Culture, High & Low 729

Bruce Langhorne, best known as the inspiration for Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" but best loved (by me, anyway) for his extraordinary score for Peter Fonda's 1971 acid Western The…

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; / Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

If I were God, I’d keep other company.

The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect.

What are the compensations on the downhill side of life?

Front Porcher Rob Grano has a lovely little review of John Lewis-Stempel's The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland. It's over at The University Bookman. Here's a taste: "Really:…

Like many Americans I’ve struggled to put the election of 2016 in proper perspective the last few weeks, only to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: Trump may be America’s first…

Grand Rapids, MI Leonard Cohen has done his last show, composed his last song, and breathed his last breath. When the news popped up on the screen of my laptop…

What follows is an expanded version of a talk originally given at the 2016 Front Porch Republic Conference at Notre Dame, where Susannah Black spoke on a panel on Promoting…

What follows is an expanded version of a talk originally given at the 2016 Front Porch Republic Conference at Notre Dame, where Susannah Black spoke on a panel on Promoting…

“Nations die of softening of the brain, which, for a long time, passes for softening of the heart.” “Democracy is only a continually shifting aristocracy of money, impudence, animal energy…

Liechtenstein is the 6th smallest country in the world, larger than San Marino but smaller than the Marshall Islands, and is roughly twice the size of the island of Manhattan.…

Over a long and colorful career, the phrase “Vanity Fair” has called up wildly divergent associations, while often seeming to mean nothing at all. Is it a place? A quality?…

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star with a spiritual yearning and an outsized libido, may be both John Updike’s most famous and most despised literary character. But…

Like most avid readers I have a queue of books I'm reading and plan to read. When a new book gets added to the queue it gets bumped to the…

On an intercontinental flight these days one has dozens of options. Not only do they have the most recent movies available for your enjoyment, but classics as well. They even…

Earlier this year, after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, I reflected on the conversations that may or may not ensue from the changing of a facebook profile picture.  As my facebook…

Only an idiot would really miss the old Durham Athletic Park - or, if not an idiot, then only someone who hadn’t actually spent much time there and didn’t know…

Recently, I watched as the people of Earth came together to bring The Martian home. Interstellar, Gravity, and Wall-E all tell the “lost in space” tale with more filmmaking skill…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Twenty years ago, the concept and label "communitarianism" was riding high, or at least as high as any broadly applicable yet intellectually coherent ideological movement…

Plato wasn’t the first to recognize the connection that exists between morality and community, though he was the first to give it philosophical expression. In the Republic, Plato saw psychological…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] As I write this review, I keep hearing about Jeb Bush, campaigning for president, talking about how the invasion of Iraq and the removal of…

Hidden Springs Lane. Two of the biggest sports-related stories of this year include the dominance of UFC fighter Ronda Rousey and the introduction of Caitlyn Jenner to a world that…

I am the illegitimate son of Dorothy Day and H.D. Thoreau.