it appears dormant or dying. In my mind, it holds promise, but that might just be my flawed left hemisphere talking (it leans toward optimism . . . especially when it's not warranted). We will see.
Please stop back periodically and click on this scrolling blog. Announcements and new pieces will be announced here.
Thanks for your patronage over these past 25 years.
Monday Substack
Eric Scheske
BYCU
Eric Scheske