Joseph Bottum

Mary Eberstadt has been treated shamefully by First Things . Well, maybe that’s a little strong, but she wrote a very important book called Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes , and it has never been featured in First Things ’ . . . . Continue Reading »

Well, now, here’s something. In Holland, the federal orthographers¯and contemplate for a moment what it means to a nation to have official spell-checkers, employed by the government and armed with police powers; maybe they say "Just the vowels, ma’am," or "My name is . . . . Continue Reading »

Well ” Mark Twain, Hart Crane, and Ursula K. LeGuin” We've mastered their books with a difficult trick: We've read them outside in. Percy B. Shelley and Machiavelli and Norman Vincent Peale” We've never tried opening one of their books. We know them by their feel. Does reading . . . . Continue Reading »

RJN: The Hemingway is good, but then his prose always did move toward compression. The "short-short"¯a short story of no more than a paragraph, and often only a sentence¯has emerged as a genre in its own right over the last decade, particularly among mystery writers, who always . . . . Continue Reading »

Young John Rose, one of our marvelous interns at FIRST THINGS, reminds me that a major lecture will be delivered here in New York on Tuesday, October 25, by Cardinal Avery Dulles¯although I guess Avery Cardinal Dulles is the right way to render that name, "cardinal" being a nobility . . . . Continue Reading »

You just can’t catch a break if you’re one of those people who wants to defend Pius XII against the flood of attacks in recent years. In his quiet but unrelenting way, Ronald Rychlak has been covering this beat for almost a decade, most notably in his 2000 book Hitler, the War, and the . . . . Continue Reading »

Every year, FIRST THINGS and the Institute on Religion & Public Life sponsor the Erasmus Lecture, a talk in New York City about¯well, yes¯the first things in religion and public life. Tickets are still available for this year’s event, the nineteenth annual lecture in the series, on . . . . Continue Reading »

Suppose that words were all you had. Suppose the great edifice of Western civilization had collapsed around you”all its truths, all its certainties, all its aspirations smashed to meaningless shards. Suppose . . . oh, I don’t know, suppose that it was 1919, and the First World War had . . . . Continue Reading »

I had lunch yesterday with Alan Jacobs, whose new book The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis will be published next week, just in time for Disney’s movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe . Alan once wrote a hilarious piece in the Weekly Standard that mentioned the . . . . Continue Reading »

The trouble with blogging, RJN, is narrative structure. Or maybe voice. Or maybe diction. Or maybe syntax. Or maybe I just don’t have a clue about the deep configuration of the blog entry as a literary genre. Does anything go? Does nothing go? I’ve got this really nice little . . . . Continue Reading »