You’ve met author Jennifer Roback Morse in these pages before. Now she’s back with her newest book, The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why the Catholic Church Was Right All Along. In its pages, she makes the case that the Sexual Revolution wasn’t as organic as some teenage no-parents party. Laws were passed, grants were granted, court cases were filed. Case [...]
I’m proud to claim a little hillbilly in my heritage. Oh, you didn’t know I had some of that? You were fooled by my Scandinavian name, which I also came by honestly? Well, the hillbilly streak is there, hidden behind a couple intervening generations. I might not be that proud if I were a more recent hillbilly, like J.D. Vance, as written in his memoir, [...]
I presume you’ve got some kind of Christmas excitement going at your house. So let me ruin that buoyant mood with this question: Why do we have to put up with this? And this? And this? Depending on your appetite for this subject, you can find your answers in Stephen R. C. Hicks’ Explaining Postmodernism. Yep, today’s culture-gone-berserk can be blamed on a few long-dead [...]
Are apartments like these popping up in your town? They’re called the “New Urbanism.” The idea is: more walkability. Retail on the street, apartments above, making it possible for people to do their shopping and errands without driving. Create spaces that attract people. Keep building height down a room-like scale, say, four or five stories (Anybody ever notice that central Paris is nothing but [...]
Do you know this man? In my day, everybody did. He was one of those faces we saw everywhere. He was as famous in the 60s, 70s, 80s as, oh, Simon Cowell is today. His name was George Plimpton. After reading Nelson Aldrich’s book about him, George, Being George, I think I’d like to try reading a book by him. We’ll get to that [...]
It’s a wonder I’m still a praying, church-going woman. Practically every novel I’ve read in the last five years features a main character who proclaims that they “don’t believe in all that stuff.” I see a particular pride, reading between the lines, and I see it coming straight from the author, who utters this line as he/she were as brave and original as the [...]
I once went to church in a congregation with several airline pilots. One of their wives told us that all pilots are daredevils. I believed her. I could see it in the blunt, go-ahead-make-me attitude of these men. But not until reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff did I understand how daring. You’ve probably seen the movie, but nobody can tell the tale of the [...]
This week’s book is such heavy-duty reading, you’ll need closed-toe shoes and maybe a helmet. I keep running across terms like “cultural Marxism,” “Frankfurt School” and “post-modernism.” Shopping the books that can explain all this stuff to me has been like standing at the lip of the Grand Canyon, choosing which donkey to ride down the trail. The winning donkey is The Devil’s Pleasure [...]
Were you the kind of teenager who drummed your fingers on Saturday night and complained that “There’s nothing to do around here”? Or, “I wanna bust out of this Nowheresville!”? Maybe not. If you check in at this blog with any regularity, you’re probably an avid reader. We readers long for a boring Saturday night, when everybody leaves us alone and we can get [...]
It was just a random video I ran across, a professor with the Canadian “aboot” in his speech, telling an interviewer about a few months of hanging on to his job while fighting accusations of hate speech. Who is this guy? He seems pretty soft-spoken and unhateful to me. Turns out it was Jordan Peterson, and a lot of people have stumbled across his [...]
