As many of you know, I’ve been focused on my Intentional Fathering project, and writing little beyond that which doesn’t wind up in a notebook (where it belongs), or transmogrified into a pseudonymous scrap of fiction in some literary venue with a smaller budget than this shoestring blog I can’t bring myself to pull the …
I’ve done something I really had no business doing, and in that same spirit of foolishness, I want to tell you about it. I’ve met a great many fathers over the years who are quietly struggling. They’ve come from broken homes, from abusive homes, from homes where they feel like their own fathers failed to …
The game works like this: Set your sights on someone whose politics you hate. This is the easy part. Everything is politics now, and everything that is not your thing deserves to be hated. It’s what sets you above the others, how stupid and wrong and hateable they are. Got a target? Good. Now the …
If you follow the tempests that froth over Twitter’s teapot on the regular, you may have seen the teeth-gnashing inspired by this Catholic priest’s tweet about a female parishioner’s shoulders: He’s since been run off Twitter. His antagonists employed two predictable lines of attack: 1) Naked lady shoulders are not the sex scandal Catholic priests …
Six days ago: an ambulance ride with my 11 year-old to a trauma center near the South Carolina coliseum where he and 2,000 other youngsters have been wrestling. His neck braced, a board under his back, tears trickling from the corners of his eyes as he chuckles at the paramedic’s dad jokes. I am not …
I feel like I should acknowledge that it’s been a year since I’ve written anything here, though I feel pretentious saying so, because it’s not like anyone has been waiting with bated breath, double-checking his calendar, pining for more posts. But yes, a year. Suffice to say I’ve been busy with other projects and not …
I don’t know how I got to the point where I’m inclined to disbelieve anything an academic claims. I’m not anti-intellectual. I read stuff. I even hold a PhD, and a Master of Fine Arts on top of that. I can show you mathematically why a single-member plurality voting system tends to yield two major …
Now that Spring has sprung in my neck of the woods, I’m pondering what I might cut down, burn, plant, fix, and build, which—because I am more reader than farmer or carpenter—turns my mind to books. So here’s a few books, essays, and stories I’ve enjoyed during my winter hibernation that I think might interest …
The recent tragedy of a driverless Uber car killing a pedestrian in Arizona is raising questions about the future of this technology. I think we should ask some more fundamental questions, like where scientists get the chutzpah to work on driverless cars in the first place, especially when there are so many more important projects to which …
Another revelation of systematic, years-long sexual exploitation of girls in England, and the accompanying failure of men whose jobs are to protect the vulnerable. A failure driven by ineptitude, class bias, and fear of racism accusations amidst a judicial machinery that responds more reliably against thought crimes than actual crimes against children. You can read …
Trying to get your internet provider to fix a problem can be dreadful, so based on recent experience, I offer you this handy little guide. Feel free to print it at no charge and keep it by your phone during the long hours ahead. When you signed up for service, you were quoted a speed. …
I’m not accustomed to being called a Nazi, at least not before 7 a.m. on a Monday. I was standing in front of the Supreme Court when it happened, holding a sign. My interlocutor was an administrator from the City University of New York. He held a different sign, along with the conviction that people …
Since the day Cain raised a rock to Abel’s head, men have been about the business of slaughtering one another. Oceans of blood spilled and still something pierces our innermost hearts when it is a child who does the killing, when his victims are other children, when his motive seems nothing other than to fill …
The thing about babies is they don’t care about your big plans. This past year I’ve had occasion to laugh at myself many times, a man like me, middle-aged and rooted in habit, suddenly a father again of newborns. Yes, that’s plural. Twins. Boys, of course, because for the rest of my life it seems …
My oldest son’s English teacher had this great idea, corresponding with the class reading Hamlet, for we parents to pen whatever wisdom we’ve tried to impart to our children and give it to them, so they have the option of sharing some of it when the class goes over Polonius’s advice to his own son …
I’ve not been what you would call a grateful person. The truth is, for most of my life I’ve been a surly, critical, stew-on-the-inside-when-things-don’t-go-precisely-my-way kind of person. In the movie Sling Blade, Dwight Yoakam’s character Doyle indicts himself as “assholish.” Yeah, that shoe fits. I probably don’t have to tell you ingratitude is like a …
A lot of people are talking about a short story in The New Yorker right now. A short story. If you care at all about writing and literature and the seemingly inexorable Western slide into voluntary aliteracy, this seems like a good thing. But so maybe “Cat Person” isn’t for you. Some people want to read …
I don’t know much about Harvey Weinstein, but I now bear more information about him than I ever set out to possess. All I can think, when I see pictures of his piggish, blinking face, is that a rot must have set into that place in his heart where in other men reside generosity, protectiveness, …
As I write this they haven’t determined a final count of the dead and dying in Las Vegas. How many homes are filled this night with weeping? Too many, is one answer. Not enough, is another. I have nothing to say about the law, except that if opinions about it were limited to those who …
If you’re starting here, you might care to first read my new Wall Street Journal op-ed about the ruckus over Confederate monuments. If you started there, then welcome to here. I assume you’re either pleased or outraged or puzzled. Me too. About a lot of things. So I don’t have a structured narrative for this …
I’d like to thank Debtwell University for this opportunity to address your student body. Furthermore, I want to express my deepest hope that your original speaker overcomes [FOOD POISONING/ IRS DIFFICULTIES/ SUBPOENA/ ETC] without undue complications. [PAUSE. MAKE EYE CONTACT. SQUINT AS IF DRAWING ON A WELL OF DEEP WISDOM, BUT NOT SO HARD THAT YOU …
So institutions are crumbling, right? The fabric of shared culture is threadbare, and our intellectual class is what you’d expect were you to put the sheep in Orwell’s Animal Farm in charge of administering doctoral dissertations. It almost makes one thankful the average American attention span is that of a moth who can’t afford his Ritalin refill—our …
This is a post for men. This is not a post for women. If you are a woman, I respectfully request that you stop reading immediately. I’m fixing to explain a couple of things, and I certainly don’t want to fall into the sin of mansplaining. So skedaddle, ladies. That includes you in the back. …
So I’m eating pineapple and considering this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners and these are not unrelated, because both activities aim at healthfulness. The truth is I’d rather be eating Krispy Kreme and reading Neuromancer, but my cholesterol has taken a slight uptick. It puts me in mind of my mortality, yet even as I approach …
“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” This admonition from St. Silouan is appropriate for Good Friday, when most of Christendom commemorates Christ’s descent into hell, where he shatters its captives’ chains. Many modern Western theologians have abandoned this teaching, but even if you reject it you are still, if you are a Christian, …
Redesigning my blog was not a rational decision. I mean, consider the facts. Fact One: Nobody reads any more. The data are pretty conclusive. We’re all eye-glued to our apps, or gaming, or enjoying the golden age of television. Sometimes all three at once. Nobody wastes time on long sentences stacked like shelves in a musty …
They say all great men have a morning routine, so I figured I ought to rush right out and get me one of those. I’ll belabor the elements of that routine while subtly flattering myself for it some other time; the point today is that it often includes listening to Writer’s Almanac while I make …
The mice think I am a god. Not the God, but definitely a god. Their tithe is a fresh-hollowed hazelnut, rolled into the center of my floor every morning. The nuts come, no doubt, from the two-pound bag they stole last month. I don’t know how long it took them, only that one morning the …
I guess before you read the rest of this you should decide how you feel about the fact that I didn’t vote for either of them. Nor did I vote for the Libertarian, or the lady who makes Bernie Sanders look like Milton Friedman and whose name I’ve already forgotten. I voted in every other …
“So, Dad, did you know Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are having a debate tonight?” “Yep.” “Are we watching it?” “Nope.” “Why not?” “For the same reasons we don’t watch German porn, or videos about how to treat gangrene.” “Dad.” “Also because I rented Jungle Book.” “Dad.” “Trust me—it’s the new one, with the digital …