I was browsing this afternoon through Rachel Abrams's TWS blog posts from 2009-2011. They're all well worth reading, but these three seemed to me to particularly capture some of Rachel's spark and zest. Here are snippets: read the whole things.

“There was a definite puppet-like quality about [Vaslav] Nijinsky’s Petrouchka. He seemed to have limbs of wood and a face made of plaster, in which his eyes resembled nothing so much as two boot buttons.

The Germans are famous for melding nouns and adjectives together to form extremely long words. No hyphens, no spaces, just an assemblage of letters and umlauts as menacing as a mechanized division. For instance, the German word for -xenophobia is Ausländerfeindlichkeit. In Austria prior to its EU membership, a foreign student visa was known as an Aufenthaltsbewilligung. The word for foreign travel health insurance protection? Try Auslands-krankenversicherungsschutz. And while we’re at it, Frau Blücher! 

In the best-known court case in the Hebrew Bible, two women come to King Solomon, the wise, wealthy, and powerful king with the following quandary: One of their children died in his sleep, while the other remains alive. There are no witnesses, and each mother claims that the living child is hers. Solomon requests a sword to cut the baby in half; but the real mother, “overcome with compassion for her son,” the Bible tells us, relinquishes custody in order to save the baby’s life. This woman, Solomon concludes, is the true mother. 

Nonfiction is a baggy-pants term, in whose bulging pockets one finds autobiography, memoir, the essay, literary journalism, and book-length studies of ideas, trends, and much else. The only thing these various forms have in common is that all are written in prose and are based, supposedly, on fact.

My wife says the only thing I’ll plant is what I can eat. Not entirely true, I tell her. I point to certain things I’ve planted: the cluster of yellow iris in the side yard, the bunch of white iris in the backyard, and the large spread of irises of many colors in the front yard, under the crape myrtle.

London
In his short story “The Occasional Garden,” Saki pinpoints a subject dear to the British heart, but also key to its social anxieties. Elinor Rapsley is about to receive a lunch visit from a woman whom she detests, Gwenda Pottingdon. Gwenda’s garden is the envy of the neighborhood; Elinor’s is a barren wasteland. Gwenda is coming on purpose to crow over Elinor’s pathetic pansies while describing her own rare and sumptuous roses. 

One of The Scrapbook’s favorite journals is the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s quarterly, The New Atlantis. TNA, which has just celebrated its 10th anniversary, is concerned with unpacking matters of technology and science, and grappling with how such advances relate to human nature. If you’re a Leon Kass fanboy—and, really, who isn’t?—The New Atlantis is your Tiger Beat.

Gordon Gee's peripatetic and colorful academic career – president of West Virginia University, University of Colorado, Vanderbilt, Brown, and Ohio State – has come to a self-inflicted end. Mr. Gee was an able fundraiser, which seems to be what those charge of civilizing and educating the next generation are mostly concerned with in these times.  Get the endowment up.  Get the government(s) to appropriate more.  Encourage students to take on more debt.  For his undeniable success in these endeavors, Mr. Gee was paid by Ohio State University a tidy $1.9 million.

Richard Goldstein writes at the New York Times:

About a half-century ago, Secretary of State George C. Marshall used his commencement speech at Harvard to announce what came to be known as the “Marshall Plan.” Of course, not every commencement address can be a major policy pronouncement by a leading statesman, but this year’s decision to give that coveted platform to Oprah Winfrey represents a new low for my alma mater.

Andrew Ferguson, along with Joseph Epstein and Peter Robinson, on "Who Killed the Liberal Arts?"