Anyone who’s read this blog for a while is well aware of how much I admire both the poetry and the thought of Robert Frost. For example, there’s this [in the excerpt that follows, Frost uses “justice” in the traditional … Continue reading →
Another great article by Gary Saul Morson has been published in New Criterion. He’s the author who wrote a piece about Solzhenitsyn that I discussed previously here. This time Morson is writing about Lenin – or rather, about the thought … Continue reading →
If you’ve ever been cheated on or betrayed, this might resonate. It’s not just about the person who lied to you, it’s about your view of yourself in the world: Insight can help turn chaos into order. I have experienced … Continue reading →
Did you ever wake up convinced you were in one place, and then look around and realize you’re in another? Maybe you’re on vacation and you think you’re at home, until you look around the room and everything is unfamiliar. … Continue reading →
Do you talk to yourself? Not aloud (although you may do that, too; I certainly do), but in your head? Psychologists who study the phenomenon say: …we don’t have to use full sentences to talk to ourselves, because we know … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Part I can be found here.] In that same interview I wrote about in Part I, someone named Richard Wolff had a few things to say as well. Wolff’s academic credentials are impressive, if you’re impressed by that sort … Continue reading →
Last night I was looking up something about Charles Krauthammer, and I chanced to come across something he’d written in 1985 that I’d never seen before. It expresses some of his thoughts on abortion, and it struck me that it … Continue reading →
Utopia for Realists. If that book title sounds like an oxymoron, it certainly doesn’t to its author Rutger Bregman: Imagining utopia, writes Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, “isn’t an attempt to predict the future. It’s an attempt to unlock the future. … Continue reading →
Theory, that is. The funny thing about the ubiquity of conspiracy theories is that some of them are true. The trouble is figuring out which ones they might be, because the majority are not. Now that the Epstein death conspiracy … Continue reading →
Li ZiQi is a phenomenally successful YouTube star from China who seems to me to be a cross between Martha Stewart and Vermeer, 21st Century style. I discovered her recently via Gerard Vanderleun’s American Digest blog, and I find her … Continue reading →
…then you’re in a heap of trouble. How can a problem be solved if it can’t even be named, or described, or discussed? This isn’t about Trump and Baltimore’s rats, although that’s one of many recent incidents that sparked the … Continue reading →
Commenter “Socratease” calls my calculus class “the stuff of nightmares.” That is quite literally true, because after experiencing the horror of that class, and the ensuing and resounding “F” I received (my first and only in a long student career), … Continue reading →