Officialdom is using the coronavirus to find fresh pretexts to expand its authority. Matthew B. Crawford, writing in Unherd, observes how political and aesthetic preferences have become moralized in safety talk. As some teenaged mountain bikers in California discovered, bureaucrats now claim a bullet-proof halo of public-spiritedness to sweep aside whole domains of human activity.

When the Waves Turn the Minutes to Hours
John R. Grove commemorates the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald with a moving meditation on Gordon Lightfoot’s song memorializing the disaster and its 29 forever-lost victims. Lightfoot’s poetry and melody in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald not only hauntingly convey the tragedy’s essential elements but, Grove writes in Law & Liberty, open a window to the sublime.


