Culture
Given the dramatic way in which my tastes and my morality have changed in the last 20 years, I expected (when I finally got around to watching it) that I’d appreciate the dark artistry of the D.C. movie, Joker, even as I was repelled by its nihilistic framing. As dark art (so to speak), it…
The headline that the Providence Journal gave to Mark Patinkin’s latest column puts things in a useful context: “It’s just a cold, right? I thought a booster made me invulnerable — but I got COVID.” If we step back a pace and look at things objectively, we might indeed wonder what makes COVID something other than…
Back in October, a report from the BBC caught the attention of the trans movement because it conveyed the experience of lesbians who’d felt pressured into straight sex with trans-women (i.e., men presenting themselves as women): One woman described her dates with trans-women as conversion therapy: “I knew I wasn’t attracted to them but internalised…
Canceling the remaining classes among a group of presumably very fit police candidates because one person with symptoms and six people without symptoms tested positive for COVID shows how crazy and weak we’ve become. We’re going to be paying for this recent shift in attitudes for decades, and one suspects the people pushing it expect…
In case you’re wondering (like I did) whether Elon Musk walks the walk he’s talking here, he does: “I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate,” Musk explained on Monday evening, as recorded by the New York Post. “And yet, so many people, including smart…
Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the school-shooting story in Oxford, Michigan, is that it shouldn’t have happened at all, judging from details provided by Tim Meads in the Daily Wire: The morning of the attack, school administrators met with the boy’s parents and showed them disturbing notes found that day indicating the boy was willing…
Trinity Rep’s open letter in response to a mostly positive review of A Christmas Carol in the Providence Journal isn’t just thinned skinned; it’s chillingly fascist.
In the middle of the Sixteenth Century, St. Francis Xavier wrote to his friend, St. Ignatius of Loyola, of his experience ministering to Christians in India: We have visited the villages of the new converts who accepted the Christian religion a few years ago. No Portuguese live here, the country is so utterly barren and…
Upon discovering that it’s permissible to sip hard liquor, I’ve been getting into whiskey in the past year. From that perspective, I find this approach from Heaven Hill distillery simply bizarre: To celebrate what they view as a just outcome, some whiskey lovers began purchasing bottles of “Rittenhouse Rye.” The brand name is derived not from…
When we remove the sacred from our traditions and sacralize our ordinary traditions, our gratitude can become a target, with nobody authorized to offer forgiveness.