The latest from Heather Mac Donald is called When Race Trumps Merit: When Race Trumps Merit provides an alternative explanation for those racial disparities. It is large academic skills gaps that cause the lack of proportional representation in our most … Continue reading →
William Blake was a unique poet and artist. I don’t think he fits into any category except “mystical visionary” and probably “some sort of genius.” Many people are aware of his poem
Continue reading →I’ll start out by saying that I think the five people in the submersible are dead, and that even days ago I thought they probably had been dead from the moment the vehicle stopped communicating with the mother ship about … Continue reading →
[NOTE: I decided not to be as politics-intensive as usual today.] I consider the poems of Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins to be among the greatest, and I’m going to highlight a single line from his poem entitled—well, the poem … Continue reading →
Disney has just released a live action version of “The Little Mermaid.” Some people have panned it, in particular compared to the 1989 animated film of the same story that was very popular and highly praised. But I’ve never seen … Continue reading →
The Moody Blues were big in the late 60s. But for reasons I never could quite articulate, their music creeped me out at the time. It didn’t make sense that I disliked their songs, because they had many elements I … Continue reading →
I was about twelve years old when I first read Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. It scared me more than anything I’d ever read. Did I understand every single bit of it? No, but I understood a surprising amount. And it … Continue reading →
In yesterday’s thread on a poll indicating a steep decline in patriotism in the US, commenter “charles” wrote: That is one thing that makes polls like this so disheartening; if more and more people believe that love of one’s country … Continue reading →
This article claims that giving up novel-reading can be a sign of senility: Fiction, on the other hand, requires you to exercise your memory, as you proceed from beginning to end and retain a variety of details, characters and plots. … Continue reading →
Today is Valentine’s Day and I’m feeling somewhat raw, for obvious reasons. And yet I’ve never been really big on Valentine’s Day celebrations. After all, for the last thirty years or so I haven’t been able to eat chocolate without … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Here’s a repeat of one of my earliest posts, written in my very first year of blogging: May, 2005. Back then I didn’t have all that many readers, so I thought I’d bring it out for another go-round.] I … Continue reading →
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a post originally published five years ago. Gerard had made the first comment on the original post, as you can see if you follow that link. “Many great dears are taken away…”] —John Updike: … Continue reading →