State of the Culture
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All intellectuals take the strengths of their societies for granted, or do not even notice them: problems, by contrast, loom large in their imagination–that is why intellectuals are often destructive forces. –Anthony Daniels, in The New Criterion An advantage–though that's perhaps not the right word–of having a melancholy and pessimistic cast of mind is that one
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OnlyFans Now Has More Than 3 Million Content Creators A couple of months ago here I mentioned OnlyFans: And I'm informed by a commenter at National Review that many ordinary girls "from good families" are appearing on OnlyFans, a web service where men pay to see women be sexually provocative, a term which is apparently quite broad
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The other day I was reading one of the many and frequent news stories that describe the decline in American education, as measured by basic competencies in reading, math, and so forth. This has been going on for decades, and everyone deplores it, and great sums of money are spent with at least the partial
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Everybody knows, though many will perhaps have forgotten fairly quickly, of the insane episode involving the marketers of Bud Light and their decision to enlist a female impersonator named Dylan Mulvaney in its ad campaign, issuing a special can with his image on it, making an ad featuring him, and so forth. I'm not of
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One of the composers on that disk of miscellaneous, indeed wildly heterogenous, classical music that I mentioned last week is Bartok. All six of his string quartets are there, and, as I also mentioned, the way the MP3 files are named means that the movements of the quartets are scattered among other pieces of music.
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I’m not tough enough or self-denying enough to give up listening to music during Lent. But I do usually limit myself to classical music, and within that tend to favor works that are either explicitly religious (like Bach’s liturgical music) or at least of a contemplative and reflective cast. To that end I swapped the
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It was only fairly recently that I became aware of the term “outrage porn,” but I just learned from Wikipedia that it’s been around since 2009, when a New York Times writer said: It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge
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I read the other day that Chuck Jackson had died. I recognized the name immediately, though I may not have encountered it since 1962, when his recording of "Any Day Now" was on the charts. I would have been thirteen or fourteen, and was prone to bouts of infatuation which were often called then, and
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Somehow Animal Farm escaped from the boxes where most of my books still reside, and I picked it up and started reading it on a whim. I had read it in high school and not since. I don't recall having a very strong opinion or impression of it, beyond the obvious satirical-polemical intent. And it's
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The collection of writings by Alfred Delp, S.J. which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago has a long introduction by Thomas Merton. I'm not a Merton enthusiast, having found what I've read of his work (not all that much) a somewhat mixed bag, but this essay, dated October 1962, is excellent. Fr. Delp reminds
Light On Dark Water 