Culture
David Goldman captures something well in modern society, within the setting of Richard Wagner’s operas: Unlike Flaubert or Tolstoy, Wagner flatters his audience with the conceit that their libidinous impulses resonate with the Will of the World, and that their petty passions have the same cosmic significance as Isolde’s or Kundry’s. That was the debut…
Even the jaded among us might be surprised by the absurd longevity of the “Uproar over [Bristol] Palin” on Dancing with the Stars. It’s difficult to ignore, though, the fact that such pop-cultural controversies can be relatively benign stand-ins for more substantial ideological and political battles: This latest reality show tempest highlights the power of…
Although admitting that “many students will thrive in their four years on campus… with dignity and sense of self intact,” Mary Eberstadt offers reason for concern about the social climate on American campuses: In 2006, a particularly informative (if also exquisitely depressing) contribution to understanding hookups was made by Unprotected, a book first published anonymously.…
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby marks the coming of aggressive-atheist season. (For some, of course, every season is aggressive atheist season.) This year, the [American Humanist Association] is taking a more combative tone. It is spending $200,000 to “directly challenge biblical morality’” in advertisements appearing on network and cable TV, as well as in newspapers,…
The always interesting Stanley Aronson unfortunately perpetuated a culturally destructive myth in a recent essay addressing whether security is really all that desirable a feeling: The unreasonable ones, those noisy, disruptive and often disagreeable ones among us, invest their energies in altering their environment rather than themselves, fighting against contemporary realities rather than floating with…
Barry Rubin offers an anecdote with which many of us will likely be sympathetic: My son is playing on a local soccer team which has lost every one of its games, often by humiliating scores. The coach is a nice guy, but seems an archetype of contemporary thinking: he tells the kids not to care…
It would be a mistake to make a splash of the quiet trickle of societal conversion, but it can be a source of hope to note this sort of thing: A handful of Roman Catholic convents are contradicting the decades-long slide in the number of women choosing to devote their lives to the sisterhood. And…
Catching up on my reading, I highlighted the following, from First Thing editor Joseph Bottum’s thoughts on the Ground Zero mosque controversy: Real democracy is messy. It’s got protestors and agitators and banners and manners and morals and financial pressures and gossip and policemen on horses keeping an eye out to make sure it doesn’t…
Taking some legislation that President Obama has proposed as his cue, Andrew Biggs makes the case against legislative corrections to the gender pay gap. All such arguments come down to the point that there are legitimate reasons that men, in aggregate, make more money than women, and Biggs gives the underlying reason why that can…
Even the most plain, factual description of Andrew Conley’s murder of his kid brother is chillingly disturbing: The teenager told police he choked his brother while they were wrestling until the boy passed out. He said he then dragged his brother into the kitchen, put on gloves and continued strangling him for at least 20…