Justin Katz
Jonah Goldberg has opened up the topic of ensoulment with respect to abortion, and an email that he published concerning the Christian view doesn’t take its conclusions quite far enough to be entirely relevant to his broader stance on abortion: What Christianity actually teaches is that man—and man alone—is a psychosomatic entity consisting of a…
Whatever the merits of its claims, this argument from the attorney general’s office (concerning why it won’t answer the governor’s call to trim its workforce) is a head-shaker: The attorney general’s office employs 234 workers, barely enough staff to fill the current need, according to Christopher Cotta, director of administration and finance for the attorney…
Every now and then, patterns emerge from my scattershot reading habits. Here’s Jeff Jacoby on public education in America: Americans differ on same-sex marriage and evolution, on the importance of sports and the value of phonics, on the right to bear arms and the reverence due the Confederate flag. Some parents are committed secularists; others…
Knowing full well that it may keep you up too late tonight or get you off to a delayed start in the morning, I hereby introduce you to Chat Noir. Click the light circles to turn them dark and trap the cat before it escapes. Anybody who still has an extra second in the day…
During a commercial break from Kitchen Nightmares, featuring master chef turned restaurateur self-help guru Gordon Ramsay, I read the following comment from George to my Too Cheery post: Yesterday morning some drunk fell flat on his face at a RIPTA bus stop. 7 AM! Just think of the cost of having this loser in our…
Here are two additional rankings across which I’ve recently come: Rhode Island is one of six states that spends more money from the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) on adults than on children But perhaps that’s because the states ranks 44th (that’s bad) on the Milken Institute’s Chronic Disease Index. How many horrifying rankings,…
Anthony DiBella’s column in yesterday’s Providence Journal has to be read to be believed: The immutable fact is that the bulk of a state’s revenue is based on scale or size. Unless we are going to merge with Massachusetts or Connecticut or become part of the United States of New England, we will always be…
I’ve got a piece in today’s Providence Journal explaining two realities that ought to be considered in tandem: that Rhode Island is toppling or driving away those who make enough to be net gains for the state to the benefit of those who are net drains, and that there are really much better opportunities for…
Such stories are terrible to hear: Gail Corvello figured that if she and her neighbors held out for about five years, they would be able to get out from under the nightmare of the soil contamination in the Bay Street neighborhood that has had a stranglehold on their lives since 2002. She was wrong. On…
Jay Nordlinger poses a series of questions that ought to be asked of the current crop of presidential candidates: Putin’s latest attacks on U.S. missile defense remind me of something: Do Democratic presidential candidates agree with those attacks? Sympathize with them? And, if one of them is elected president, are our efforts to defend ourselves,…