So I’ll just begin with an admission that I know it’s crazy and macabre and most certainly narcissistic. What I’ve been doing in my essays lately, however, is forgetting, for just a little while, that someone might read them. Just to see what happens. To push the boundaries and whatnot. And when I set aside …
Some of you may like my latest essay on the Image “Good Letters” channel at Patheos. Others of you may hate it with a fiery burning hatred. Here’s an excerpt: It was an offering. I understand why you are afraid of men who look like me. All he asked in return was an equivalent offering. Please understand …
The Boy Scouts of America is considering an end to its prohibition against homosexual troop leaders, deferring that decision to local councils. Sexual molestation! cry opponents, and so into the breach rushes the conscientious journalist, whose moral obligation is to remind readers of the evidence that homosexuals are no more prone to molestation than heterosexuals. …
Granted, playwright turned conservative-screed artist David Mamet lately comes across like that kid in philosophy class who just got hold of Atlas Shrugged and believes everyone should read it immediately. Still, he’s not an idiot. Which is what makes Ta-Nehisi Coates’s critique of Mamet’s recent gun rights essay so, well, idiotic. Consider the paragraph that particularly …
We’re trying to find an office manager, and so I’ve had to articulate what makes for a good employee. This is a treacherous and particularized endeavor, because the people who appear to be good employees for other bosses would likely drive me crazy to the point of pushing them from a window, and this is …
On Election Day, it helps to keep in mind who is to blame for the mess we’re in. Which reminds me to share with you an excerpt from my most recent essay at Image‘s Patheos channel: “Sports talk is well suited to politics because it is unburdened by thoughtfulness, and because it is tribal. We …
I suppose the Constitution has seen better times. Time Magazine asked last year if it’s still relevant, a former Speaker of the House scoffed at the notion that a radical expansion of federal power might be forbidden by it, and a fair portion of Americans can’t tell you the first thing about its contents. We’ve …
Let me run a theory about men and women by you. Your job is to tell me if you think the New York Times would print it: The reason that women economically outperform men—women in their 20s outearn their male counterparts, and hold well over half the jobs in many of the nation’s fastest growing …
So The Chronicle of Higher Education has seen fit to fire Naomi Schaefer Riley for criticizing the state of what passes for “Black Studies” in American universities. There’s no need to break that down here, Jonathan Last has a telling analysis of what motivated the firing, namely, the Chronicle’s decidedly left-wing readers and staff writers …
Some of you know about my long-running battles with snakes. You’ll understand, therefore, why I so appreciate Jonah Goldberg’s jeremiad against snake-enabling military-industrial complexes, and beyond that, his bloody-minded willingness to harness good old American entrepreneurial violence in order to kill the big ones. An excerpt: “You see, I don’t think we need a vast …
Some of you may like my latest Image post, even though (or maybe because) it ranges from E.O. Wilson to homosexuality to Michael Polanyi to engineers to literature to the Dewey Decimal System to sparking revolution with bedtime stories. Here’s an excerpt: “. . . I confess I enjoy seeing scientists upset. Whenever you stumble …
Sometimes I care about a political battle or news event or Item of Great National Debate enough to write about it, but then I stop, because I think someone has already said this better, or said its opposite more persuasively, or someone who donates money to the non-profit where I work will see it and …
Some of you might like my most recent essay at the Image Good Letters blog, “Dreaming God.” Here’s an excerpt: “. . . my experience is that nothing enrages the rational, scientific atheist more than when you get rational and scientific with him. If you want to make a Richard Dawkins aficionado more apoplectic than Dawkins …
An organization of which I’ve been a big fan for years is the Institute for Justice, a team of Davids repeatedly taking on Goliaths who use the powers of government to keep small businesspeople from competing with them. IJ’s defense of monks who make and sell cheap, sturdy caskets, against a mortician’s lobby that wants …
Several people in the office have come down with the pinkeye. I always thought it came from poopy hands, which makes me think less of everyone afflicted. When I mentioned this to Wife, she said I was wrong, that pinkeye can come from lots of things. We went to WebMD to resolve our dispute. Of …
Jonah Goldberg, on how the despicable Fred Phelps and his entourage might have been dealt with in an earlier, more “hands-on” era: “If this country worked more properly, if you saw a whole bunch of battered, bruised and bloodied people in an emergency room, you might ask “What happened to them?” Then someone would say, …
I’m not overly prudish. I can appreciate a form-fitting skirt, a cool glass of whiskey, Everclear turned up good and loud. I’ve even been known to drop an expletive or two. But one thing I cannot abide is this trend, which took wing with Linda Blair’s exploitation in The Exorcist, of bathing children in filth …
Speaking of Woodlief vacations, you might enjoy my latest piece in The Wall Street Journal, “Our Love Affair With the Fairs.”
The University of Virginia has adopted a tough new policy that requires student criminals to self-report arrests. In other news, local fraternities are being nicely asked to send flower bouquets to every co-ed who finds herself taken advantage of on their premises, professors are admonished to report to their students the number of times they …
Terry Nichols, the terrorist whose twisted little mind told him to fight government oppression by blowing up babies and postal clerks, is suing officials at the federal prison where he resides, apparently not counting it so much a blessing that he has yet to join mass murderer Tim McVeigh in a bunkhouse in hell. Nichols’s …
Spokesman for British retailer Tesco: “We do not think this skirt is inappropriate and neither do the parents we’ve talked to.” Except, of course, the many parents who are so troubled by the hem-hiked mini-skirts you’re marketing to nine year-olds that they feel compelled to protest, just as they did when you tried to sell …
“They began to find themselves defending Cahtolic orthodoxy in debate with ‘Christian Marxists’ who knew little about Christianity or Marxism.” (David Paul Deavel, about Eugene Genovese and his late wife Elizabeth, in the Jan/Feb issue of Touchstone)
Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology, in response to Google’s refusal to assist China’s thugocracy in stifling free speech and oppressing it’s citizenry: “You are unfriendly and irresponsible…”
The German home-schooling family which fled the government in their country has been granted asylum by a federal immigration judge in Memphis, on the grounds that they face persecution for both their religious beliefs and their social group. The U.S. Immigration and Customs authority is appealing the judge’s decision, reportedly for fear of inviting applications …
I’ve been working for days on a spreadsheet for my publisher, listing not only my media contacts and influential acquaintances — all of whom will receive advance copies of my book in hopes that they will read it and subsequently say good things to thousands of book-buying citizens — but also renowned parents. The thought …
In Friday’s Wall Street Journal I assess the state of the Boy Scout Handbook after 100 years of revisions: Scouts founders hoped the BSA could remain above politics and address character. They couldn’t anticipate the day when a future honorary Scout president would insist that the word “is” has debatable meanings. UPDATE: And yes, if …
The most interesting part of this article, to me, is not the safety guy calling for a choke-proof hot dog, but the fact that there is a National Hot Dog & Sausage Council. I envision a bunch of guys who look like Burgermeister Meisterburger sitting around a table in a smoky back room of the …
It looks an awful lot like L.A. County’s Department of Children and Family Services is covering up details of child abuse deaths less out of concern for legal procedure than from fear of tarnishing their already deplorable record.
This is the place where help for the orphanage is being coordinated. They’ve got a law firm working on expediting the adoption issues, and they’ve announced it’s now legal for every one of the children to enter the U.S., though apparently that’s in some doubt. It’s still wise to contact your congressman regardless. But whether …
Okay people, I don’t ask you for much, but I’m asking all of you to do two things. You’ve seen on your televisions the horror in Haiti. I have a friend who has been working for a long time to adopt a little boy from the BRESMA orphanage in Port-au-Prince, home to about 150 orphans. …
