Articles 355

“If you’ve never worked a tradeshow booth,” a business pal once remarked to me, “you’re not a real American.” True dat. At the Good Food Festival and Conference in Chicago…

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…

As a homeschooling parent I'm continually frustrated by the difficulty of talking about why we do what we do. Homeschooling is nearly always portrayed as a flight from something: bad…

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…

Do you love America? If so, how much? Do you wear an American flag on your lapel (and look askance on those who don’t)? Do you drive only American cars?…

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…

It doesn't take an acquaintance with Tocqueville to spot the flaws in many American claims about equality. Just go to school. You soon learn that an A paper is not…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] A couple of days ago, I had the lucky opportunity to listen up close to Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute here in Kansas,…

Down on the Square (as we East Texas natives refer to the downtown in Henderson, pop. 11,000), I make a visit to the backroom of the Strong-Hurt Pharmacy, site for…

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…

Holland MI. As if my beloved state of Michigan hasn’t had enough problems, we now have Republican presidential candidates skittering across our fair soil and bucolic shorelines, plugging up our phone…

Big-city economic development from the pasture up.

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…