This new book by Jonathan Haidt seems very promising. It’s entitled The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Now, I’m not sure the people coddling the American mind … Continue reading →
[Part I here.] I have come to conceptualize many of the people who are drawn most powerfully (and obsessively) to these extreme activities this way: they don’t want to live without them. And for some of the most extreme practitioners, … Continue reading →
I’m a lover of poetry, as you can probably tell from the number of posts listed in that category on my right sidebar (as I write this, it’s 161). But the poetry of the last twenty or thirty or even … Continue reading →
I’ve never read anything by Bret Easton Ellis before. One reason is that I don’t like fiction all that much unless it’s fabulous, and I definitely don’t like violent fiction, which by all accounts American Psycho (Ellis’s most popular novel) … Continue reading →
Commenter “Ariel” addresses these remarks by another commenter in this way: …”but [Trump’s] policies are overall working pretty well” How the hell can you know that? I say this from watching George Bush blamed for the housing crash when it … Continue reading →
I haven’t done a jello post in a long, long time. To rectify that shameful failing, I bring you this [hat tip Ed Driscoll via Instapundit]: Jell-O might be the glistening dish of picnics and potlucks, but for Allie Rowbottom—a … Continue reading →
And I mean big, big trouble. No Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded this year as a result. Pity (that’s sarcasm, in case it’s not clear). That first link I gave is to a very long story about the … Continue reading →
It’s extremely popular, but not for the reasons you might imagine: The popularity has little to do with interest in Judaism, let alone with the Holocaust. It is Anne’s personal story that draws most readers in, particularly young female readers. … Continue reading →
There have been two suicides of prominent celebrities in the news in the past few days: Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. I’ll talk about them a bit later in this post, but I want to start with something more general—this … Continue reading →
Author Philip Roth died last Tuesday. You can read hundreds of tributes to him and many criticisms of him, and I don’t have too much to add to that except to say that I liked his early works (including two … Continue reading →
Writer Tom Wolfe has died at 88. Reading a lot of commentary around the web, I notice that Wolfe was a deeply meaningful writer to a great many people, some of whom say he changed their lives. I have to … Continue reading →
This article about how head injuries sometimes (although very very rarely) lead to savant powers made me think (once again) of the Jorge Luis Borges story “Funes, the Memorious.” Fortunately, the work appears in its entirety online, so if you … Continue reading →