Culture
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…
Former CIA official Herbert Meyer has an excellent article about the Left’s strategy and methods for radically transforming the United States of America, touching on some broad themes in current events: At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it. The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is…
Do we really need to transform Sherlock Holmes into a prior generation’s James Bond, as this trailer indicates a forthcoming movie will do? It’s as if we’ve gone from the anti-heroes of late-twentieth-century affection to obligatorily super heroes. It ought to be enough that Mr. Holmes is uncommonly insightful; he needn’t be a ninja, as…
I’m not sure when beauty pageants (you know, wouldn’t they be considered as objectifying women?) became so PC, but the flap about Miss California wasn’t really about previously undisclosed semi-nekkid pics–it was about Miss California Carrie Prejean saying she disagreed with the concept of gay marriage. The trumped-up nature of the bogus picture charges was,…
The Providence Journal editorial board argues against hate-crime legislation on the grounds that it “can empower an increasingly intrusive government, already snooping enthusiastically into private communications” and classifies the citizenry in “protected” and “unprotected” groups. The editorial notes one worrying example: John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, notes that protesters have already been punished…
The other afternoon, Dan Yorke was discussing, on 630AM/99.7FM WPRO, the human trafficking side of Rhode Island’s legal prostitution business, and several callers put forward the argument maintaining the occupation’s legality in Rhode Island prevents a slide down the slippery slope of interference in our bedrooms. The obvious response that came to mind was that…
One bullet stuck out in Mark Patinkin’s latest scattered-thoughts column: It doesn’t work to seek your kids’ sympathy by saying you had a harder day than they did, because as far as they’re concerned, you’re supposed to. So true is this that it’s typically a mistake to do the hardship tit-for-tat with one’s children. Better…
David Goldman (aka “Spengler“) writes in First Things: After a $15 trillion reduction in asset values, Americans are now saving as much as they can. Of course, if everyone saves and no one spends, the economy shuts down, which is precisely what is happening. The trouble is not that aging baby boomers need to save.…
I suspect this would be much less of a story without the wordplay and image building that it enables: After Lesh, who had never publicly supported a presidential candidate, threw his lot in with Obama, he was anxious to do a benefit concert for him. But he was all but done with The [Grateful] Dead,…
Having previously confessed a susceptibility to the inevitable, cheesy scene in movies at which the underdog team prevails, I’ve held on to Mark Patinkin’s recent column about bench-warmers and failures ranging from Harry Truman to Lucille Ball. Such stories are inherently compelling — hopeful and affirmative of a sense of justice and good in the…