Quick Read
Or rather, he would be if anybody were reporting on the story. As Republican state representative Brian Newberry noted a week ago on Twitter, Jordan Goyette’s story is not one that anybody in Rhode Island’s mainstream is keen to cover: If you picture the news media as a filtering machine, Goyette falls easily through one…
Somewhere or other in my social media flow, I recently came across the outrage of a moment, wherein a director of communications for a school district jumped in to halt a Dr. Seuss reading that had prompted discussion of America’s racial past: The assistant director of communications for Olentangy Local School District abruptly stopped the…
Perhaps my favorite moment in all of music ever comes in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The music is a bouncy march, and in the libretto, the singers are proclaiming an intent to take paradise by storm, like “a victor.” The mood changes suddenly, however, and I’ve always thought it a deliberate statement…
Like it or not, we’re all tangled up with each other, so in some degree, the choices we make and the value we create or destroy affect everybody. How we structure society is a decision about how we utilize “our” resources. That doesn’t mean maximizing efficiency or economic advancement or anything else must be the…
A skeptical reader can find many things worthy of comment in David McRaney’s How Minds Change even beyond the author’s central objective of training people how to manipulate others psychologically to implement radical policies. Not wanting to write a book in response, I’ll probably just bring them up as they become relevant. One side point…
It’s “climate change,” of course; that’s the easy go-to answer for anything having to do with the natural environment. Even when there’s a more proximate explanation, the global bogeyman has to be tacked on, as the Boston Globe’s Dharna Noor does in this case: The culprit behind all those dead trees: Drought, which hit New England…
I know, I know… put something else on the list why don’t you? Well, this is an area that cannot be forgotten: Progressives have spent decades deliberately invading institutions with an eye toward turning them politically to their favor, which mean first making them political. I’m not among those on the other side who believes…
At the moment, it appears to be simply talk, but this is a concerning idea for Democrat Rhode Island Senate President Dominick Ruggerio to float: Ruggerio floated an outside-the-box idea for the state takeover of Providence schools: He wants to work with the Rhode Island Foundation, the state’s largest philanthropic organization, to see if it…
That’s the question that comes to mind when I see an historical anecdote such as this from Jean-Marie Valheur (via Instapundit): You will often hear about his great speeches, wonderful quotes, witty little anecdotes here and there. Or insights into his complex marriage. His mental health issues and how he overcame them and carried on…
I’m midway through reading a book about the psychology of changing your mind, and the author apparently sees understanding the subject as an important tool in overcoming our polarization. I’ll have much more to say about the book, no doubt, not least to suggest that increasingly subtle psychological manipulation may be causing the polarization. After all,…