July 2010
12 posts
RT @ebertchicago: I know it’s about a lesbian couple, but give me a break. http://twitpic.com/28khi7
RT @jcbeam: Barack Obama’s Facebook Feed: Shirley Sherrod edition http://bit.ly/9wCOJH
Still more evidence that Marilynne Robinson is our best writer today http://tinyurl.com/28q95vy
Classic Labash: http://tiny.cc/ircm7.
On the important issues of the day: Hooray frivolous fripperies! http://tinyurl.com/2b8rb7w
Love in the age of the PUA: http://www.thepointmag.com/archive/love-in-the-age-of-the-pickup-artist/
Time for “conservative class warfare”: great rant by Ross. http://tinyurl.com/3y94ang
On Stendhal and the Pick-Up Artist
The great mistake of the pickup artists, of Don Juans, of seducers in general, is to think that the lover is a failed version of themselves. The lover, they say, tries to “get the girl,” but just doesn’t know how—and if he learned their techniques he would. The trouble is that there is no agreement on just what this “getting” is. And, in fact, if the lover were to adopt the techniques of the...
Why I love Miss Manners: Q. Is it proper for a lady to brush her teeth in the presence of a man? A. Only if an improper act preceded it.
Has any ltr to the editor ever used the word “ironic” correctly?
Couple has $$ for a Gtown house & “preventive” IVF but don’t feel “financially stable” enough for children. Huh? http://tinyurl.com/2g72oer
My July 4th plans: http://tiny.cc/i2oc2.
June 2010
1 post
RT @AshleyRParker: You can just call me Ashley Leibovitz. Or not. http://tiny.cc/ch1pq
April 2010
2 posts
Are you a young professional committed to free enterprise & liberty? Apply for AEI’s Summer Institute http://www.aei.org/summerinstitute
Women tend to still like attractive, intelligent,... →
March 2010
4 posts
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to...
In Print
From my essay on Marilynne Robinson in the CRB:
“Gross error survives every attempt at perfection, and flourishes.” Robinson may call herself a liberal Protestant, but it’s not for nothing that she says “my heart is with the Puritans”—no novelist working today has a deeper understanding of original sin. For Robinson, discontent is our natural condition. “There...
Edith Wharton goes to Istanbul →
Why there is no Jewish Narnia →
January 2010
1 post
Me, This Month
Top 10 conservative novels, written since the 1950s.
On Marilynne Robinson again.
Maile Meloy: Anti-rebel.
December 2009
7 posts
Academic research on steampunk ≠ job security.
My friend’s take: “Imagine being the person reading this paper and having to recount the guy’s various expenses: $279.20 for a plane ticket! $257.54 in application fees! The script should have included stage direction to nail oneself to a cross.”
Come to the AFF Christmas party! http://americasfuture.org/blog/2009/12/first-annual-aff-christmas-party/
The rise of the muckraking right. http://americasfuture.org/doublethink/2009/11/muckrakers/
Some holiday reading: http://claremont.org/publications/pubid.775/pub_detail.asp
The Lockean Novel
“Richardson is one of the great English ‘Lockean’ novelists of the 18th and early 19th centuries (Defoe and Austen are two others). The Lockean novel, as I call it, debunks the ‘fancy and covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious,’ the aristocratic order that puts too much power and temptation into the hands of the arrogant wealthy. It also elevates the...
Holiday reading →
“So far as liberalism is active and positive, so far, that is, as it moves toward organization, it tends to select the emotions and qualities that are most susceptible of organization. As it carries out its active and positive ends it unconsciously limits its view of the world to what it can deal with, and unconsciously tends to develop theories and principles, particularly in relation to...
November 2009
8 posts
To save feminism, get rid of the lady blogs. http://americasfuture.org/doublethink/2009/11/average-janes/
What’s your story?: Matthew Continetti http://bit.ly/38sFkV
“Whatever theoretical claims are made for imposing high taxes to provide generous government benefits, the practical reality is that these public goods are, increasingly, neither public nor good: their beneficiaries are mostly the service providers themselves, and their quality is poor.”
—William Vogeli, City Journal
“And on she went allowing her placid egotism full reign; in constant...”
– Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me
From the New Criterion:
Mr. Podhoretz offered an anecdote that epitomized Mr. Kramer’s qualities: The story goes that one night, when Hilton was still chief art critic of the New YorkTimes, he found himself seated next to Woody Allen, who asked him whether he felt embarrassed when he ran into people whose work he had attacked. “No,” Hilton replied without missing a beat,”I expect...
U r what u type. →
October 2009
6 posts
An epidemic of fear
“The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people ‘know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.’ Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses...
Come to the AFF roundtable tonight! http://bit.ly/Ij81e
Reihan on WaPo
“I like how you seem to hold me personally accountable for partisan gerrymandering. If I had that kind of power, I would conjure up a delicious turkey sandwich to appear in front of me right now, as I’m pretty hungry.”
—Reihan!
“The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its...”
– Katha Pollitt, telling it like it is
The Undead Constitution
“Thomas Jefferson, whom Tocqueville called ‘the most powerful apostle that democracy has ever had,’ would not countenance any sort of permanent constitution, even an evolving one. He insisted that every constitution must naturally expire after 19 years. ‘If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right,’ wrote Jefferson. ‘The earth belongs always...
September 2009
8 posts
“[Irving] Kristol, who died on Friday, seemed to enter life with an intellectual...”
– David Brooks, “Three Cheers for Irving”
Are women and fiction still unsolved problems? http://bit.ly/7StqK
Irving Kristol: the moral critic http://tiny.cc/36oTS
"Intellectual engagement is not for crybabies."
Mark Lilla on Berkeley’s Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements and Paul Lyons’s class on conservative history:
There were many surprises as the students examined the history of conservatism. The biggest one, for both Lyons and me, was how attractive all the students found Whittaker Chambers and how much they enjoyed his cold-war memoir, Witness. Who knew? If...
There is an Obama Effect—at least there is one in France. http://bit.ly/m34QE
August 2009
10 posts
2 tags
“…realistic verisimilitude (of the O’Hara sort) has become burdensome and...”
– Saul Bellow, The Great Ideas Today, 1963