Culture
Last night’s Violent Roundtable on the Matt Allen Show was the most difficult public appearance/talk show that I’ve done yet. Probably because Matt correctly assessed that an hour of harmony wouldn’t have been very interesting, his questions touched on a number of weighty subjects on which expressing comprehensive thoughts on the spot is not easy.…
My closest friend during my fresh-from-high-school year at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh was a small-venue professional wrestler. (Were I inclined to categorize it as a sport, rather than a form of performance, I’d have characterized him as a player in the minor league.) He and his twin brother were a bad-guy tag team of…
Growing up in the ’80s, with all of the romanticizing of the ’60s that was fashionable, then, I thought it pleasantly discordant to hear George Harrison describe his disappointment in the Beatles’ visit to Haight-Ashbury, where the big scene consisted of “a bunch of spotty teenagers” (or something close thereto). Less pleasant was learning, some…
I’ve been traveling for the last couple weeks, and last Wednesday while doing some work holed up in my hotel room, I stumbled on “The Goode Family“. It made me chuckle quite a few times. As described in today’s ProJo: Though it will no doubt be labeled right-wing agitprop by some of its trashed targets,…
Fully expecting scurrilous attacks that deliberately miss my point, I was going to put this one aside, but it nagged at me at periods throughout the day, as I constructed a client’s two-flight deck stairs, so here it is: Am I alone in finding there to be something discomfiting about the Providence Journal‘s making this…
As Americans accede to the concerted push to break down our mores and cultural definitions, we shouldn’t be surprised if there’s an increase in this sort of double-take news items: Two men and a woman, ages 18, 19 and 20, have been indicted for allegedly raping a fellow University of Rhode Island student on campus…
John Rosemond offers a reminder that surprises most especially in the degree to which it reads as revolutionary: A child, lacking farsightedness, does not know how to govern himself. He does not know what is in his best interest. He is apt to prefer that which is bad for him and reject that which is…
Although it’s really tangential to the main subject of the article (which is the effect of high-tech communications on real relationships), this quotation hits some notes that have been a minor theme, of late: “TWO HUNDRED FIFTY years ago,” [Saint Joseph’s University social ethics professor James] Caccamo says, “our role models would have been people…
It may be that a partial explanation for this … Furthermore, “It was not manly to put a lot of time and effort into academics,” said Edwards. It’s not cool to study, to read the book: “Sometimes it’s not cool to even buy the book. But you’ve got to ace the test. You’ve got to…
I can most definitely relate to Michael Crawford’s observations: When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. “I was always tired,” he writes, “and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all.” He quit after five…
