Nathaniel Peters

It was a Tuesday morning like any other Tuesday morning. I came into the office, said hi to my co-workers, and checked my e-mail. I had never given any thought to Scandinavian crime novels myself, but all that was about to change. When I got my weekly e-mail update from Books & Culture , I saw that . . . . Continue Reading »

I know and have read little of Solzhenitsyn, but at some point in college I read his address at Harvard’s Class Day in 1978. To me he captured brilliantly Western society’s predominant form of legalism in which the law is obeyed only so far as one is compelled by the phrasing of . . . . Continue Reading »

Today’s New York Sun reviews a fascinating book by Tim Tzouliadis that catalogs some of the forgotten casualties of the Communism. (I found the review on Arts & Letters Daily .) The Forsaken tells the story of Americans who moved to the USSR to help complete the “building of . . . . Continue Reading »

In a medieval history class my junior year of college, our professor assigned us a book of the selected works of Bernard of Clairvaux. I found it to be the richest spiritual work I had ever read, and would later take Bernard as my confirmation name. Now re-reading Bernard’s sermons on the . . . . Continue Reading »

Joke of the day: Two fonts walk into a bar. The bartender snarls and says, “We don’t serve your type here. If you don’t leave, I’ll have to call the serif.” . . . . Continue Reading »

This August, Kay Ryan will begin serving her one-year term as the sixteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. A friend of mine pointed me toward one of her poems, which gives a delightful twist of thought that I’d never had before. Originally in the November 2003 issue of Poetry , it is . . . . Continue Reading »

The Volokh Conspiracy highlights a funny passage from Morse v. State on the use of big words in legal proceedings: As to the other objection — that the language is abstractly incorrect — if incorrectness from a legal standpoint is intended, the objection may be disposed of by citing . . . . Continue Reading »

We’ve mentioned the Canadian Human Rights commissions before on our blog, and the most recent issue of First Things has an article on the topic by Douglass Farrow called ” Kangaroo Canada ” (subscription required). But today I discovered videos of testimony Ezra Levant gave before . . . . Continue Reading »

The Claremont Institute’s Bradley C.S. Watson has an article on ISI’s First Principles web journal on the need for a federal amendment defining the nature of marriage. The heart of his argument is twofold. First, Watson predicts, judicial fiat will override the decisions of voters in . . . . Continue Reading »

Ross Douthat, an occasional FT contributor and assistant editor at the Atlantic has some interesting comments on Joseph Bottum’s ” The Death of Protestant America .” I think he is right in claiming that the more “conservative” economic fulfillment gospel and the more . . . . Continue Reading »