State of the Culture
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On the way home from work I listened to the BBC/PRI radio show The World. A BBC foreign affairs writer was interviewed about the Woolwich murders. The interview lasted for somewhere around ten minutes, and the words "Islam" and "Muslim" were never once mentioned. I deplore anti-Islamic hysteria and fear-mongering. But there's nothing to be said…
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Here's the cover of the current issue: The magazine has always been a very mixed bag. But over the last few years the mixture has tipped decisively toward the conventional thinking of affluent liberals. The good things have been fewer, and the bad things more numerous and egregious. And whether good or bad, the whole…
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I get a daily email from the Vatican Information Service which reports on the doings of the pope. A lot of it is dull stuff about meetings and ecclesial appointments, so usually I just scan it quickly. But usually there are at least a few remarks from the pope. And sometimes there's something pretty substantial.…
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The Internet Cat Video Festival.
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I’ve hated it reflexively since its beginning. But with time’s passage and deliberation, I’ve come to hate it with deeper, more variegated richness. I have to say that I pretty much feel the same. And when I say "since its beginning," I mean since I first heard its name, which makes it sound trivial and…
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I don't know much about Sam Harris, one of the belligerent "new atheists" ("What is new about them?", I always want to ask). But simply from having come across bits of his writing here and there on the web I have the impression that he's a very angry man. So it was only a little…
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Probably you've heard a remark attributed to Baudelaire that goes something like this: The greatest trick of the devil is to persuade men that he does not exist. I suppose the following passage from one of his prefaces to Flowers of Evil, quoted by David Yezzi in the April issue of The New Criterion, must be…
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(This is a post I've been wanting to write for a week or two. But as I may have mentioned, I've been working a lot of nights and weekends and haven't had much time for writing. So I'm going to go ahead and just say it briefly, which probably covers it just as well anyway.)…
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I have a silly tendency to expect that actors and actresses who play characters I like will be people I would like as well. I know it makes no sense, but it happens all the time–all right, I admit it's worse when the person is a beautiful woman–and it was the case with Reese Witherspoon…
Light On Dark Water 