Saturday, March 07, 2026

Woy Woy

 "We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents"

~ Bob Ross


Articles of Note

Counterculture prophet, Whole Earth cataloguer, proto-internet evangelist, Stewart Brand has a new obsession: maintenance... more »


A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw


New Books

An Emerson for our times? Terry Tempest Williams’s “epic documentation of the Glorians” is full of celestial beings and desert miracles... more »


Essays & Opinions

He championed Joyce, mentored Eliot, and broadcast fascist propaganda. Ezra Pound was indispensable as an artist and irredeemable as a man... more »


Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
~ Clive Barker

March 5, 2026

Articles of Note

Bolster civil discourse and the Great Books, or purge “commies”? The right is at war with itself over how to reform the university... more »


New Books

Shut out of plum positions because of his political sins, Malcolm Cowley became a triple-threat hired gun: reporting, reviewing, editing... more »


Essays & Opinions

Adam Phillips: "Psychoanalysis is not better than aromatherapy or worse than neurology, it’s simply something for people who find it intriguing"... more »


March 4, 2026

Articles of Note

In 2013 Mary Gaitskill told students: “Go home and look between your legs and tell me if that is a social construct.” All hell broke loose... more »


New Books

College students’ sense of meaning and purpose is transactional and internet-based. For them, the campus is a hustler’s paradise... more »


Essays & Opinions

Harold Bloom made academics wince and general readers swoon. The asymmetry was the point... more »


March 3, 2026

Articles of Note

Our dreams are our own — or are they? Meet the researchers behind the new science of TDI: targeted dream incubation... more »


New Books

A cow carcass, buckets of blood, poisoned dogs: A lot of death went into the making of Chaim Soutine’s art... more »


Essays & Opinions

In 2002, the college essay was declared dead. More than three years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the college essay lives on... more »


March 2, 2026

Articles of Note

John Brockman was more than a literary agent — he was a networker and salon impresario. Was he also Jeffrey Epstein's conduit to the academy?"... more »


New Books

Despite science's efforts, consciousness isn't quantifiable. The hard problem remains stubbornly hard, but reading poetry may help... more »


Essays & Opinions

“How we live as ethical people and behave and think wisely is not something to optimize, or, crucially, to even let ourselves think about in this way”... more »


Feb. 27, 2026

Articles of Note

Rose Lesniak, the magnetic feminist poet who heckled John Ashbery and trained dogs, is dead. She was 70... more »


New Books

There were two Thomas Manns: the early, coolly ironic author of Death in Venice — and the later, literary spokesman for democracy... more »


Essays & Opinions

Werner Herzog has spent 50 years insisting that lies reveal deeper truths. That argument has become harder to make... more »


Feb. 26, 2026

Articles of Note

On February 3, 1967, Jimi Hendrix  pushed the electric guitar past its known limits. He wasn't just a musician. He was an engineer... more »


New Books

Laid off from The Washington Post, the critic Ron Charles turns to books that ask a fundamental question: Do I matter?... more »


Essays & Opinions

Hoping to catch a glimpse of the legendarily fat G.K. Chesterton, William James climbed a ladder to peer into his garden — to no avail... more »


Feb. 25, 2026

Articles of Note

The New York Review of ArchitectureThe Manhattan Art ReviewSan Francisco Review of Whatever — we’re living in a reviewnaissance... more »


New Books

Minimally competent fathers are lavished with unearned admiration. The concept deserves a name: oppressive praise... more »


Essays & Opinions

We are wealthier than Aristotle could have imagined, yet we spend little of that wealth on what he believed it was for: leisure... more »


Feb. 24, 2026

Articles of Note

Across 48,000 minutes of recorded conversations with countless authors, Michael Silverblatt established a reputation as our greatest reader... more »


New Books

Was Elizabeth Bathory, aka “the Blood Countess,” a torturer of young maidens or a victim of a disinformation campaign?... more »


Essays & Opinions

How come a person who can’t focus on a novel can sit through a three-hour video? The problem isn't the screen. It's the environment... more »


Feb. 23, 2026

Articles of Note

What does it look like when the largest funder in the humanities goes all in on social justice?... more »


New Books

"It’s weird: in Updike’s teenage letters he sounds preternaturally sophisticated; in his forties, he sounds like a horny kid"... more »


Essays & Opinions

If you memorize the classic fallacies — ad hominem, post hoc, straw man — you inoculate yourself against them. That’s a nice, but false, idea... more »


Feb. 20, 2026

Articles of Note

“Rather than being a footnote to premodern folly, the Rosicrucian affair turns out to sit at the narrative center of the modern world”... more »


New Books

For leftists, philanthropy is often simply an expression of plutocratic power. How then to make sense of the surprisingly radical Garland Fund?... more »


Essays & Opinions

"What is it to live near to light, in sustained awareness of it? How does it braid itself into our sense of revelation, our communion with grace?... more »


Feb. 19, 2026

Articles of Note

Did Kamel Daoud steal the story in his Goncourt-prize-winning novel? “I felt betrayed,” said a patient of his wife’s therapy practice... more »


New Books

Trotsky in Mexico. How Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and a Kremlin-hatched plot led to an ice axe in the head... more »


Essays & Opinions

Staunch anti-Nazis, the members of Berlin’s Fest family were penalized first for their politics, and then as defeated Germans... more »


Feb. 18, 2026

Articles of Note

AI can summarize an email, but it can't make a genuine intellectual contribution. Right? Wrong, as Yascha Mounk found out... more »


New Books

Often invoked, rarely read, the work of the philosopher Alexandre Kojève is finally landing in the spotlight... more »


Essays & Opinions

David Brooks on the sins of the educated class, what Trump gets right, and why Brooks is leaving The New York Times for Yale University... more »


Feb. 17, 2026

Articles of Note

Confessions of a midlist writer. Once it was okay for a writer’s debut to sell only a few thousand copies. No longer... more »


New Books

The film critic A.S. Hamrah has no use for plot description, boosterism, or takedowns. He focuses, instead, on continuities and contradictions... more »


Essays & Opinions

“Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it”... more »


Feb. 16, 2026

Articles of Note

In the 1950s, Foucault sped around Sweden — quite dangerously — in a spectacular Jaguar... more »


New Books

In the Victorian era, discoveries upended humanity's place in the cosmos. Tennyson turned this metaphysical crisis into poetry... more »


Essays & Opinions

"I find myself being more and more difficult," Toni Morrison once said. "It's something I really relish." The difficulty was the point... more »


Feb. 13, 2026

Articles of Note

The Mellon Foundation has put huge sums of money toward the idea that arts and letters is not for wisdom, but for advocacy... more »


New Books

“Being a literary sex symbol can really take it out of you, making it tougher to maintain your lofty dignity as a quoter of Kafka”... more »


Essays & Opinions

What happens when a novel’s plot comes uncannily close to major breaking news? The case of Murder Bimbo is instructive... more »


Feb. 12, 2026

Articles of Note

Can an AI be endowed with a sense of morality? Amanda Askell is fashioning a soul for Claude... more »


New Books

Revolution” initially signaled destruction. Why did the word take on a more optimistic tenor?... more »


Essays & Opinions

“One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word”... more »


Feb. 11, 2026

Articles of Note

At a film screening, Salvador Dalí, in a fit of envy, turned on the director: “Joseph Cornell, you are a plagiarist of my unconscious mind!”... more »


New Books

Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity”... more »


Essays & Opinions

We associate confessional poetry with Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Larry Levis’s confessionalism was different... more »


Feb. 10, 2026

Articles of Note

The overworked phrase “rewiring your brain” suggests mechanical precision. The process is slow, messy, and incomplete... more »


New Books

Peter Matthiessen went to Paris to spy and write the Great American Novel. But he was, in his words, “always in the club drinking martinis”... more »


Essays & Opinions

In publications like New Masses and The Anvil, the proletarian literary movement had a message for Ezra Pound: “See you in hell”... more »


Feb. 9, 2026

Articles of Note

George Scialabba is no fan of political theory: “Imagination, sympathy, solidarity — by whatever name: this is the true engine of political progress”... more »


New Books

Walking “a fine line between principled opposition and crankdom,” the film critic A.S. Hamrah rails against Rotten Tomatoes, texting at the movies, and digital projection... more »


Essays & Opinions

It should be as good to remember a past joy as to anticipate a future one, reasoned Derek Parfit. Nonsense, argues Samuel Scheffler... more »


Feb. 6, 2026

Articles of Note

Typists, editors, arbiters of art. Literary amanuenses like Theodora Bosanquet, Véra Nabokov, and Valerie Eliot shaped modern literature... more »


New Books

How did Western psychiatric taxonomieshandle such non-Western disorders as “pibloktoq” (a wintertime psychosis) and “kufungisisa” (thinking too much)?... more »


Essays & Opinions

Oscar Wilde, William Morris, and John Ruskin were exemplars of socialist aesthetics, advancing the view that more leisure would result in better art... more »


Do we misuse our leisure time?


Sylvia Plath in her journals.

Obeid family loses control of $30m worth of Sydney properties after one of NSW's 'most brazen acts of corruption'

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done." 

 ~ Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice


For many years I did not think that the Iron Curtain would fall in my lifetime. I also never thought that characters like the political kingmaker, Eddie Obeid, would ever be caught and punished…


Obeid family loses control of $30m worth of Sydney properties after one of NSW's 'most brazen acts of corruption

In short:

The NSW Crime Commission says it has taken control of $30 million worth of properties linked to former New South Wales Labor politician Eddie Obeid.

New South Wales Crime Commissioner Stephen Dametto says new evidence and legislation changes assisted with the decade-long investigation.

What's next?

The commission is expecting a lengthy legal process to return the proceeds of Mr Obeid and his son's crimes to the people of New South Wales.



he NSW Crime Commission has placed a caveat over key Sydney development sites secretly owned by disgraced politician Eddie Obeid’s family trust, and frozen all property interests of Obeid Corporation Pty Ltd.
A decade-long forensic investigation into hidden Obeid assets worth tens of millions of dollars culminated in a closed hearing at the NSW Supreme Court on Friday, at which the commission secured an order to prevent the sale of the sites in Bankstown unless the order is lifted.
Former minister Eddie Obeid leaves Long Bay Prison in August after serving time for conspiring to commit misconduct while in public office.SAM MOOY
Herald investigation in January revealed that an Obeid family trust fund had concealed a secret share, worth around $30 million, in land earmarked by the government for high-rise development next to a new Sydney metro station.
Email chains and confidential documents obtained by the Herald showed the Obeid family trust’s status as ultimate beneficiaries of the site had been deliberately hidden behind the ownership of Obeid associate and business partner Walhan Wehbe. Wehbe is not accused of being involved in Obeid’s crimes.
“This has been a marathon exercise in the face of a deliberately complex web of trusts and companies which have allowed the Obeid family to conceal the proceeds of crime,” NSW Crime Commissioner Stephen Dametto said.
“While two previous investigations did not result in the ability to confidently launch proceedings, at no stage did the commission give up.
The Bellevue function centre in Bankstown, which is part of a property now subject to a caveat imposed by the NSW Crime Commission.WOLTER PEETERS
“Ongoing investigations using coercive powers continued, new evidence was obtained and legislative amendments removing a six-year limit on recovering proceeds of crime provided what we needed to strike in the way we have.”
Authorities have repeatedly tried and failed to reclaim the $30 million that Eddie Obeid gained via a corrupt deal involving a coal exploration licence at Bylong, north-west of Sydney, for which he was convicted.
commission’s caveat is estimated to be worth up to $60 million. The Obeid family trust is potentially entitled to half that amount.
“While achieving the restraining order is an outstanding outcome, it is only the first step,” Dametto said.
“While the commission expects that numerous lengthy legal processes will follow, my message to the directors of the Obeid Corporation is to do the right thing and return the proceeds of Eddie and Moses Obeid’s crimes to the people of NSW.
“Otherwise, the commission will litigate this matter with determination to ensure the tens of millions of dollars acquired in one of the most brazen acts of corruption NSW has seen remain out of the reach of Mr Obeid and his family.”
The Bankstown land, presently home to the dilapidated Bellevue function centre and some leased shops, has been slated by the NSW Department of Planning for a 20-storey residential tower under the state’s transport-oriented development strategy.
The Obeid family trust moved to conceal its interest in the site in May 2018, when the family was facing intense scrutiny over its network of properties and business activities.
Walhan Wehbe in 2022.SAM MOOY
Financial documents show the trust fund transferred its 50 per cent stake in a company then named Redpoc Pty Ltd, which owned the site, to Wehbe, who owns numerous other properties around Bankstown.
The catch was that Wehbe held the shares on privately agreed terms, stating that any income would flow into an Obeid family trust, according to legal advice given to representatives of the Obeids and Wehbe.
Documents obtained by the Herald outline a complex but lawful accounting strategy deployed by Obeid family accountant Sid Sassine and tax lawyer Rolf Koops.
It meant that, as far as publicly available records held by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission show, the Obeids were no longer connected to the company that owns the land.
Family accountant Sassine had “accomplished miracles with our accounts where others before him had failed”, according to a testimonial on Sassine’s website from members of the Obeid family, deleted five years before the Redpoc transfer.
The accountant gave evidence at an Independent Commission Against Corruption hearing into a corrupt coal deal in 2013, denying he was the family’s “frontman” but agreeing he had worked to keep the Obeid name out of the spotlight.
“My role there is to conceal, yes, to hide the name Obeid from the general public, to avoid the hindrance that they’ve consistently had,” Sassine told the inquiry. They are not accused of wrongdoing by the commission.