I bet I know whose kids got My First Trolley Car under the tree this Christmas...

I'm bumping this thread only because a reader suggested exactly this point to C.J. Chivers:

I own a lap steel guitar that was manufactured before WWII that plays and sounds at least as good as it did the day it was new and there are many, many similar instruments of the same age are still in use. In fact, most quality musical instruments made of wood actually improve with age if well maintained. I’m not an expert on violins, but I’d venture that at least 80% string instruments played in the world’s major orchestras predate the rifle pictured on your site - many by a couple of centuries!

And then they should take it out to the countryside and blast it to pieces!

Or maybe that's not where you were going with that comment...

Michael Tee: the Jeremy Clarkson piece is indeed great. Thanks for that.

Thanks, Peter! Matthew Gilley: it sounds like Chivers' book covers that very question.

Oh man, now my Ricochet sidebar is nothing but guns, guns, guns. Everything I post from now on should be understood as crude attempts to dictate the advertising I'm presented with.

Trace,

Get some earplugs and old flowerpots and I'll show you "twee..."

Dave:

I have one of those!

Michael Tee: if you read Reihan's post, you'll see that he's defending A. Brooks against criticism from D. Brooks.

I've always marveled at the way the Economist's style guide warns against regionalisms, then the magazine blares something like: "Toff Snaffles Dosh, Fleet Street Chuffed!"

That should be "How often do..."

Thanks so much, gentlemen. If nothing else, I'm hospitable to the need for a limiting principle.

Peter,

Yes, take it as a provocation. I'm trying to think through how I, as a layman, should regard con law once it appears to no longer constrain governmental power. Is it a procedural formality? A rhetorical tool? An alternative, aspirational system of government that citizenship demands we maintain along with the "real" one?

I neglected to say that everyone should follow Ross Douthat's links to Alan Jacobs' posts about Clay Shirky. Or just start here if you're interested.

Maybe Yeltsin-era Moscow? From the Vanity Fair profile of the Exile founders:

The decade had all the indulgence of 1920s Paris and Weimar Berlin, without the bothersome art and poetry.

Of course, the point of that passage is to note that Moscow had the decadence without the efflorescence, so maybe it doesn't fit.

Sorry to have gotten left behind. I have read-only access to the site during the workday.

Rob: I think it's reasonable for Jack White to draw a line somewhere between technology our grandparents had (e.g. electric guitars, the written word, the fork) and technology still hot from the mold. The latter deserves a skeptical look and some effort at shaping it before it cools into something we and our kids take for granted. And yes, chess in the park and networked video games are both recreation, but just because one is the "modern version" of the other, does the conversation just end there? Aren't there additional questions worth asking about how minds and technology develop together, and whether every change is necessarily a good one?

Trace: "...the forward march of knowledge and technology has alleviated far more human suffering and is ultimately the greater purpose." Woah. Greater purpose? As I find myself always having to explain to libertarians, I'm cool with penicillin. But I'm not sure what conduces from the claim that technological progress is the "greater purpose." The word limit and family demands are both closing in, so I'll leave it there..