David Brooks has written a fascinating essay on how self-presentation in politics is very different from that in the academic world, and how Michael Ignatieff came to grief in Canada finding this out the hard way. I don’t feel the […]
Howard Ahmanson
It’s a Consensus World, After All?
We often speak of our era as a very polarized age. I will demur. First, I remember 1968 in America, and the polarization and hate between cultures then was a lot worse than it is now, with actual riots and […]
Two Theories of a Lasting Marriage
Reading the Sunday New York Times always fertilizes the imagination, for good or ill. Today they had a psychologist named Eli J. Finkel writing about how since 1965 we have been in the era of the “self-expressive marriage,” which is […]
Why Does Talk About “Evangelism” Make Me Nervous?
At an event I was at recently I heard about a new effort to get Christian colleges united around the concept of ‘evangelism’. Well, fine. Jesus desires that people in all cultures be brought to Him and taught to do […]
The Last Freedom (and its Relationship to the First)
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World seems, for the most part, to be closer to the future we are facing in the West than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I do think that parts of Orwell’s vision are still important, however; in […]
“Spoiled Rich Kids” and “Ghetto Gangsters”
Trustfunders like myself are accused of a lot. We are accused of being ‘spoiled’, whatever that is. Some of us take the route of a Paris Hilton, others of us follow the rather ostentatious simplicity of the so-called ‘trustafarian’. But […]
After a Century, Why is the San Francisco Bay Area Kicking our Butt Now?
I was young in the early Sixties, when the cultural rivalry between Los Angeles and San Francisco was strong and active. Jack Smith, for Los Angeles, and Herb Caen, for San Francisco, used to feud regularly in their newspaper columns […]
How Michael Dell Ruined My Vacation
For seventeen years my wife and I have been going to the Four Seasons Hualalai, on Hawaii Island [known as the Big Island] for a month every winter. The beach in front of it is full of lava rock and […]
Why I Won’t Support Unz’s Minimum Wage Initiative – And What I Will Support
Some important people on the Right, starting with the maverick Ron Unz but apparently including such as Phyllis Schlafly and Bill O’Reilly, have come out in favor of a higher minimum wage, such as $12 per hour. The argument against […]
The Late Chaim Potok and the 2012 Election
My apologies for my long silence. I was gone for five weeks, mainly on my wife’s business, but the last portion of the trip was a journey through the north of Greece looking mostly at painted churches. I should start […]