Things to Read This Week (1/5/2026)
A strong dose of moralism for the new year ... plus Stoppard rankings
“The Judicial Oath and the Judgment of History,” a nice piece in the Public Discourse by Judge William Pryor arguing that judges are obligated not to worry too much about what history will make of them.
“The Return to Tradition in the Law,” another nice piece in the Public Discourse, this one by Jeff Pojanowski. From the ominous if optimistic conclusion: “There are judges writing click-baity opinions, scornful bloggers, scoffing podcasters, and hot-take tweeters—and students primed to listen. There are large language models seeking to mass produce a simulacrum of that craft. Après le Restatement of Torts, le déluge, perhaps. But if feats like the medieval preservation and subsequent revival of Roman law show us anything, it is that the steady, often thankless work of patient scholarship and steady teaching can provide sound footing on dry land.”
Finally, a tribute by Hadley Arkes to the late, great, Tom Stoppard. Great among many other reasons for its focus on the underappreciated “Jumpers,” which gives us “an unmatchable portrait of a moral skeptic: a man reluctant to concede that the train for Bristol left Paddington Station unless he himself had been there to see it leave, for that report might be ‘a malicious fabrication or a collective trick of memory.’ And even then, he would accept the claim only on the proviso that ‘all the observable phenomena associated with the train leaving Paddington could equally well be accounted for by Paddington leaving the train.’ “
With apologies for hijacking this last link, this provides an excuse to answer the eternal question: what are the best Stoppard plays?
The top choice is easy. The Real Thing (1982), by a mile — on both writing (“If you get the right [words] in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.”) and love (“A sort of knowledge. . . . Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared-- she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it doesn’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain. Every single thing.”). By the way, you can listen to a live performance on Spotify.
In my view tier two is occupied by Arcadia (1993) (also on Spotify!) and The Invention of Love (1997), two plays about art, history, scholarship, and more. Arcadia focuses more on the fallibility of constructions of the past and makes use of an amazing dual-epoch set — with a nice dose of fractals, chaos, and math (“Mountains are not pyramids and guns are not cones. God must love gunnery and architecture if Euclid is his only geometry.”). The Invention of Love focuses more on, well, love, poetry, Oxford, and homosexuality (AEH: Homosexuals? Who is responsible for this barbarity? Chamberlain: What’s wrong with it? AEH: It’s half Greek and half Latin! Chamberlain: That sounds about right.”).
Tier three has several subgroups — the famous plays that are still excellent, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound; the eastern European plays like Rock n’ Roll and The Coast of Utopia, also excellent; and several underappreciated beauties such as Jumpers (logical positivism); Night and Day (foreign journalism); Indian Ink (British colonialism in India); Artist Descending a Staircase (Duchamp); all with good romantic or sexual subthemes too. (I haven’t seen Leopoldstadt but assume it will be in this tier when I do.)
Tier four has many honorable mentions — Every Good Boy Deserves Favor; Dogg’s Hamlet & Cahoot’s MacBeth; Hapgood; The Hard Problem; Squaring the Circle; and more — but the top three tiers cover a range of topics in love, knowledge, freedom, truth, and beauty so well that I can’t commend them enough.