The wife let me know today that I received a magazine—not an unusual event in itself, but welcome—we do like very much to sit & read together on some evenings. This, however, was a very unusual magazine: It’s brand new & brimming with confidence. My friend Marco Granza made it happen after years of work, the most famous part of which work is his very successful IM website: You can see the best of both magazine & website by reading Michael Anton’s essay on Tom Wolfe. If you like the essay, go order the magazine! Marco deserves all the congratulations we can muster & some help, too, to thrive in putting together the upcoming issues. Many people on the right complain about the problems in the arts & culture, but few work on the problem—Marco is among those few & if you want to understand the young men on the right, he has a better feel for what’s happening than anyone else.
At any rate, the wife was very pleased to have received this gift—she told me to open the magazine & take a look at the acknowledgments—sure enough, I read my name there in rather prestigious company. The wife smiled serenely. As you may imagine, no publisher has printed my name in a magazine as a show of gratitude, so this is also most unusual.
The other unusual thing the wife mentioned, as soon as we opened the magazine together: Isn’t that a Caravaggio we saw in Naples? She was right, the magazine opens with a detail from The Seven Works of Mercy; the painting bears contemplation: