[caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”305”] Image from the Flathead Beacon [/caption] Yesterday, a federal district court ruled that the US Forest Service did not violate the Establishment Clause by renewing a permit for Big Mountain . . . . Continue Reading »
So tomorrow, word has it, the Supreme Court will release it’s decision in the cases concerning Prop 8 and DOMA. I.e., tomorrow we will get a same-sex-marriage ruling. Now the import of the decisions will depend on the cases, and so to understand them well, so as to avoid saying something . . . . Continue Reading »
Macklemore’s pro-same-sex-marriage rap video is “quite masterful, actually . . . ” says R. J. Snell in today’s column , “beautifully produced, skillfully managed, and positioned within a moving narrative of birth, death, and love; it is, I suspect, devastatingly . . . . Continue Reading »
“In the opening line of James Joyces Ulysses , stately, plump Buck Mulligan bears ‘a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,’” says Melinda Selmys in today’s column , ”Holding the bowl aloft he declares, ’ Introibo ad . . . . Continue Reading »
Steven Pinker (l) with stuffed panda (r). Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has sent a letter of protest regarding the University of Miami’s dismissal of Colin McGinn for harassing a female graduate student. “Such an action,” says Pinker, “would put a chill on . . . . Continue Reading »
At the five-minute mark of this video, we see a sort of ersatz secular liturgy done with all the intelligence of Richard Dawkins and all the taste of Charles Saatchi. Next time your church music director’s choices tempt you to atheism, remember the sort of liturgy that awaits you on the other . . . . Continue Reading »
Therapeutists and Evil Theodore Dalrymple, Library of Law & Liberty Prisons and Our Faltering Belief in Second Chances Shadd Maruna, Wilson Quarterly The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action: A Debate Jeffrey Rosen and Michael McConnell, New Republic East Meets West: Asceticism and Consumerism . . . . Continue Reading »
Last night my husband asked me the question I only briefly touched on in my last post; how does the tech support contracted to our government have so much access to national security data that it could do what Edward Snowden did? This morning, John Hinderaker is asking the same question in . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m speaking of the just-issued The American Academy of Arts and Sciences report on the humanities in higher ed, the Heart of the Matter , released with snazzy blurb-testimonials to The Importance of the Humanities from George Lucas and others, and a NYT column by David Brooks. Brooks’s . . . . Continue Reading »