Web Vibrations

Brent Muirhead, Integrating Critical Thinking into Online Classes

Adversus Idiotas, Of Students and Getting the Conversation Started

U Krakovianki, The cost of being a reader
 

Tracy Lee Simmons

For today, Jacques Barzun is the finest voice we have.
— Q&A with Tracy Lee Simmons

Tracy Lee Simmons is the author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin
 

Acknowledgements and Thanks (Mark Halpern)

To my friend Jacques Barzun my debt is so great that if he were to call it in, I would have to declare bankruptcy. He urged me to write this book, gave me detailed comments on various drafts of it as it was written, and supported it in every possible way—all at a time when he was often suffering some degree of disability, and laboring to meet various other obligations. The only anxiety I have about this book is over his opinion of it; if he thinks it worthy of the time and trouble he has spent on it, I will feel fully rewarded for the labor of producing it, whatever the rest of the world may think.
—Mr Halpern, Language and Human Nature, 2006

Mr. Halpern’s book has a Preface by Jacques Barzun.

Hear Mark Halpern on AfterTV.
 

Web Vibrations

Dar al-  Intellects in no dhimmitude

The Gospel of Judas

WiseSerpents

Best of the Blogs
 

Contra Mundum

. . . individuality is not illusory . . . the ultimate arbiter of truth is experience.
—Jacques Barzun, “Quentin Anderson, Redux”, in Donadio, Railton, and Seavy, Emerson and His Legacy: Essays in Honor of Quentin Anderson (Southern Illinois UP, 1986).

 

Web Vibrations

dedefensa.org (Philippe Grasset, includes the article by Thomas Vinciguerra).

William Safire

Stephen Shields

Diary of a City Parishioner

Lame Worldview—Paul Lamey

Theatre Ideas—Scott Walters
 

Robert A. McCaughey

In Robert A. McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004 (New York, Columbia UP, 2004), Jacques Barzun is described as:

another instance [like Mark Van Doren] of a much-published Hamilton Hall habitué, but one whose interest in music and science fiction and predilection for academic polemics set him apart from most of his colleagues.

The inclusion of “science fiction” rather than detective stories among Barzun’s interests suggests that Professor McCaughey does not know Barzun well. Yet I was glad to have “Jacques Barzun’s recollection of the silent reproof from senior colleagues upon their discovery of his regular attendance at the Friday matinee of the New York Philharmonic” and other items about Barzun and about his and my alma mater.