State of the Culture
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[History] will remember him as the greatest and most learned intellect ever to occupy the Chair of Peter. No public official in our time has been anywhere near his intellectual equal. This disparity is itself the cause of much disorder, if we grant, as we must, that truth is the essence of intellect and indeed…
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The phrase, as you probably know, is the sentence Voltaire passed on the Catholic Church: crush the infamous thing. The Atlantic has been redesigned again, made thinner and flashier, with shorter pieces reduced even further. At the top of one of the pages devoted to these, there's a box labelled "A Very Short Book Excerpt." The…
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This is a follow-up to the discussion that followed on this post, and to a lesser extent on this one, about the definition of neo-conservatism and of conservatism in general. In a comment on the first one, Grumpy suggested that everyone read George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. As it happens, I…
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"I just think we chose the wrong future." Great line from Peter Hitchens (in the third section of that page, "Mrs. Cable"). I have read in several places that violent crime in general is actually several times higher in the UK than here, though our homicide rate is higher.
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Interesting. "Because we have to go to work, commit ourselves to relationships, care for our children and explore our own minds, we cannot allow our sexual urges to express themselves without limit, online or otherwise; it would destroy us." At The Wall Street Journal, of all places.
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As you may know, the University of Alabama (Roll Tide!) won the national championship in football last night (Roll Tide!!). And you may have heard that one of the announcers for the game, Brent Musburger (who is by no means young), raised eyebrows with some remarks about Bama quarterback A.J. McCarron's girlfriend. If you've ever…
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This will be the last Sunday Night Journal, at least in this form—I'm holding open the possibility of reviving it as a simple journal, not a weekly essay. I’ve kept it going for eight years, from 2004 through 2012, with a year off in 2009. And now I want to turn my attention to other…
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American football, I mean. Really, it is. And in the New York Times. You don't have to know anything about football, just that Tim Tebow plays quarterback, which is the single most important position on a football team, that he was one of the top players in the country when he was in college but hasn't…
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The Waning of Adulthood This is a subject that comes to mind for me sometimes when I've been watching old, which is to say roughly pre-1960, movies or TV shows, or even listening to the classic American popular songs of the pre-rock-and-roll 20th century. To develop fully a thesis on this topic would require a…
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I started to post this link in the comments to the previous post but decided it was worth a post of its own. I just ran across this while reading something else at The Atlantic (namely this extremely exciting bit of news) and I only had time to read half of it: The Bookstore Strikes Back, an…
Light On Dark Water 