Culture
It is most definitely consistent with a religious conservative’s worldview to argue that experience of happiness is a cocktail of biological, financial, cultural, social, and psychological factors, but I question whether the sort of scientific differentiation that University of Mary Washington Psychology Professor Holly Schiffrin attempts in a recent syndicated column is really all that…
Reader mangeek left this curious comment last week: A lot of my progressive friends are pretty easy to find during the days and nights: Coffee shops and bars, respectively. I still haven’t figured out how to live without an income, so I schlep it to work fifty hours a week. I’ll bet Justin has a…
Jonah Goldberg posted a letter in the Corner that’s worth reading in its entirety, but here’s the crux: To be blunt, in the days of my grandfather, a good sized group of men would have peeled off from the funeral, and informed Rev. Phelps he was not welcome within eyesight of the funeral, and that…
This photograph brings home the reason that I’m fundamentally opposed to the notion of “hate crimes” and, indeed, identity groups overall: The young man in the foreground is Tyler Clementi, who recently plunged to his death from the George Washington Bridge (which spans from New Jersey to New York City), apparently as an emotional response…
I suppose it’s generally been taken differently, coming from a politically and theologically conservative traditionalist like me, but it looks like the thinking about the origins of homosexuality are moving toward what I’ve long contended to be the case (here presented by research psychologist Jesse Bering, who is, himself, gay): Another caveat is that researchers…
Ancient mythology proves that parricide isn’t anything new. Lizzie Borden proves that it isn’t new to our region. But Joel Beaulieu’s alleged patricide and attempted matricide in Tiverton has come mere months after the sentencing of James Soares across the bay in Warren for the same crime, and a mere two years after the act…
In one of those fortuitous instances that creates the sense of a plot to life, this story just arrived at the end of my driveway with the morning paper: Deaton and Daniel Kahneman reviewed surveys of 450,000 Americans conducted in 2008 and 2009 for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index that included questions on day-to-day happiness and…
In a rare personal insistence on sitting down and watching a movie, last night, my wife and I viewed The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. Based on some quick skimming of reviews around the Internet art of the allure of the movie appears to owed at least some debt to…
Some strains of Darwinian secularism are speckled throughout with signs of the mansions and vast estates of their most prominent promoters. Such appears to be the case with Matt Ridley’s philosophy, as presented in George Gilder’s review of his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves: Reason, to Ridley’s mind, impels us relentlessly forward and…
The Islamic practice of women’s veiling, extending to the absurd and offensive burqa, presents difficult questions for the West. Who are we, we wonder, to trample other cultures voluntarily perpetuated? Worse yet is the question of whether a society can stop intolerance once it has granted itself permission to discriminate against that which it finds…