“Never begin a sentence with but. ” So my college freshmen tell me. They also tell me that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat (everybody knew it was round), that women in the Middle Ages were no better than cattle (they had more freedom than they would enjoy until . . . . Continue Reading »
Readers of “First Thoughts” should also visit and subscribe to Helen Rittelmeyer’s blog , the latest addition to our online lineup. Helen’s started with an uncanny side-by-side reading of The Brothers Karamazov and “Arrested Development,” a critique . . . . Continue Reading »
Against Political Pragmatism Alex Worship, Prospect The Return of Teleology John Farrell, Forbes Moving Away from “Choice”? Anna North, BuzzFeed Manti Te’o and the Breakdown of Journalism Mallary Jean Tenore, Poynter How MLK Overcame “Christian” Opposition Russell D. . . . . Continue Reading »
Student production of As You Like It , Kenya 1955 Harold Bloom happened to be at Cornell during one of the most famous student protests of the “canon wars,” one in which black students went en masse into the various campus libraries, pulled armfuls of books from the stacks, and threw . . . . Continue Reading »
Aspiring writers are generally regarded as one of nature’s lower life forms, especially by established writers, most of whom seem to wonder whether the taxonomist who placed aspiring writers in phylum Chordata wasn’t perhaps claiming too much for them. From where they’re sitting, that’s an . . . . Continue Reading »
I don’t know the details of the Manti Te’o story and am not going to find them, but this exchange between Malcolm Gladwell and Chuck Klosterman interested me for their reflections on why people believed the story. Gladwell analyzes “the singular genius of the hoax . . . . Continue Reading »
People are calling Manti Te’o’s fake girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, a “catfish,” a term for a fake online identity presented as real—-often in the context of online romance. The term, it seems, comes from ” Catfish ” a 2010 documentary (which inspired a spin-off . . . . Continue Reading »
As David Mills notes below , Wendell Berry has recently claimed that opponents of same-sex marriage are necessarily and categorically rejecting a whole class of people. He tells us this kind of “categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob” and as such is the worst kind of . . . . Continue Reading »
A new report from the Institute for American Values explores the complicated ways in which a child’s family structure, particularly the experience of parents’ divorce, can affect his or her religious practices as an adult. Coauthors Elizabeth Marquardt, Amy Ziettlow, and Charles E. . . . . Continue Reading »
Art Daily profiles Natalia Tsarkova, an Orthodox Christian who happens to be the Vatican’s official painter: Tsarkova arrived in Rome in the early 1990s and began doing portraits of Roman aristocrats, who introduced her at the Vatican where her background captured the attention of late pope . . . . Continue Reading »
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