Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
From Chicago Boyz commenter Miguel Cervantes comes the sad news that Dr. Michael Kennedy has died.
Michael was a prolific contributor to Chicago Boyz from 2008 to 2024. His posts are here. He also posted a huge number of comments in response to other contributors’ posts here.
Michael’s personal blog is here. He contributed to a wide variety of other blogs (including lefty blogs that, Michael occasionally complained, banned him as a dissident). Neo has a lovely post about Michael here.
Michael was obviously a brilliant man, accomplished, full of energy and with many interests. He must have been an excellent physician. He was a student of history, a skilled and experienced sailor, and a father. His observations on politics, current affairs, technology and other topics were always well informed and insightful. I will miss him.
Ginny Machann, who contributed to this blog from 2004 until July 2023, died this past Friday. An obituary is here. The funeral will be tomorrow, Saturday, September 23 (the obituary has details).
Ginny was a lovely person. She delighted in the discussion of ideas and was a delightful person with whom to discuss ideas. She grew up in Nebraska and lived in the East-Central Texas melting pot. She was vastly well read, a PhD and English instructor who had — unusually for an academic person — run her own business and believed that she had learned much about life from doing so. She was curious and insightful about human nature and human possibilities. In recent years she was a valued participant in this blog’s regular Zoom meetups. I hope that she got as much out of our discussions as the rest of us did out of her participation.
I was fortunate to meet Ginny and her husband, Clint, in Austin a few years ago. It was, I think, a great time for all of us (Sgt. Mom and the late Shannon Love were there too). Ginny and Clint very sweetly gave me a gift of local kolachkes and wine. My heart goes out to Clint and to their daughters, Alena, Tessie and Sarah.
Shannon Love, who passed away in 2021, was a popular and always interesting contributor to this blog between 2004 and 2013.
He was a great guy with a brilliant mind that saw connections other people missed and generated an endless stream of insights on all kinds of topics.
Shannon’s daughter, Ripleigh Degenhardt (rdvirtualsolutions@gmail.com), recently contacted Instapundit about her father and about her project to collect stories about COVID hospital stays and deaths.
Shannon published more than 900 posts on Chicago Boyz. You can find them all here.
By now you’ve all seen, heard, and read that the great Tom Wolfe died this week. His social satire and sardonic wit carved out a distinctive path through post-modern America. Wolfe championed a literary style that was part journalism, part acerbic effervescence. Few (if any) recent writers were better able to craft stories by such vivid portrayals of particular people in particular places at particular times.
Here is Tom Wolfe in one of his many interviews with William F. Buckley on Firing Line. Just two mid-century Yale Men parlaying over the Black Panthers, Bernstein, Balzac, Homo Ludens, and the Mets disappointing season.
The question by the gentleman at around 39:45 is actually a good one and a complaint Wolfe faced his entire career. As a chronicler, he had a tendency to paint the events into flourishes that steered the situations toward the underlying themes that he was using to make his broader point. Conversely, as a novelist he was accused of conflating ordinary details into fantastic baroque ideals.
The guard buzzed Kramer through the gate, and Kramer’s running shoes
squeaked on the marble floor. The guard gave them a dubious onceover. As
usual, Kramer was carrying his leather shoes in an A&P shopping bag.
Beyond the entryway, the level of grandeur in the District Attorney’s
Office went up and down. The office of Weiss himself was bigger and showier,
thanks to its paneled walls, than the Mayor of New York’s. The bureau chiefs,
for Homicide, Investigations, Major Offenses, Supreme Court, Criminal Court,
and Appeals, had their share of the paneling and the leather or school-of
leather couches and the Contract Sheraton armchairs. But by the time you got
down to an assistant district attorney, like Larry Kramer, you were looking at
Good Enough for Government Work when it came to interior decoration.
The two assistant district attorneys who shared the office with him, Ray
Andriutti and Jimmy Caughey, were sitting sprawled back in the swivel chairs.
There was just enough floor space in the room for three metal desks, three
swivel chairs, four filing cabinets, an old coat stand with six savage hooks
sticking out from it, and a table bearing a Mr. Coffee machine and a
promiscuous heap of plastic cups and spoons and a gummy collage of paper
napkins and white sugar envelopes and pink saccharine envelopes stuck to a
maroon plastic tray with a high sweet-smelling paste composed of spilled coffee
and Cremora powder. Both Andriutti and Caughey were sitting with their legs
crossed in the same fashion. The left ankle was resting on top of the right
knee, as if they were such studs, they couldn’t have crossed their legs any
farther if they had wanted to. This was the accepted sitting posture of
Homicide, the most manly of the six bureaus of the District Attorney’s Office.
Both had their jackets off and hung with the perfect give-a-shit
carelessness on the coatrack. Their shirt collars were unbuttoned, and their
necktie knots were pulled down an inch or so. Andriutti was rubbing the back
of his left arm with his right hand, as if it itched. In fact, he was feeling
and admiring his triceps, which he pumped up at least three times a week by
doing sets of French curls with dumbbells at the New York Athletic Club.
Andriutti could afford to work out at the Athletic Club, instead of on a carpet
between a Dracaena fragrans tub and a convertible couch, because he
didn’t have a wife and a child to support in an $888-a-month ant colony in the
West Seventies. He didn’t have to worry about his triceps and his deltoids and
his lats deflating. Andriutti liked the fact that when he reached around behind
one of his mighty arms with the other hand, it made the widest muscles of his
back, the lats, the latissima dorsae, fan out until they practically split his
shirt, and his pectorals hardened into a couple of mountains of pure muscle.
Kramer and Andriutti were of the new generation, in which the terms triceps,
deltoids, latissima dorsae, and pectoralis major were better known than the
names of the major planets. Andriutti rubbed his triceps a hundred and twenty
times a day, on the average.
And that’s just the scene and status. The dialogue continues with the obligatory obscenities and a glimpse of “donkey loyalty”, as Wolfe calls the tribal ties that contrast the “Favor Bank” of the legal system.
Rest in Peace Tom Wolfe, and thank you for your works that contributed to our awareness and understanding of this ever perplexing world.
Helen Szamuely (Image taken from Pete North’s blog.)
We learned belatedly of Helen Szamuely’s passing.
Helen was a historian, an English patriot — a founder of what was to become the Brexit movement, a researcher, literary critic, public intellectual and political commentator and prolific writer.
The Telegraph‘s obituary is a bit harsh (perhaps payback for deserved slights) but gives some background. Richard North, Helen’s long-term collaborator on the great EUReferendum blog, has kind and interesting remarks about Helen, and a video of Helen speaking, here. Richard’s son Pete shares thoughtful reminiscences about Helen here. She was prominent in London conservative political and intellectual circles but those of us “across the pond” had to make do with her online presence. I wish I had met her in person.
Helen wrote or contributed to numerous blogs. Besides EUReferendum the Chicago Boyz blogroll includes Conservative History Journal and Your Freedom and Ours and perhaps one or two others I’ve overlooked. She was also active on Facebook, Twitter and who knows where else on social media. Lex and I invited her to contribute to this blog and she very generously and cheerfully did so over the years. She was brilliant and erudite with a wide range of interests which she was always ready to discuss. I will miss her.
RIP, Aleha HaShalom. Our condolences to Helen’s daughter, Katharine.
—-
Lex adds:
Very sad. There was a period of many years, until recently, where I was in almost daily communication with Helen, as part of a group that included James C. Bennett. Helen was a brilliant, opinionated, sometimes prickly, deeply-learned, patriotic, liberty-loving woman. She was a strong and early proponent of Britain leaving the EU. She was right, she was way ahead of her time, and I am glad she lived to see PM May sign the notice of withdrawal. I considered Helen a real friend, despite never meeting in person, and it is sad that I never will now. Just on my current Gmail account, I have 1,879 email threads including Helen going back to 2005. She was a big presence, for me and for many others. Rest in peace, Helen. We are still here, pushing for all the things you believed in and fought for.
[. . .]
Once, early in my correspondence with Helen I asked “By the way, is your name pronounced SHAMwelly?” She responded: “No, it’s a Hungarian name, so the sz is pronounced s. The Poles pronounce things the wrong way round.”
