Culture, High & Low 728

Today many Americans seem smitten with the notion that Washington holds the answer to the many dangers circling in the water.

Whenever I hear someone claim that “our enemies hate us for our freedom,” I think first of the USS Vincennes and July 3rd, 1988. Twenty-two years ago today, Vincennes was…

I prefer the waiter at Galatoire’s who told us to avoid the trout because it wasn’t very good that day. That’s useful information. But it’s simply impossible to imagine a…

This spring, Joel Salatin spoke at Patrick Henry College on "Food: The Cornerstone of Christian Credibility." I'm happy to be able to make an audio recording of this lecture available…

I was just a boy with spindly limbs and boney knees, but I knew the importance of stories, so I sat with my grandparents on the porch, and drank sweet…

If you love place, limits, liberty, and think they are words that have meaning, you are probably conservative, and should honor that word also.

What a trifling thing it is to control man! How easily we believe in fairy tales when they come cloaked in the black box of authority and superior knowledge.

Nostalgia is, therefore, an index of alienation, communal decrepitude, and, at high levels, cultural patricide.

I have a long history with the sour cherry. Here is some of it.

What if the nation-state was not the cure but the cause of the wars that we term “religious”?

Why didn't I remember to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month? Does this mean that I am culturally insenstive? Or are there too many heritage months to keep up with?

Claremont, CA. On Tuesday, the residents of this fair state voted to “open” the California primaries. From now on, every voter in the state will receive the same ballot in…

The general continued to pay for the upkeep of the LSU tiger in an airconditioned cage. The amount of money involved was almost precisely the same as the subsidy for…

Philip Bess argues that traditional forms of building are particularly suited to contemporary life.

Over the weekend I picked up a book with a promising title: "Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture." It helps chart a path to a promising coalition between…

I Drink, Therefore I am; A Philosopher's Guide to Wine. A review.

We are trapped in the deepest imaginable form of incoherence: we call for more control over the consequences of mastery, yet vaguely recognize that this very response is the source…

Who is following in Susan B. Anthony's footsteps: Connie Schultz or Sarah Palin? Is abortion an empowering right necessary for true equality, or an inhumane tragedy linked to lack of…

The great libertarian journalist Jesse Walker calls this Cold War liberal folkery (http://reason.com/blog/2010/05/27/you-hit-me-baby-like-an-atomic) "the most earnest song ever written." Hilariously bad. Enjoy! 

The hubris of ingratitude is a caustic acid that reduces all in its wake to the fetid condition of servitude, for a spoiled child needs nothing so much as a…

We are here, in part, because choices made in big places have worked against rural places and rural people.

I just completed Nicholas Carr's excellent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, and--because that's the sort of person I am--I couldn't resist writing a review-essay…

Nor was it his great and almost constant tumescence, which his grey polyester pants could never quite sufficiently hide.

Jersey Shore teaches us something about the tragic dimensions of the culture in which we live, and in which we raise young people.