Julia Yost

A week’s worth of commentary on Fr. Jacques Hamel. Continue Reading »

“Just as if the world had existed merely for our sakes!” Continue Reading »

My sister and I were preschoolers in the 1980s. Once upon an afternoon, our mother instructed us: If ever she were unable to pick us up and had to send another grownup in her stead, she would impart to that grownup a “secret word.” If ever a grownup approached us, neighbor or stranger, claiming . . . . Continue Reading »

There are no teams in thoroughbred racing. Or rather, everyone who follows racing is on the same team—at least for a few weeks in the late spring, when the three races are run that make up the Triple Crown.The lack of partisan fandom in racing has something to do with the brevity of its stars' . . . . Continue Reading »

The enormous Duggar family has been in the public eye since their TLC reality series, 19 Kids and Counting, premiered in 2008. In the lineup of TLC shows about oddball families—the twins-plus-sextuplets family; the polygamist family; the little-people family; the hundred-proof hillbilly family—the Duggars are distinguished by their amazing fecundity, and by their commitment to baby-names starting with J (Josh, Jana, John-David, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph).They are distinguished, too, by their vocal affiliation with Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull—hierarchical and pro-procreation movements within Evangelicalism, which strike some observers as creepy and cultish. The Duggar kids are homeschooled and don’t mix much with the outside world; this, too, strikes some observers as creepy and cultish. All of the Duggar girls perm their hair and wear long skirts—sartorial tics that some observers find creepy and cultish. Did I mention that all the Duggar kids’ names start with J? (Josiah, Joy-Anna, Jedediah, Jeremiah, Jason, James, Justin …) At a certain point, this starts to look creepy and cultish. Continue Reading »

Michael Alig was paroled this May into the world he helped invent. Starting in the summer of 1987, Alig reigned as the most fabulous party promoter in New York, paid by club owners to orchestrate havoc in their venues with his retinue of camera-ready freaks. He, in turn, paid his acolytes to trick . . . . Continue Reading »

In a scene cut from The Exorcist’s 1973 theatrical version, Jason Miller’s Fr. Damien Karras sits with Max von Sydow’s Fr. Lankester Merrin on the stairs of the MacNeil house, and the two Jesuits discuss why the child Regan has become a monster. Continue Reading »

Mad Men’s Season Seven, Episode Seven (“Waterloo”), the half-season finale, may look a bit like a rerun of Season Three’s “Shut the Door. Have a Seat” and Season Six’s “For Immediate Release”—both episodes in which a crisis precipitated a . . . . Continue Reading »

Season Seven, Episode Six of Mad Men, titled “The Strategy,” takes as its subject families—how they are configured; and success—how it is defined; and happiness—in what it consists; and how all these matters overlap. Continue Reading »

Season Seven, Episode Five (“The Runaways”): A very disjointed episode of Mad Men. Don Draper is marginal to most of its action; two watchable characters (Roger Sterling and Joan Harris) are absent from it entirely; and we endure two eruptions of gratuitous weirdness, one in the form of kinky sex, the other in the form of sexualized mutilation. Altogether, we find the story de-centered and distinctly schizoid. Continue Reading »