Some of you may enjoy my radical suggestion in today’s Wall Street Journal that the First Amendment doesn’t authorize teachers to indoctrinate children. It’s getting pushback from free-speech absolutists and folks who have faith The Market will sort everything out in the long run. My fear is that if we wait for the end of …
Well, it’s been a hell of a summer. Pestilence, economic destruction, bitter partisanship, and now, the politicians descend from their lairs to commence the quadrennial feeding season. It puts me in mind of Merle Haggard’s old standard: “If we can make it through December/ Everything’s gonna be alright.” I’ve been reading a lot, which means …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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, 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 …
Look, maybe it’s time we cash in our chips. Blow this popsicle stand and buy that cabin in the hills we’ve always talked about. Sink a well, set out the rabbit traps, and settle in for a long-ass winter. Don’t get me wrong—our republic has had a fine run. Not so long as some of …
When I was twelve, we were evicted from our house in Florida, a consequence either of Reaganomics or our failure to pay rent for three months, depending on whose story you wanted to believe. We faced a long, hungry drive back to North Carolina. A neighbor, also from our home state, called me over and …
Most of us have never endured war amidst our homes and so we can only imagine, if we care to, the terror that drives people to take their children and elderly parents and spouses and flee all they have known. Now they gather on the shores of the West, but they look like the lunatics …
Some of you may like my attempt, though it probably deserves more thought, to articulate why we pay little attention to big-money sports in my home. Here’s an excerpt: Now, let’s not quibble over semantics; I know the Canadians spent millions on a national curling center, that parents of gymnasts fork over thousands for training, …
I will tell you something about courage and cowardice. I will speak primarily about men, because I am a man, and because the evil that grieves me was glimpsed by men, and these men turned away their eyes. News accounts from England reveal that over 1,400 children in the borough of Rotherham were systematically brutalized …
Related to my previous post, I have an essay at Good Letters digging into the hypocrisy of evangelicals, as represented by the American Family Association, who simultaneously support the Drug War while demanding that we reject child refugees from that war. Here’s an excerpt: We sponsor both sides of this war; we constitute the primary …
A society doesn’t capsize all at once; it leans by degrees. It tilts, and the opinion mavens who are its deckhands rush about reassuring everyone that it’s the horizon that is at fault. We are finally leveling things, they say, now clip your belt to the rail so you don’t go overboard. The enlightened canter …
Forty days have passed quickly and the feasting is over, so I suppose I should start putting together words again. When it’s not on this novel I’m revising, my writing mind has been on science—on the art that is genuine science, and the bullying that is scientism, and our persistent modern confusion of the two. …
What happens when you gather thinkers in thrall to scientism, and ask them to list the most important books for civilization? A compendium that includes books on robot sex and immortality, but nothing on plumbing, or farming, or the God recognized by a third of the world’s population. As you might imagine, I take issue …
(Note: An expanded version of this essay—which attempts to address some of the objections leveled in the comments below as well as at The American Conservative—is over at On Faith.) I am angry, and so I hope you will forgive me for whatever I write that offends, unless you need offending, in which case I hope you …
Some of you might appreciate my latest essay for Good Letters. Others of you may not like it at all. Maybe it’s proof that I’m no less angry today than I was ten years ago, when some of you first started reading my little missives. I’d like to think I’m angry about more important things …
Those of you who read what I scribble here and elsewhere know I nurse a few curious theories about science, like that it ought to remain distinct from scientism, and that the scientific process taught in schools is hokum, and that reductionism is just as nonsensical when it comes to dominate the physical sciences as …
I recently read Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, and composed a thought about it in relation to the state of this country, which perhaps more than ever before mirrors the state of man today—outwardly self-reliant, inwardly flailing. My thought is that we are yanking free the anchors, worrying loose the cables, and where once this …
Last I checked there were 36,000 mentions of Jimmy Fallon in the news, and 8,820 of Kermit Gosnell. It’s understandable if you haven’t heard of Gosnell. He’s a Philadelphia abortionist on trial for, among other things, murdering newborns by snipping their spines with scissors. He did this after failing to murder them while some portion …
On the radio I heard a shill for some agglomeration of sugary drink manufacturers inveigh against NYC mayor Bloomberg’s attempted regulation of soda sizes. “We believe New Yorkers are smart enough to make these decisions for themselves,” he said. If you’ve been to New York, if you’ve been to America, then you might be tempted …
A reasonable response to the accusation that the evangelical mind is insufficiently expansive is to ask to what dimensions its critics would like to see it expanded. That question springs to the lips when considering Biblical scholar Peter Enns’s contention that evangelical minds are not only confined, but are required to remain in confinement. “The …
The scandal of the evangelical intellectual’s mind Read More »
There is a difference between being anti-intellectual and being anti-intellect, and this is where Russell Jacoby foundered, in his essay last year about the lack of intellectualism among conservatives. As Peter Lawler notes, it’s shoddily done for want of defining terms, which is a frequent flaw in Chronicle of Higher Ed essays about conservatism. There …
You might like my latest post at Good Letters. An excerpt: “We are used to words not meaning anything, you see, and so who cares if foot-long is not supposed to mean eleven inches, that cheese is not supposed to be a vegetable oil and whey composite, that deli meat is not supposed to be shaved from …
Look, it’s not the end of the world, or America, or really much of anything. In fact, it could become the beginning of something. Here are eight reasons you should take heart from what you consider last night’s loss. 1. Congressional Majorities: Understand the bullet you dodged. The president’s party tends to lose seats in …
