If Pico and the alchemists are read carefully, one begins to understand the modern obsession with space exploration, cloning, and the creation of life.
July 2011
(What follows is the text of the remarks that I delivered at the recently concluded I.S.I. Honors Program. The conference was entitled “The Language of Liberty”).
Fells Point, Baltimore … A narrative today dominates our political landscape that poses liberty
But that is not so with computers, for no matter how many doctorates one holds in computer science, at some point the system disappears into a world of magic.
Can you make this stuff up?…
Perhaps the tension will be useful when it comes time to make something of what is. Just be sure you make it in a place called home.
“The Geek Squad” has put out a back-to-school advertisement which argues that technology will “make school easier” – mostly by making sure you are always entertained and don’t have to work. At least they could pretend that school was about…
In Bingo-land it is not appropriate to talk about yourself until you have found some shared link. In general it is more acceptable to talk about who you are (your social fabric) than what you do (your claim to fame).
(Or, Fix Your Darn Windows)
This “summer of Hell,” to borrow Peters’ phrase, has had me in too many hospital/doctor waiting rooms. But as I was recently counting up co-pays and deductibles in my head and wondering how to rob Peter to pay Paul this…
If only such voices as that of Lord Maurice Glasman received a hearing in today’s Democratic Party. According to this remarkable article in the Guardian, Glasman has the ear of Labour’s leader Ed Miliband in urging an alternative direction for…
Caitlin Flanagan has weighed in on the phenomenon of students studying abroad, and the organizations which profit from them doing so. While these students will all discuss how they are “giving back,” what they are really doing is taking. I…
FPR’s first annual conference will be held at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, MD on September, 24, 2011. The conference title is “Human Scale and the Human Good: Creating Healthy Communities in a Global Age.”
The slate of confirmed…
Soon you’ll all be cool as cucumbers–and soon enough as cold as the grave.
The speculative greed of the many—the suckers—is what enables the few to pull off their uncreative destruction. But not only the greedy get hurt when one of these bubbles bursts or scams explodes. Widows and orphans, pensioners, the unemployed, and the destitute, not only in the U.S. but around the world, suffer the most when Americans contrive to wreck their own economy for a season.
In a recent piece in The Weekly Standard, Adam J. White argues that Samuel Alito is a Burkean conservative. By looking at Alito’s reasoning and not simply his voting record, White concludes that
Justice Alito is uniquely attuned to the…
Like the football coach whose pep talks wear thin, a President who turns every cause into a holy one, every enemy into a Hitler, and every conflict into a genocide, may soon find his audience sinking, exhausted and disbelieving, into the very cynicism he hopes to surmount.
