Why The Name?

Why the name, you ask? It comes from T. E. Lawrence’s epigraph for his autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Its first verse reads:

I loved you, so I drew these tides of
Men into my hands
And wrote my will across the
Sky and stars
To earn you freedom, the seven
Pillared worthy house,
That your eyes might be
Shining for me
When we came.

We’re not a poetry magazine, obviously. (And Lawrence took the image from Proverbs.) But our goal is to be objectively worthy, and provide a capacious house for intellectual output and interchange. “Worthy” as used in our title therefore means both “worthwhile,” unlike the vast majority of politically and historically oriented discourse today, as well as “excellent,” in the sense that the goal of our writings is objective excellence and worth, not adherence to some particular ideology, or to any individual’s or group’s program.