Some people like cooking. Others don’t—indeed, some would be happy to guzzle Soylent and throw the whole cooking thing out the window. Yet many of us, as we grow older, become responsible for others: children, friends, and family members who may come over for dinner or who may live with us. Cooking isn’t a gender-specific [...]
Why did Republicans do so well in the 2014 elections? Among the reasons emphasized by pundits and operatives on both sides of the political aisle has been the ability of Republican candidates to counter effectively the charge that they would escalate the so-called “war on women.” A key example cited by both left and right [...]
We ought to rename our planet according to the bureaucratic shackles we place upon our children. We shall call it Tormentaria. It seems quite apt. The Tormentarians are a humane race. They don’t favor harsh (though swift) punishment; they grow queasy if anyone mentions a whipping post or even a smack on the posterior. They [...]
Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, like all conservatives, has a tender affinity for precious things that are passing away. Sometimes they can be preserved and brought to new life. At other times, they may only be preserved in memory for another generation such as ours, who may open the record and feel them in our own hearts, [...]
Can an Englishman ever be an American? It is a simple enough question, to which, perhaps, there is ultimately a simple enough answer: Yes or no. The problem is that the simple answer begins as a tougher question: Yes or no? And this question is difficult to answer because it raises further questions. What exactly [...]
Driving a significant distance to work is a clear and present danger for a hypochondriac. In case you had not noticed, billboards are increasingly about sickness. One drive to work could leave him wondering about the ten most important questions to ask a doctor, suspicious that he might have lupus, ADHD, Alzheimer’s, or certain that [...]
The immense folly of the government run public schools is lost on American citizens blinded by misplaced trust in the false promises of a bankrupt educational system. The utilitarian social utopians who designed the curriculum rejected the original promises of an authentic education based on principles and replaced them with the calculating schemes promising to [...]
Tourism, as anyone with a passport can tell you, has become a very big business, particularly in places that no longer thrive in the customary practices of industry and commerce. Take Genoa, for instance, one of Europe’s largest cities along the Mediterranean coast and still the grandest seaport in all Italy, whose bright and shiny brochures [...]
In the historical and often hysterical debate surrounding the legal definition of marriage, there is one crucial class of people whose voice has not been heard and whose fate and future will be affected profoundly by the radical changes being proposed and initiated. It seems that the whole marriage debate has been concerned with the [...]
There are many good things to say about Disney’s massively popular movie, Frozen. One of its more refreshing plot twists concerns the heroine’s saving the day through an act of sacrifice for true love—for her sister. Those who expect to read, now, praise for some feminist attempt to show how a strong female character can dispense [...]
In various lectures and publications, I’ve had occasion to call attention to the problem of the “birth dearth,” the fact that the birth rate has dropped below–often well below–the rate of replacement in just about every prosperous and high-tech country. The relevant facts are laid out for our country (if hardly for the first time) [...]
I’m no Russell Kirk when it comes to television. The Birzers own one, and, as patriarch, I’ve yet to throw it out the window of any floor of our house. But, we haven’t had any cable or any channels–not a single one–since 2002. Our decision to cancel all TV had little to do with principle. [...]
At 8 a.m. on August 29, as Dirk and Petra Wunderlich began the day’s homseschooling classes with their four children, a team of twenty armed special agents, social workers, and police with a battering ram stormed the family’s home in Darmstadt, Germany. The children were forcibly taken from their parents in a raid that was [...]
Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973 In philosophy, religion, politics, and other arenas of communal life, we are confronted with choices between radical contraries. We can choose between Aristotle and Nietzsche (according to Alasdair MacIntyre); we can choose between God and Mammon (as Jesus instructs in the Sermon on the Mount), or, as [...]