Linkfest 2020-10-16: Castle of Otranto Edition
An engraving from the Castle of Otranto
This is a nice overview of Gothic novels and how they have influenced what we now call fantasy. Gothic novels were an incredibly broad group, containing books in a range from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Amazon link) [the progenitor of the woman with great hair fleeing a dark castle] to Frankenstein. The historic diversity of these books was confusing to me for a long time, but I’ve come to realize that my idea of a genre is far too cramped.
Review of Rod Dreher’s “Live Not By Lies”
The pseudonymous Handle, one of the best long-form bloggers, has come out of retirement to review Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (Amazon link), a sequel to The Benedict Option. Handle’s style is in-imitable, and he critiques and sharpens Dreher’s argument while insisting that Dreher hasn’t quite gone far enough.
Excess Deaths From COVID-19 and Other Causes, March-July 2020
This study has a nice looking image, but a potentially confusing one with its stacked and overlaid time series data. The accompanying table is excellent, although regrettably not an actual sortable table, but rather an image.
A big database of alternative history in fiction.
An absolutely fascinating history of a Cold War attempt to raise a sunken Soviet submarine under the cover of doing undersea mining research. Also, worth keeping in mind just how far the United States government will really go to cover up intelligence activities. The Glomar Explorer was never meant to be anything but a one-time use spy game, but the cover story spawned useless fields of study and endless entries in children’s science books.
The Long View: On the Nature of the Coming World Government
John J. Reilly looks at the likely features of the universal state that is likely to coalesce in the next fifty or sixty years. It will be neither as good nor as bad as anyone expects.
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