[The following is the preface to my forthcoming The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age (Rowman & Littlefield)] Propadeutic to a Thumotic and Erotic Ontology. This is the fanciful and facetious subtitle I used to try out on friends when asked about the book . . . . Continue Reading »
The BBC’s, The Joy of Statistics, produced a very illuminating illustration of how human life expectancy has increased over the last 400 years around the world. But it does more than that, I think. The clip demonstrates several important, and not obscure, points. The obvious . . . . Continue Reading »
1. An Irrational Guide to Gifts Imagine that you are walking by a storefront and you notice a beautiful coat that is just the right cut and color. You walk in to check it out, and up close it is even more beautiful. But then, you look at the price tag and you discover that it is about twice as . . . . Continue Reading »
Earlier this week, an Ivy League political science professor was arrested and charged with one count of incest for having a reportedly consensual sexual relationship with his twenty-four year old daughter. Normally, I’d find such a story too sordid and tabloid-esque to be worth commenting on. . . . . Continue Reading »
Okay, forget that Chaucer versus Shakespeare stuff. Matt Anderson pointed me to an article that reveals our greatest word-maker to be none other than John Milton : According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Milton’s alma mater, Christ’s . . . . Continue Reading »
When I was a kid, there was a game show called Family Feud in which Richard Dawson, or Newkirk from Hogan’s Heroes suffering a sad fate (I am not sure whom), would kiss the contestants and host the happenings. A big part of his job was to announce in ponderous tones: “Survey says . . . . . . Continue Reading »
Vatican City has been crowned the ‘Greenest State In the World’ by . . . the Vatican newspaper. According to design blog Inhabitat : Last year Inhabitat reported that the Vatican was spending $660 million on a massive 100MW photovoltaic installation that would effectively be . . . . Continue Reading »
GWH is about many things. One, is to slow warming. But some are using climate fears as a pretext to destroy the nation state system and replace it with a radically socialist authoritarianism controlled by international bureaucrats and despots, who would use the power of bureaucracies and . . . . Continue Reading »
In our second On the Square article today, Melissa Musick Nussbaum and L. Martin Nussbaum recall the publication of Thomas Nast’s anti-Catholic cartoon “The American River Ganges” and see a likeness between the nativist anti-Catholic sentiments expressed in editorial cartoons, . . . . Continue Reading »
In his new book All in a Word , linguist Vivian Cook lists all the words that the literary titans Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare “invented”—or at least had the first recorded use. Who do you think was the master neologist? Shakespeare or Chaucer? Flavorwire compiled a . . . . Continue Reading »
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