A couple of months ago, assistant editor Nathaniel Peters linked to an article in the Atlantic which made the disturbing suggestion that what you are doing right now is making you stupider. Nathaniel didn’t think that he, at least, had suffered much:

Since coming to First Things, I’ve spent my days reading many more articles and blogs than I did in college. But I don’t sense any change in my thought patterns, although that may be because I learned how to think with the internet already in play. Instead, I’ve noticed that reading lots of articles online and in print every day has honed my ability to skim. It’s also taught me to save deep reading for what really interests me. But when a piece comes along that does grip me, I don’t perceive any greater difficulty in my ability to soak it in and mull it over.

Perhaps Mark Bauerlein, author of (deep breath): The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) would say that Nathaniel is at best a rare exception, and at worst a poor victim, too long immersed in this culture of electronic surfing to imagine that better is possible . Check out the review in the New Atlantis.

I have spoken before about my friend, Manolo the Shoe Blogger. Well, I call him my friend, though, in fact, we’ve only exchanged emails. But he is a brilliant writer who has established, for his blogging, the faux voice of an Italian fashion obsessive whose English is much worse than he thinks it is. Since I do pretty much the same kind of writing, I feel perhaps more kinship with the man than really exists.

If you haven’t yet discovered Manolo, try a pair of recent posts. The one on the latest episode of Project Runway, for instance, which begins, “Manolo says, ayyyy! Who knew Brooke Shields was so nice! She is like the giant, beautiful goddess of nice, radiating kindness and good humor everywhere. Clutch us to your ample bosom, Giant Goddess Brooke! Teach us to be nice to annoying persons with consciously outré hairstyles and studied personality traits. We are your votaries!”

Or the one in which he responds to a request for shoe advice. The desperate letter reads,

Dear Manolo,

In September I’m getting married in an informal ceremony on a Hawaiian beach. I’ll be wearing a vivid ocean blue jersey sundress with simple Tahitian pearl jewelry and white orchids in my hair. I’m not going to wear shoes on the beach, but for the dinner after the ceremony, I’ll need a pair of sandals, something affordable that’s pretty but not too fussy.

Emily

And the answer is:

Manolo says, how the Manolo well remembers the single beach wedding he attended, many years ago, in the seaside resort mecca of Panama City, Florida. (Where all of your wildest mini-golf and ribald t-shirt desires may be satisfied!)

It was the beautiful and moving ceremony, the bride in the lovely, white sundress-ish thing, the groom so handsome in his tuxedo from the Jimmy Buffet “Margauritaville” collection. The Manolo nearly wept with joy for his friends.

And then the sand fleas came.

Afterward, the fragrance of calamine lotion and domestic beer scented the magic Redneck Riviera night.

Ayyy! Hawaii! You will need the most beautiful shoes possible for your festival of poi, roast pig, and lifelong commitment.

Here is the simply beautiful and affordable sandal that is available in 14 colors, including this marvelous platinum.

Yes, it’s not really First Things-y. But you gotta love a definition of Panama City, Florida, as the place “where all of your wildest mini-golf and ribald t-shirt desires may be satisfied!”

Speaking of the train, Stefan, I’m new to the city, which means there are a lot of things I need to learn before I can start getting from here to there without scratching my head a few times. Of course, one of the first hurdles I’ve had to overcome was navigating the sprawling MTA transit system. While most of my initial lessons were rather commonplace, like learning the difference between local and express trains, I’ve also picked up a lot of interesting tidbits about mass transit in New York.

I’ve discovered, for example, a vast subculture surrounding New York’s subway system. SUBWAYblogger.com and Second Avenue Sagas are two examples of a flourishing blogging scene that covers everything from the MTA’s shocking announcement that the subway is dirty to the story of three New Yorkers stealing $800,000 worth of free subway rides.

So next time you’re catching the L out to Brooklyn or the 3 up to Harlem, remember that that massive beast called the MTA has a story, and it’s a story worth telling.

Most people I interact with, whatever their stated moral views, seem so basically sane, sensible, and decent that I’ve lately begun to wonder whether cultural conservatives exaggerate when they proclaim a national decline into everlasting adolescence.

But then again, no.

While waiting for the train this morning, I overheard a man in his mid-thirties discussing his father’s exploits. This middle-aged man had triumphantly reported having recently “made-out with a girl” at a nightclub. The son, as he told the story, was mildly surprised and very amused, but offered his congratulations and obligingly gave his father detailed information (which he loudly repeated on the platform) on the mechanics of the truly superior french kiss.

Now, this sort of thing is manifestly atypical, and only an arch-prude could be insensitive to the Rabelasian humor of it. But listening to this child-man talk about his puerile conversation with the child-man who happened to be his progenitor, I felt I was practically hearing the wheels come off the bus of our civilization.

Song For Our Lady’s Assumption

As the tower of David art thou, O Mary,
And in thee there is no flaw,
How beautiful and lovely art thou in the adorning,
And the odor of thy ointments
Is like the fragarance of Libanus,
Above all perfume. . . .

Like a dove brooding over swelling waters,
Like vials that pour out perfumed oil,
Like lilies distilling their fragarance,
Like the golden vessels of Tharsis,
Like the choice Libanus and the cedar tree,
Like fair tall columns of marble
Set upon bases of gold, art thou, O Mary!

Source: The Mozarabic Liturgy
Robert, Cyril. Mary Immaculate: God’s Mother and Mine. Poughkeepsie, NY: Marist Press, 1946.

If you read On the Square with any regularity (which I am sure you do) you are probably familiar with the thoughtful and instructive writings of Denver’s Bishop Charles Chaput. This past Tuesday saw the release of the Bishop’s new book, Render Unto Caesar, which tackles the ever-topical question of how Catholics are to exercise political agency, particularly in a pluralistic, liberal democratic state like the United States.  Fr. Robert Imbelli (an Associate Professor of Theology at Boston College) has written a thorough review of the book for L’Osservatore Romano. His verdict is wholly positive. He judges the book a signal contribution to a most important debate, and urges Catholics and non-Catholics, Americans and non-Americans, to carefully consider and discuss its arguments and analyses.

A belated note about fine reporting in the Boston Globe back in June: Alex Beam’s “Grave Schism on the Death Beat,” an account of the rival factions in the International Association of Obituarists. This year, the splinter group will meet in Toronto, while “the faithful” will continue to hold their annual convention in New Mexico. A sad business.

Okay, now we’re cooking with Crisco. Here’s the abstract for an article, in the August issue of the journal Political Theory, called “Sovereignty and the UFO,” by Alexander Wendt (Ohio State Univ.) and Raymond Duvall (Univ. of Minnesota):

Modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone. Although a metaphysical assumption, anthropocentrism is of immense practical import, enabling modern states to command loyalty and resources from their subjects in pursuit of political projects. It has limits, however, which are brought clearly into view by the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously. UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is.

This may be the greatest sentence of its kind ever written: “Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision.”

I mean, this has got it all—a dangling participle, a complete grammatical jumble, and the phrase “the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty.” Plus it seems to be about how the existence of UFOs demolishes our legal system. What more do you want out of life?

From the Language Log, a note on Sir William Jones, the great scholar credited with identifying the Indo-European family of languages and founding modern historical linguistics: “At an early stage in his life, Jones’s father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education, but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad.” Studium discendi voluntate quae cogi non potest constat, I guess.

(via the Volokh Conspiracy)

I did read Lennard Davis’ new essay on Woody Allen—or, at least, I read it up to the point where Davis said that Woody Allen “stares at a world that Dostoevsky could not bring himself to imagine when he said that without God there could be no morality.” But then, somehow, I felt a little ill, and I never quite got back to the rest of it. Perhaps someone with a stronger stomach can tell me how it ends.