Tony Woodlief | Author

culture

Mugged by reality

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 …

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White ashes

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 …

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Cheaper by the dozen

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 …

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The new Conservatism

Mickey Edwards explains why he didn’t go to CPAC, the annual Conservative self-lovefest, arguing that the traditional conservatism of America has been supplanted by a state-aggrandizing European-style conservatism. I’m not sure if the shift is even that intellectual, or if it’s simply that Conservatives — like members of any tribe facing an enemy tribe — …

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Christian America?

Maybe instead of pouring all this energy into haggling over claims in watered-down, non-primary source, lowest-common-denominator, utterly de-contextualized, ponderous textbooks, we ought to try harder to get kids to read more, and read more of what matters. Does anyone really think that one sentence about Cesar Chavez or Samuel Gompers is going to be the clincher between …

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Previously, on . . .

The start of a new season of 24 got me thinking about that standard practice television series have of explaining what happened in the previous episode: “Previously, on ____”. Sometimes it’s a little funny because, while of course the particulars are usually quite different, in another sense what happened last week is pretty much what’s …

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Marionette parenting

Judith Woods reminds us that there’s a difference between good parental involvement and hovering overkill (i.e., “helicopter parenting“). We ought to dispense with calling it helicopter parenting, in fact, and call it marionette parenting. Parents should be in the helicopter, hovering about their children’s lives. That’s their bloody job, after all — to supervise, counsel, protect. …

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What my kids call theirs are just fine, thank you

I don’t know which is creepier, the fact that U.K. public schools are going to start teaching five year-olds the names of private body parts, or the fact that the U.K. has a “Children’s Secretary.” And given the aberrant practices of ruling politicians and Royals over the years, does anyone in the U.K. really want …

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Be it resolved

I read once that the historian’s admiration for authority affects his assessments of civilizations past — that oppressive regimes, with their monuments to state power, will draw his eye and his imagination more readily than a nation of citizen farmers. That’s probably true for most people; we can’t help but watch the parade’s prancing exhibition of the …

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