Culture
Looking at the cartoon on the cover of this week’s New Yorker magazine, it struck me that cartoons do not easily lend themselves to third party satire. In a press release announcing its latest issue, The New Yorker describes the cartoon thusly: On the cover of the July 21, 2008, issue of the The New…
Jonah Goldberg notes an incident of a county commissioner in Texas being attacked for using the phrase “black hole” in precisely the metaphorical manner in which it is used regularly across the nation. Writes Goldberg: Obviously, there’s something to be said for ignoring the childish grievance-peddling that motivates so much of this nonsense. But the…
Cross-posted at Spinning Clio. The first thing I thought of when I read the story about the 17 wanna-be baby mamas of Gloucester, Massachusetts were the teenage girls who lay at the center of the Salem Witch Trials. No doubt, this was probably because of the proximity of Gloucester to Salem Village (now Danvers, Mass.).…
The immorality of wealth is a notion that has been in the air lately, with the latest example being David Brooks’s lamentation of “The Great Seduction” in the New York Times: The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries,…
One must read carefully before taking or rejecting the claims of such studies vociferously, but there’s a general point that can be extracted from news about a slowing down of the decrease of sexual activity among teens: The latest figures renewed the heated debate about sex-education classes that focus on abstinence until marriage, which began…
Two items on today’s reading list have a disturbing link. First the tale of the Internet as a pimping tool for under-18 prostitutes: Well-known as a free online community bulletin board, craigslist has gained the dubious distinction of being a popular site for pimps to market young girls to customers, or “johns.” The young prostitutes…
Mark Bauerlein has a new book in which he calls the current under-30 crowd the “Dumbest Generation,” though it’s not really their fault so much as that they are growing up in the “digital age.” The Boston Globe has pruned out “8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation“. I’ll give you the reasons, but…
An odd tangential statement from a Rhode Island Catholic article (not yet online) about the need for young adults and children to be careful online: “You’re at the most difficult period of your life,” Quirk began, describing the leap from childhood to adulthood as a “hard” period. “It’s challenging to make it through in one…
It would seem that the manifest circle whereby violence on TV produces violence in life is complete: An afterschool fight that drew 50 to 60 student onlookers in front of Roger Williams Middle School was posted on the Web site YouTube, making Providence part of a growing phenomena in which teenagers use technology to publicize…
Just after headlines concerning the large American prison population and my slap-dash finding that Americans don’t like criminals and feel very safe comes an interesting editorial report from BBC North America Editor Justin Webb: What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is…
