Culture
Popular wisdom insists that social issues are a political wedge wielded from the right to divide Americans for political gain. Experience suggests that the cynical aggressors, in this sense, are actually more likely to reside on the left. Not for no reason has President Obama played the “don’t ask, don’t tell” card as his political…
With the intention of zooming out a bit for some mid-afternoon reflection, I note Robert Louis Wilken’s review of a book by Tom Holland and its striking proclamation: That, at least, is the thesis of Tom Holland’s new book, The Forge of Christendom, a provocative and elegantly written account of the end of the first…
On the day that the news section of the Providence Journal acknowledged that abstinence-only sex-ed programs could potentially be successful, the editors of the Lifebeat section thought it necessary to rush to the defense of their modern kulturkampf with the headline, “Program blamed for rise in teen pregnancy” on the section’s front page. Of course,…
His specific topic is contemporary Judaism, but Ben Greenberg makes a worthwhile point related to pluralism more generally: Orthodox Judaism was supposed to founder on rugged American individualism, but quite the opposite has happened: A Judaism assembled at a buffet of individual preferences has small interest for young adults seeking direction and meaning in their…
Prediction: This is going to turn out to be a major issue in a decade or two: Smart phones, MP3 players, laptops and other devices are the air kids breathe — perhaps too deeply, judging from a new study that shows children ages 8 to 18 devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes…
First, a line that’s supremely relevant for those of us who’ve been beating our heads against a wall of political inertia, in Rhode Island: In my experience, compulsively objective scientists are evenly matched, or even outmatched, by shamelessly subjective humanists. More than once I’ve been shocked by colleagues who seem unable to grasp that richly…
BobN makes an excellent comment: Libraries were all we had before the Internet. They were the original broad and deep pool of knowledge available to all. Of course, the original free library as invented by Ben Franklin was funded by private benefactors who subscribed to its capital and operating costs purely as a matter of…
Having challenged the premises (and the math) of naysayers of abstinence-only education, I don’t find these results surprising: Billed as the first rigorous research to show long-term success with an abstinence-only approach, the study differed from traditional programs that have lost federal and state support in recent years. The classes didn’t preach saving sex until…
Bob Kerr writes in yesterday’s Providence Journal The first time I saw a laptop on a bar top was at Local 121 in Providence a few months ago. It was a moment of social breakdown. In a place meant for the soothing embrace of a cocktail, a woman apparently saw no problem, no code violations,…
Internet technology and revolutions in communications create a razor’s edge between magnificent and dangerous. People are decreasingly held down by a lack of connections or resources, but by the same token, there is less of a vetting process for advancement, and the direct chute to stardom obviates a sense of long, slow investment in one’s…