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JB: 11.03.05 Well, now,…

Well, now, here’s something. In Holland, the federal orthographers¯and contemplate for a moment what it means to a nation to have official spell-checkers, employed by the government and armed with police powers; maybe they say "Just the vowels, ma’am," or "My name is . . . . Continue Reading »

RJN: 11.2.05 Columnists say it…

Columnists say it should be irrelevant, and then go on to discuss it at length. I’m not at all sure it is irrelevant. It reflects a very major change in American public life. Of course, the Constitution prohibits a “religion test” and therefore it should be irrelevant to whether . . . . Continue Reading »

RJN: 10.31.05 My, my, but…

My, my, but aren’t we important. A few years ago a bishop remarked about a Catholic academic who blamed all the troubles of the Church on the fact that the bishops had over the years been ignoring his advice, “Father ________ suffers from a severe case of self-referentiality.” . . . . Continue Reading »

JB: 10.28.05 The Hemingway is…

RJN: The Hemingway is good, but then his prose always did move toward compression. The "short-short"¯a short story of no more than a paragraph, and often only a sentence¯has emerged as a genre in its own right over the last decade, particularly among mystery writers, who always . . . . Continue Reading »

John Keegan, the eminent

John Keegan, the eminent historian of warfare, writes that the trial of Saddam Hussein poses difficult questions of law and morality. Saddam may be responsible, as seems to be the case, for as many as a million deaths. He ordered mass killings of Iraqis, and hundreds of thousands were killed in the . . . . Continue Reading »

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