I’ll never forget my once-in-a-lifetime meeting with Michael Oakeshott. I’d written most of my doctoral dissertation on the great man’s work by the time I actually met him so you can imagine the pressure of the day and the anticipation. He didn’t disappoint me but I think I disappointed him. At one point he asked me what I was intending to do after graduate school. “I think I’ll be a journalist,” I said. “Oh dear,” he replied, his pixie-smile suddenly collapsing. “I’ve always thought that the need to know the news every day is a nervous disorder.” Can you imagine what he’d say about blogging? It was indeed wonderful for the nerves to spend a few days without the newspaper or the internet. I took in a fabulous trip to Austin, a riveting “Richard III” at Washington’s Shakespeare Theater (if you want to see good Shakespeare, it’s far better to live in D.C. than in provincial New York City), and then, last night, the deliriously delicious “A Mighty Wind.” (Conspiracy theorists will be thrilled to know that I went with Ken Adelman, James Taranto and Richard Miniter to R3. We all took notes. What a master propagandist that Shakespeare fellow was. And of course Henry Tudor won in a cakewalk.)
BUT I DIGRESS…: Still, I now know, after catching up a bit, that plenty of non-U.S. companies will have a share in Iraqi reconstruction, that, among other pro-environment decisions, the Bush administration has proposed some of the greenest diesel fuel standards in history, and that the New York Times continues to bleed talent in the wake of the Raines reign of terror. So pretty much what you’d expect, no?
The Dish 