Culture, High & Low 728

I make available, below, the text of a lecture I delivered in November, 2011, at University of Texas at Austin. My thanks to the Jefferson Center and Tom and Lorraine…

In the spring of 2011, articles began popping up about a couple in Toronto who were refusing to publicly reveal the gender of their baby. They named the child “Storm”…

“Many propositions involving temporal concepts which seem obviously and necessarily true are just as necessarily but not obviously true when formulated in terms of spatial relations.” [1] In 2011, the…

The urbane  residents of New York City like to appear austerely bored at their hometown's famous sites: the Empire State Building is an overrated tourist-trap; Times Square, garish; and Wall…

When the daily paper is gone, where does the reporting go?

If you follow college "culture" at all, you'll find little new or surprising in the recent discussions of the abusive hazing rituals at Dartmouth, or that the college and its…

Sir, I write this letter to protest the public and wholly unwarranted attack on my character you have made during the course of your campaign, and which has only recently…

Edmund Burke was the greatest master of the English language, not even excepting Shakespeare.  It is no doubt a startling claim, but one that I think is highly defensible.  The…

I’m struck at the vanity of those impious folks infatuated with their ability to improve the situation without having first served a long apprenticeship under the tutelage of the old.…

To paraphrase an observation of Chesterton on the subjects of poets, silence and cheese:  Political scientists have been mysteriously silent on the subject of soap, or at least until now.[1 ]…

I was watching a film called Chartres Cathedral and the Geometry of the Sacred the other day. For some reason, the Gothic gargoyles put me in mind of the Republican…

In a wonderful article published here at FPR a few weeks ago, Jason Peters argued that a proper education ought to provoke a kind of spiritual or intellectual crisis among…

Washington, Ct. Classics are called such for a reason. They endure. Quite by accident frequently, for as any condemned intellectual knows, the most marketable idea prevails within the lifetime of the…

Several weeks ago, at the web journal Humane Pursuits, James Banks published an article entitled “Community as We Know It, Not as We Wish It,” which was largely a response…

About this time last year, Mitch Daniels, the Republican Governor of Indiana, stirred some controversy by calling on conservatives to declare a truce on so-called “social issues” so that they…

Well, if drive-through Ash Wednesday services weren't enough, the Dutch have finally invented mobile euthanasia units to do house calls when your own doctor won't. A town in Wisconsin I…

The Regents, New York's public school state tests, are coming up in May, and so some of the time I've been spending with S, the fifth grader I've been tutoring,…

The New York Times recently ran a précis of a book by Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University and the author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary…

In The Supper of the Lamb, a delightfully odd book, Robert Farrar Capon suggests as an exercise in reality an extended session with an onion. “Once you are seated,” he…

Alexandria, VA.  Vast and even incalculable quantities of ink have already been spilled over the issue of the HHS mandate that religious organizations purchase contraception as part of their compliance…

Devon, PA.  Cursed with a lousy city newspaper rife with good coupons, I sat down with my coffee this morning to read Karen Heller's latest column, "What?  Birth Control?  Again?" …

In Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the character Tomas is an inveterate womanizer, a man who takes notes on the particular physical differences, however minute, of the women…

Lucky me, to be invited to try the beta version of Google’s newest and coolest app — Séance! After a quick download and install, I wasted no time in launching…

I think Walker Percy uses the following to illustrate contemporary life, although I don’t remember where. But it goes something like this: When his grandfather walked down the street, everyone…