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Phobos and Deimos

At the beginning of book VII of Virgil’s Aeneid, auspicious winds send the ships of the Trojan hero and his warriors to the mouth of the Tiber, where they put ashore. An oracle has foretold their coming. Aeneas is welcomed by the king of the Latins, and an alliance is forged. The king’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Catastrophism and Control

A wise man knows that he must put things into perspective, but a still wiser man knows what perspective to put them into. A doctor who tells the widow of a patient who has just died that, after all, her husband’s was only one of 2,800,000 deaths a year in the United States alone (56,000,000 . . . . Continue Reading »

COVID-19: 
New York Diary

Friday, March 20. A light fog hangs in the air in the early morning as I walk uptown to see what’s going on at the big hospitals a few blocks north of my neighborhood. The magnolias, crabapple trees, and forsythias are in splendid bloom on the spacious grounds of Rockefeller University, next to . . . . Continue Reading »

Italy in Crisis

With just over 120,000 people, Bergamo, northeast of Milan, is not a particularly populous city, and it is short of priests, like almost every other city in the Catholic West. Yet in the second week of March alone, six priests died of coronavirus in Bergamo, and five more died the week after. By . . . . Continue Reading »

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