Culture, High & Low 730

David Brooks on the meritocracy: good critique, bad conclusion.

Less happy for mother is the reality that the single soul, resulting from this communion of two bodies, receives nourishment from single-malt.

Whatever else you make of Facebook friendship, it underscores the great and significant discrepancy between: 1) the scale of contemporary life, and 2) the scale of friendship.

With friends like this, you can have a world full of enemies at your back and it don't matter because your friend is your fortress.

As the half-savage neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Most of us require an extended social network to keep us mentally and morally awake, and for a laugh, too, and if these friends are people we can weave in…

Could the very thing that makes our lives so easy also be that which makes it so much harder, particularly in encouraging our separation into our private retreats?

It may be the great sentiment of this American moment: “I want to build something of my own. How do you not understand that?”

Why not stand on the shoulders of the Kindle?

In 1973, the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton abortion decisions. Together, they represented a serious defeat for the unalienable right to life, the…

A friend of mine with a penchant for self-effacement said “There’s just not enough time to get the work done and procrastinate.” It is not that he only works well…

But as a profound poet trying to make a comfortable living I can’t really trouble myself about that fit audience though few. . . . Were I to start thinking…

I tend to think that slippery sidewalks are a sign of a broader pattern, in which people are less prepared to take responsibility for the inconvenience of ‘gray areas.’

It is only our own town or neighborhood that is specific enough, and someday knowable enough, to enable a capable writer's imagination to imagine it clear and whole.

Devon, PA. My old friend and classmate, Jeremiah Chamberlin, writes in to the FPR ombudsman of a new venture he has undertaken to help support, save, or at least treasure,…

The listlessness of modern death is that you might not even get a chance to show courage before you forget who you are.

Alexandria, VA My last post has led some to conclude that I am a pessimist. Even Ross Douthat, among the most perceptive commentators in print and on internet, suggested that…

Washington, CT. Puckish ad infinitum, I take it as my heathenish duty during this special time of year to preach at the choir boys and girls of ye Front Porch…

If my friend Ike lived in Britain they’d call him a “one-off.”  An avowed anarchist who thinks that things started going downhill when humans invented agriculture (and thus the need…

Hillsdale,MI. David the King ordered the beautiful Bathsheba to come to him because he could.    He also could have her husband killed, and sent the letter that condemned Uriah the…

Henry County, Kentucky. Most families who celebrate Christmas have their own favorite Christmas traditions. We like to go to Bethlehem. Bethlehem (Kentucky, six miles from us) is a place too…

Rock Island, IL A century ago in New England, the approach to snow was quite different. When snow began to fly, people switched to runners. Roads were not plowed out,…

JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS.  I am not a film critic and what follows is not a movie review.  In fact, my movie tastes run decidedly to the petite bourgeoisie, and beyond…

East Lansing, MI.  Back home in the steady snows of Michigan, I came across an old poem of mine, the other day, that seems like an appropriate riposte to Jeffrey…