State of the Culture
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“The [Vagina Monologues] represents a binary representation of gender, implying that in order to be a woman you must have a vagina, which is an antiquated way of viewing gender.”
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For literature? Here's one of many news stories on the announcement that are out this morning. Much as I love much of his work, I don't really think so. If there were a Nobel Prize for popular music, absolutely yes. But something called "literature" should be able to stand alone on the page, and I don't
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Interesting commentary by Ross Douthat on the effects of liberalism's increasingly tight grip on pop culture. …outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture,
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For years I have been seeing this poem by Kipling described as having some sort of profound relevance. I read it, and it seemed interesting, but I didn't quite understand who these gods were supposed to be. It was only fairly recently that I learned the answer. A "copybook" in English schools of the time
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"Cliché" is not an adjective. How did this get started, anyway? Maybe they aren't accustomed to reading and don't hear the "d" in "clichéd".
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Going through a pile of miscellaneous notes, I found this, which I had jotted down while poking around in the library at Loyola University in New Orleans. Fr. Hynes like to think of the laymen's retreats as one of the forces combating the religious slackening of our times. "The lack of faith has caused many
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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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When people my age were young–in our late teens and early twenties–and very conscious of being part of a youth culture that was very different from our parents', we sometimes joked about how funny it would be if our children grew up to be middle-class conservatives, perhaps even churchgoers. We envisioned middle-aged hippies pleading with their children
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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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That is, attempts to fiddle with the rules and create the possibility of picking someone else have been defeated, and Trump is definitely going to be the Republican nominee. "Looking to those colleagues, [Iowa committeeman Steve ] Scheffler admonished them to acknowledge their errors and unite around Trump." Ha. As someone or other said somewhere or
Light On Dark Water 