Culture
A confession: I’ve played along from home with the reality TV show fad. As MTV’s Real World spanned my life from high school to college, I used to joke that, were I on the show, I’d be the one kicked off midseason, and life confirmed that joke all too often. By the time Survivor hit…
Reviewing Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, Duncan Currie emphasizes that advocates for the poor (and such) focus on the wrong measure of social progress: Mobility, not inequality, is the key indicator of economic opportunity. The two are not necessarily correlated: If income inequality has gone up since the early 1980s,…
Friday night was my construction company’s Christmas party, and it won’t surprise Anchor Rising readers to hear that I spent most of it bantering with a twentysomething carpenter who is currently straining his daily energies to take night classes in Boston. Having vivid memories of the automotive experience that such an endeavor entails made my…
Mark Steyn looks to Vermont for the creeping of Europe’s demographic trends into the United States: … in a very basic sense there is no “state”: Graying ponytailed hippies and chichi gay couples aren’t enough of a population base to run a functioning jurisdiction. To modify Howard Dean, Vermont is the way liberals think America…
Mary Eberstadt notes that, leading up to the turn of the millennium, the taboo against pedophilia appeared to be next up on the list of cultural norms to undermine: The phenomenon of pedophilia chic revealed the intensely troubling possibility that society, especially literate and enlightened society, was in the process of sanctioning certain exceptions to…
If I were the type to cling to my guns and paranoia, this might strike me as some sort of pre-conditioning. “Look, Johnny and Suzie, it’s normal to hand your guns to the nice man from the government.” Children in Providence and East Providence can trade toy guns for real candy or toys on Friday…
In the comments to this morning’s post on Bush’s reviving poll numbers, Mike Cappelli expresses his concerns, generally, about the attitudes and worldviews of up-and-coming generations. It brought to mind something that I’ve noticed, as if all of a sudden, over the past year: This texting thing has become a real problem on the construction…
I’ve been meaning to offer kudos for this excellent letter by David Carlin, who is, somewhat surprisingly, a sociology and philosophy professor at CCRI: The question of whether or not anti-SSM people are motivated by bigotry is an empirical question, and I submit (as would Dr. Harrop, I believe) that if their motives were empirically…
You’ve seen this news, I imagine: Swiss voters on Sunday overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets, barring construction of the iconic mosque towers in a surprise move that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population. Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and…
Having some kind of head cold nastiness for the better part of a week has left me more befuddled than usual and less able to focus thanks to various apothecary concoctions. Here’s what I’ve been muttering about…. Apparently, Gen. Treasurer Frank Caprio is going to campaign as a right-of-center progressive. Tiger Woods has garnered a…