Last weekend I did something I have avoided doing for years. I went to a political rally. I am no longer a political junkie, but there was a time in my life when I was. From high school, through college, and for many years beyond I had no greater ambition than to be a, uh, politician. I started out . . . . Continue Reading »
So what is one to make of the State of the Union address last night? A superior instance of what is, you have to admit, one of the low forms of American speechmaking. When did the State of the Union descend into this kind of oopy-goopy, forty-eight-ovation touchy-feely-ness? All of Clinton’s . . . . Continue Reading »
I have no privileged perspective on the wisdom or lack thereof in President Bush’s Wednesday night address on Iraq. Like most readers¯and, one would like to think, all who have at heart both America’s interests and the avoidance of greater misery in the Middle East¯I hope the . . . . Continue Reading »
I’ll be lecturing in Baltimore on Monday, January 29, and in Denver on Tuesday, February 6. You might stop by, if you live near and haven’t anything better to do—like cleaning out your closets, or washing the dog, or finally writing that letter to your Great-Aunt Mabel. The topics . . . . Continue Reading »
Behold, the redesign of our website has arrived¯at last! It now features:• Online-only subscription (as well as access to the most recent issues if you already have a paper subscription)• A new search engine , which enables you to distinguish between the magazine and the website when . . . . Continue Reading »
The most consequential cultural and political event in American history in the past half century was the Roe v. Wade decision of January 22, 1973. An argument can be made that it is rivaled by September 11, but that fateful day did not result in the deep realignment of religious, cultural, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Living a chaste life on a college campus is difficult. Defending your commitments to chastity, whether to your friends in the dorm room or to your professors in the classroom, is even more difficult. If you haven’t been a university student for a while, think back to what the sexual climate on . . . . Continue Reading »
Perhaps it is wrong for me to comment about a movie I have no intention of seeing: But if this review of the new semi-documentary Zoo is accurate, it apparently has a sympathetic take on “the last taboo,” meaning bestiality. (“Zoos” in this context don’t refer to animal . . . . Continue Reading »
The publishing world, it seems, is just as prone to the fickleness of trends and fashions as is, well, the fashion industry. A few years ago, a whole spate of books came out on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, most of them flogging (surely not by coincidence) the same dead horse of papal perfidy. . . . . Continue Reading »
The German historian of manners Norbert Elias begins his book The Civilizing Process by asking how the “modes of behaviour considered typical of people who are civilized in a Western way” came about. Through a survey of etiquette books and other documents dealing with topics like table . . . . Continue Reading »
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