The Shield of Aeneas “When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, ‘My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, [...]
International bad-boy Julian Assange stripped naked, shot pool with pneumatic tarts in Las Vegas and had his photo spread all over the internet; while Britain’s Prince Harry remains locked into London’s Ecuadorian embassy until pneumatic tarts in Sweden promise not to extradite him to America. Sorry. Let me try that again. Prince Harry, third in [...]
Introduction Mark Twain tells us in his book Tom Sawyer that when Tom was punished by having to whitewash his Aunt Polly’s fence, he tried, as was his custom, to shirk the obligation. By making the work look fun, however, he interested the other boys in painting the fence. After arousing their interest, he still [...]
Jane Austen’s genius comprehends the subject of marriage and the book of love in all its intricacy, practicality, goodness, and mystery. Her novels center on the importance of marriage as one of life’s most important choices and life’s greatest source of happiness—“all the best blessings of existence” to use a phrase from Emma. In Emma [...]
Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, uniquely, have been lionized as merely “lending their names” to the founding. But at least one of these two greatest Americans of the eighteenth century was indeed a lawmaker and not merely a symbol in the Constitutional Convention. The title of this essay gives away its complete content, without suggesting [...]
After his great victory in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush went before the United Nations to declare the coming of a New World Order. The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled. The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of “The End of History.” Savants [...]
Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying, by Amy A. Kass and Leon B. Kass It is a commonplace belief that the health of a civilization is directly related to the well being of its families. It is also commonsense to affirm that families are stronger when marriages are sturdy. Sound [...]
N.B. This is a piece I wrote in the early 1990s. I had forgotten completely about it until I came across it by accident today (Wednesday, August 22). It was my first attempt at a dissertation proposal, and I wrote it for one of my favorite graduate school professors, Dr. Russell Hanson. He probably doesn’t remember me, [...]
If there’s one thing we can be sure of ever since this Great Recession hit four years ago, shortly after we got sated on the Beijing Olympics in late summer 2008, one verity, it is that the money supply has gone up ever since. Way up. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is known far and [...]
One reason I can’t buy the claim that conservative intellectual has become an oxymoron is that on our campuses it’s so often the conservatives who defend “liberal education.” I’m going to sketch out the understanding of “liberal education” or “general education” shared by me and many of my fellow professorial conservatives (a tiny and shrinking [...]
[My recent book, Beauty in the Word, a sequel to Beauty for Truth’s Sake, is quite dense and complicated, so I thought it would be helpful to readers if I produced a “study guide”. So, in a series of posts, I look at some of the key themes and ideas in the book.] II. The Transcendentals [...]
The whole case for our commitment to equality as a national goal comes from an isolated phrase—”all men are created equal”—in the Declaration of Independence. Was Lincoln right in his exposition of this phrase in the Gettysburg Address? The idea is as old, of course, as that magical first sentence of the Gettysburg Address: “Fourscore [...]
Wind. All he could hear was wind. The voice of Max and the others vanished in the gale of his waking nightmare. It was dark, the kind of perfect darkness modern people rarely know and so find disorienting. And then he saw a circle, spinning like the outside rim of a wagon wheel and the [...]
Comes now news from across the pond that executives at one of the world’s most respected banks, Barclays, rigged Libor. Even the venerable Bank of England is apparently being investigated. For sports fans, this is like fixing the Super Bowl or doping a horse in the Derby. But it is rather more serious. For [...]