Perhaps many of you have heard of writer Raymond Aron before, but I hadn’t until I picked up a collection of essays by Roger Kimball published in 2002 and entitled Lives of the Mind. Aron was the author of a … Continue reading →
By now you have probably read the remarkable story of Jaycee Lee Dugard, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who was kidnapped eighteen years ago by a couple named Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Jaycee was eleven at the time, and has been held … Continue reading →
There was a discussion in the comments section here a while back about just what type of tyrant Obama might end up being. Commenter “huxley” wrote: Stalin and Hitler were aware of how people approved of them, but no more … Continue reading →
We keep hearing that Sotomayor has a compelling life story. And no doubt she does. I happen to think that most people on earth have compelling life stories. Granted, some are a lot more dramatic than others, and contain elements … Continue reading →
Some time ago I took note of the following offering in a comment thread. It’s a Talmudic saying that goes like this: The truth is a heavy burden; only a few can carry it. Yes, indeed. When I did a … Continue reading →
Mark Sanford is the latest politician confessing to cheating on his wife. You might say it goes with the territory. Politicians tend to be egotistical and aggressive. They also encounter a great deal of opportunity to stray; as Henry Kissinger … Continue reading →
Yesterday I found myself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the extraordinarily beautiful Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Mt. Auburn is one of the first “garden” cemeteries in the United States. It was begun in 1831 and designed mostly by Henry Alexander Scammell Dearborn, … Continue reading →
Bernie Madoff ran quite the little family business. Back in the happier, headier days of 2000, son Mark is quoted as saying: All of his family members grew up with this being our lives. When it is a family operated … Continue reading →
Here’s a rapturous account of Obama’s inauguration from ex-uber-editor Tina Brown (hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Remember, as you read it, that the author was once at the helm of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, among other credits. Brown’s fulsome … Continue reading →
The NY Times reports on researchers’ attempts to discover the chemical mediators of that complex emotion we call love. Some of this research has been done with prairie voles, who seem to share humans’ ability to be monogamous—although I doubt … Continue reading →
You might ask: who cares about Mrs. Madoff? After all, it’s her husband who’s the culprit. There’s little doubt that this is true. But a rather intriguing article appeared in today’s NY Times on the subject of the involvement (or … Continue reading →
Are these guys correct, and is the worst of the recession behind us? I certainly don’t know—but neither does anyone else. It would, however, be a wonderful thing to have the answer, because we are being asked to act in … Continue reading →