Culture
“Where the hell else is a middle aged man gonna hook up with a young sexy hot sex slave in real life? Like the old saying goes, we want a ***** [whore] in the bedroom but a lady in the kitchen. Just don’t expect you gf [girlfriend] to be as whory as the real whores.…
I suppose I lack the grounds to object to Robert Whitcomb’s protestations in yesterday’s Providence Journal (not online) that his experience living in France doesn’t jibe with the warnings that he hears fellow Americans giving against socialized medicine: The ignorance and dishonesty in the U.S. health-care debate are beyond belief. … Then there are the…
By coincidence, each of the past two days brought a question from somebody about my political beginnings. The answer to the when is 9/11. Practical philosophy had always been appealing to me, but it had previously followed a literary and cultural context, rather than a political one. That changed on a September morning. It wouldn’t…
Oft overlooked, at the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, is Hester Prynne’s resistance to calls for her to become a sort of feminist messiah. Having turned toward prudence, she suggests that the archetypal woman will not conquer through deviancy, but through fulfillment of her feminine character. A recent letter from Don Rittman of…
Since we’re already on the topics of self reliance and freedom, it’s a good time to recall a Providence Journal editorial about a New Yorker who is suing everybody conceivable over his fall from Newport’s Cliff Walk. The fellow left the path, apparently required more protection than his own common sense to keep him from…
Aesthetically, it’s hard to disagree with Arthur Blaustein’s argument for the value of literature to civic health: Novels offer genuine hope for learning how to handle our daily personal problems—and those political issues of our communities and our country—in a moral and humane way. They can help us to understand the relationship between our inner…
Returning home from the Johnston, a couple of weeks ago, I floated along in the fast lane of 195, my mind flitting through political thoughts, and it took me a moment to register the fact that traffic in both of the other lanes had come to a crawl. A sign explained the reason: “Left two…
The New York Times article doesn’t claim a trend, instead following the efforts of a single teacher, Lorrie McNeill, with a class of gifted students, but one can be sure that the positive article in the publication formerly known as “the newspaper of record” will encourage more teachers to follow her lead. What McNeill has…
I’ll be the first to acknowledge the prominence of self interest in the development and ascendance of local taxpayer groups. Members take up political arms, as it were, for a variety of reasons, and often those reasons are decidedly materialistic in nature. Therewith comes the sliver of truth to Phil’s cartoonish characterization of the simmering…
I hadn’t heard of this (or don’t remember having heard of it) before reading Maggie Gallagher’s recent summary of the battle over same-sex marriage: When word spread at Harvard Law School last month that one of the most successful recruiters of its graduates, Ropes & Gray, was helping Catholic Charities explore ways to prevent same-sex…
