Rod Dreher links to an El Pais story about an admirable athlete, the Un-Lance Armstrong . In second place but way behind the leader in a 3,000-meter steeple-chase, Iván Fernández Anaya pulled up when he realized his opponent had thought he’d finished and stopped before . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter Leithart on men of steel and flesh : Since Thetis dipped Achilles in the Styx, men (especially men) have dreamed hot dreams of invulnerability. The Greeks kept dreaming, but they knew these dreams couldn’t come true. Even Achilles—best of the Achaeans, half divine and a tornado of . . . . Continue Reading »
Do Wendell Berry’s recent comments in support of gay marriage reveal a broader flaw in his work, as some critics have claimed? For that to be the case, his comments would have to line up with the works that have made him famous. Yet when we place Berry’s recent statements alongside his . . . . Continue Reading »
At Public Discourse , Peter Blair reviews Roger Scruton’s intriguing case for a conservative environmentalism: In the conservative vision, threats to one’s home, environmental or otherwise, are met by public spiritedness, by volunteering efforts united by what Scruton calls “ . . . . Continue Reading »
“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 »
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