State of the Culture
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This one actually appeared on the 15th, so is more than ten days old. But it didn't get any less ridiculous. Government Can't Solve the Loneliness Crisis It appeared in National Review, and, as you might suppose, it's a government-skeptical response to an outlandish idea for a new government project. I just can't think of
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Starbucks Reveals Holday [sic] 2023 Menu and Cups Last week I had to choose between this one and the one about racist birds. Unlike that one, this one is merely ridiculous. Or maybe not. The position of Starbucks in American culture is creepy to say the least. And I really don't like the thing we
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Say Goodbye to America’s Racist Birds The headline is ridiculous, and the news it links to is not only ridiculous but much more: crazy, sick, arguably wicked. You may have seen other news stories about this: the American Ornithological Society has decided that many bird names "have associations with the past that continue to be
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A Scientist Has Confirmed That Humans Have No Free Will This was in Popular Mechanics; you can read the story here. To be fair to the magazine, the tone of the article hints that the writer doesn't take the "findings" of the scientist altogether seriously. And he gives the last word to another scientist who
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Louise Perry, a British woman whom I'll describe for lack of a better word as a journalist, has recently published a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I have not read it, and probably won't, not because I don't think it would be worthwhile but because I have other priorities for my reading. She
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There is a lot to say for the scientific method, but in the social sciences it is often little more than a magical trick: the ritualistic application of statistics to poor data measured by imaginary instruments. Author unknown, found on a sheet of paper in my files, in quotation marks so apparently not my words.
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That's a line from an Al Stewart song, "On the Border," the second hit single from his very successful 1976 album (and extremely successful single by the same name), Year of the Cat. It's one of the little cultural fragments that are always bouncing around in my head, and it probably shows up once a
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I don’t know what I thought the actual content of a Barbie movie might be. Well, that’s a little misleading right off the bat, because I didn’t think about it at all. If I had, I suppose I would have expected a sort of Barbie cartoon, with a negligible story, no more substantial than an episode
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There are many such, I'm sure. A couple of days ago I was reading an article about the legal battle between Hunter Biden and his "baby mama," mother of a child whose paternity he has attempted to deny, and whose existence Joe Biden refuses to acknowledge. (Yeah, one could say a lot about that, but
Light On Dark Water 