I have been enjoying Kevin Starr’s volume in his cultural history series, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963. It is a period of which I have some living memory, and I have heard of, or met, in […]
Culture
Why June 28, 2014, is a Really Big Anniversary
First of all, it is the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke (i.e., Crown Prince) Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. This led, of course, to the Great War and a series of wars and cold wars that lasted for much of […]
Some Bleats About the ‘Common Good’
James Davidson Hunter is doing commendable work trying to restore the interest, of Christians especially, in the ‘common good.’ Not a bad thing, but first we have to think about what the ‘common good’ is. 1. First of all, we […]
Pansies
Why are pansies associated with unmanliness and deviation from heteronormativity? They are some of the hardiest flowers there are. When I took this picture the temperature in Washington D.C. had risen to a high of 34F (1C) and they have […]
China’s High-Speed Rail
Yeah!!! I admit there are a lot of problems with California”s high speed rail, and it was probably a mistake, but if high speed rail could replace a lot of airplanes I would be very very happy. In Response To: […]
The Homeless Prefer Suburbia
Even the homeless see the virtues of suburban life, apparently.
Academics, Politics, and Business
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]