Culture
One of the peculiarities that native Rhode Islanders perhaps do not even notice about their state — at least in the East Bay — is the proliferation of historical cemeteries, tucked into suburban and urban corners alike, here and there, such as this unkempt one on Water St., in Portsmouth: George Carlin used to have…
Kimberly Dennis summarizes a cliché in such a way as to give me hope that maybe differing perspectives really are just a clarification away from harmonization (via Paul Caron, via Glenn Reynolds): Successful entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists typically say they feel a responsibility to “give back” to society. But “giving back” implies they have taken something. What, exactly,…
Commenter David P. offers an insightful comment to my post on technology and brain development: Newspeak, the language invented by George Orwell for “1984,” nicely illustrates the connection between language and docility. In creating Newspeak the Party simplified the vocabulary as much as possible by eliminating many synonyms so that, for example, all the variations…
So now it’s recess. Well, as a former high-energy boy, I’m not sure what I’d done if I had been forced to while away all the hours of the school day in a structured environment. Back in my day, we had a morning and afternoon recess (plus a lunch break!). The promise of those pending…
I guess it’s among the hardships of wealth. Jeff Opdyke laments that his son doesn’t have the drive that he did, as a teenager, to earn money, mostly because he and his wife have admittedly been a bit too generous: We get a lot of satisfaction in doing that. But it comes with a pretty…
Lexington Green wonders where the ruling class gets the nerve: Why does an elite that is actually not admirable in what it does, and not effective or productive, that has added little or nothing of value to the civilizational stock, that cannot possibly do the things it claims it can do, that services rent-seekers and…
There’s a narrative in the air, and I herein offer only a few glances from my evening reading. Turn to Peggy Noonan for the general theme: But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don’t act as if they do. I think their detachment from how normal…
One wonders how the side of the culture war that proclaims itself “pro-science” will adjust its thinking in response to this finding (emphasis added): The participants’ mean age was 12.2 years; 53.5% were girls; and 84.4% were still enrolled at 24 months. Abstinence-only intervention reduced sexual initiation (risk ratio [RR], 0.67; 95% confidence interval [CI],…
Sara Hamdan laments, in the current First Things, the decline of dance as an art form. Given the sustained conditioning required of dancers — and the sustained attention of the audience — the art form doesn’t lend itself as easily as other arts to modern adaptations that allow practitioners to maintain the practice as a…
There may be more to the story, but it appears that University of Illinois Adjunct Associate Professor of Religious Studies Kenneth Howell has lost his job for the offense of teaching Catholic thought as if it might be worth considering as something more than a curious human error. Kenneth Howell was told after the spring…