[NOTE: Here’s a post I first wrote in 2005. It’s a favorite of mine.] I think it may be a lost pedagogical device, but when I was in grade school, we were forced by our teachers (mostly elderly women, as … Continue reading →
Today we have the sad news that best-selling blockbuster author Tom Clancy has died of undisclosed causes at the age of 66. I must admit I never read any of his books; it’s just not my style of reading matter. … Continue reading →
I’ve got a new post up at PJ’s Lifestyle section. The topic: driving the Model T versus driving the cars of today. Not about politics at all. Okay, maybe just a little.
Continue reading →Phyllis Chesler’s new book, An American Bride in Kabul, is described and recommended by John Hinderaker at Powerline. Sounds interesting. Nothing like personal experience to drive a point home.
Continue reading →Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Case in point, the rainbow … Continue reading →
British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a complicated man, like many poets. But unlike most of them these days, he was politically of the right, at least in some respects. Larkin wrote in forms, which is inherently conservative. But his … Continue reading →
Joyce Maynard has made a kind of cottage industry out of her long-ago relationship with J.D. Salinger, who seduced her when she was a wunderkind of 18 and he a famous writer of 53 and then abruptly threw her out, … Continue reading →
Is Obama really going to attack Assad’s regime in Syria, or is he just talking? And if he does attack, how far will he go, and what is his ultimate goal? There’s no dearth of speculation on all those questions. … Continue reading →
The poet Yeats often wrote about how dreadful old age was, especially its physical manifestations. In the poem “Among School Children“, he describes himself as having looked pretty nifty in youth and terrible at sixty: And I though never of … Continue reading →
…to remind me of the Flying Dutchman. Or Philip Nolan, The Man Without a Country:
Continue reading →America has been so fortunate, and in many ways so outside of history’s darker corridors, that we have forgotten what we should have known, and neglected to teach it to our children. It’s like a population (think Native Americans before … Continue reading →
Oh, I was a strange, strange child. And not the least of my strangenesses was that I loved the stories of Philip K. Dick. That was odd in several ways. First of all, it was odd because I was a … Continue reading →