I suspect that our ancestors were better prepared for Christmas than we tend to be. Unless you’re the sort of person who breathlessly anticipates the holy day, like we all did when we were kids, it has a way of coming up from behind and tapping you on the shoulder and startling you. That’s the [...]
I'm not much of a long-range planner when it comes to the giving of gifts at Christmas time, I'm a last minute giver. But at least I try to be a thoughtful one. My recommendations in past years have followed a theme. The same is true this year. This time around my list reflects my [...]
Pixar certainly has a winning formula. The movie studio seems to have found that little spot behind the collective ear that we like to have scratched. Its first 2015 release, Inside Out, follows the same inimitable story-telling recipe it served up to great applause with films such as Up, WALL-E, and Ratatouille. Pixar films are captivating—artfully done—without [...]
On election night, when the returns come in, folks around the country generally look upon the results from New England with a mixture of horror and puzzlement. Even though I have lived in New England most of my life I admit to looking at them in the same way. My feelings have something to [...]
This is what the Romans had in mind when they spoke of gravitas: They noticed that some men have weight—and they naturally make others feel it. To the Roman way of thinking gravitas is a virtue. And it’s a virtue because it is useful for certain things. For one thing, it can help you [...]
How the West Really Lost God by Mary Eberstadt We can hope that Western civilization is in the early stages of awakening from a bad dream. Mary Eberstadt’s new book may help with that. It is more a stirring nudge than a blaring alarm—in part because it is an accessible work of social science, [...]
The Introduction to, The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House There were giants in the land in those days, but fewer people than there used to be. Now the giants were the typical sort—lumbering and hungry. But the people were very odd, most anyway. It wasn’t uncommon for a giant to reach right [...]
Chapter 4 in The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House “And the two shall become one flesh.” You don’t hear that much anymore, and when you do it is written off as poetry. With the low regard for poetry these days that pretty much relegates it to something fit for a greeting card. When [...]
Imaginative conservatives flee from the mass mind, so you should expect their Christmas gifts to come from parts unknown. They haven’t run just to be different—heaven forbid. Being obsessed with being unprecedented is itself a symptom of the mass mind. Instead imaginative conservatives are always on the lookout for things that are true, good, [...]
Chapter Three in The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House The words love and economy rarely find their ways into the same sentence. Economics has been called the dismal science but people write songs about love. You don’t write songs about economics unless you’re writing a parody. When most people hear the word economy they think about money. That is [...]
Chapter Two in The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House A house, you can see with your eyes, comes with walls and a roof. The house I will teach you to build is made with love. That sounds really sappy, I know. Most people think love is a sunny disposition towards others, and, if [...]
Religion for Atheists: A Nonbeliever’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton. When I learned that Alain de Botton had written a book with the title, Religion for Atheists: A Nonbeliever’s Guide to the Uses of Religion I thought, why of course he has. I was introduced to de Botton through, The [...]
I am very hopeful about our long-term prospects, it is the near-term ones I’m worried about. What’s the near-term?—the next few hundred years, give or take a century. Since the near-term is when my children and grandchildren will pass their lives I feel I should do something to help them. I’ve passed the half-life [...]
Chapter One in The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House Experts in this sort of thing tell us that there are three tasks you must perform in order to survive in the wilderness. They even give us some helpful deadlines—dead being brutally factual in this case. In ascending order here they are: you [...]