Livin’ in the USA
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Johnson said of Paradise Lost that "No one ever wished it longer." I can't give my opinion on that, since I've never read more than excerpts from it. But on the basis of those I suspect I'd agree. And by that standard I would have to rate J.R.R. Tolkien's Lay of Leithian at least as high as Paradise
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I recall reading about The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch when it came out some years ago. I would have said, without checking, ten to fifteen years ago, but it was actually twenty. I remember reading some reviews at the time and thinking that it sounded interesting: essays by a poet who makes his living as an
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For most of my adult life, until I was getting near fifty or so, I spent a lot of time thinking about What Was Wrong with Society and what Society ought to be like. I tended to assume that Society was fundamentally messed up and therefore must be fundamentally changed. When I was twenty this change
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So now Trump really is the president. I was astonished and appalled when he got the nomination, and thought it only guaranteed that Hillary would win. I was more astonished when he won the election, and was only pleased by the result because it meant that Hillary would not be president. Since then, I've heard or
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One night last week I dreamed that I was on a college campus that was being terrorized by small (about man-sized) blue dinosaurs. They looked like upright alligators, a bit like Albert the Alligator in the Pogo comic strip, except that they were blue, a rather pretty light shade, rather than green, and not at
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It isn't often that I run across something that makes me think "Everybody should read this." But this is one of them. The book referred to is The Negro Motorist Green Book, compiled and marketed annually from 1936 to 1964 by Victor H. Greene. It was a guide for black people traveling in the U.S. It
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From James Piereson's review of The Fractured Republic by Yuval Levin, in the June issue The New Criterion: Mr. Levin views the post-war era—roughly the period running from 1945 to the year 2000—as following a coherent trajectory that has left us in a situation in which it is impossible to put into place the grand designs of
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I've been thinking about this since I mentioned Obama's apparent lack of love for this country in a post last week. I see some evidence that the sort of patriotism I was thinking of there is less common than I assumed. Perhaps the president's detachment is not unusual any more. That wouldn't really be surprising, considering
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I found this fascinating: the story of the growth of the bottled water industry, and the advertising that made it happen. This is an interesting case. I don't think advertising can make people buy something for which they don't feel a real need or which isn't so rewarding in some way that people come to
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This is becoming normal in America: an abominable crime is committed and the first reaction of way too many people is to exploit it in pursuit of their political aims, which involves trying to blame their opponents for the crime. Even those whose better impulses might lead them to avoid participating find themselves responding to attacks on them.
Light On Dark Water 