Near the beginning of the Netflix series Midnight Mass, released in late 2021, an Ash Wednesday service is faithfully shown, complete with a young priest’s effective and moving sermon, explaining the ashes as “a smudge of death, of ash, of sin—for repentance—because of where this is all heading, which is Easter. Continue Reading...
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March 01, 2022
Does anyone care who John Galt is anymore?
If it had not been for the railroads, I would never have gotten beyond the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged. Having had a vague idea of what Ayn Rand believed in, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the story depended so heavily on the Iron Horse (given that most “libertarians” view trains as collectivist and bad and cars as admirable chariots of liberty). Continue Reading...
February 28, 2022
The good news of your God-given limits
I love productivity books. I’ve read all the big classics on the subject, from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to Cal Newport’s Deep Work. I am a devotee of David Allen’s productivity ur-text, Getting Things Done. Continue Reading...
February 28, 2022
Justin Trudeau’s political overreach is a greater threat to liberty than the truckers’ protest
The mask has been torn off. If anyone had any doubts that some governments will do literally anything to suppress anyone who protests what they regard as unreasonable measures by the state to address the COVID pandemic, events in Canada has surely disabused them of such illusions. Continue Reading...
February 25, 2022
Canon law, works of mercy, and human dignity
“All human societies face about the same problems,” claim David Friedman, Peter Leeson, and David Skarbek in their fascinating and peculiar book Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. “They deal with them in an interesting variety of different ways. Continue Reading...
February 24, 2022
Licorice Pizza is the L.A. fairy tale we didn’t know we needed
My series on cinematic nostalgia continues—after Wes Anderson’s Francophilia, Ridley Scott’s Italian farce, and Spielberg’s Puerto Rican fiasco, here’s a California story: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth feature film, Licorice Pizza, the only Hollywood movie made last year with some reason to be remembered. Continue Reading...
February 23, 2022
A new documentary on the life of Kurt Vonnegut is unstuck in time
What would Kurt Vonnegut have made of the accordion-style cycle of lockdowns and other restraints imposed on us by the seemingly permanent American sanitary dictatorship devoted to the religion of health in this the centenary year of his birth? Continue Reading...
February 22, 2022
Charles Schulz, Peanuts, and the power of community
Charles Schulz believed that life was hard and lonesome.
That is why he believed that life was best experienced with others. Only through the sharing of burdens and triumphs and fears and joys could a person navigate the immense challenges of life. Continue Reading...
February 21, 2022
George Washington will not be canceled
Cancel—as in noisily toppling George Washington’s statue and striking his name off of buildings? In 2020, one group demanded the removal of his statue from the campus of the University of Washington. Continue Reading...
February 17, 2022
Steven Spielberg’s woke West Side Story is a self-contradictory disaster
Steven Spielberg has recently made a number of movies nostalgic for midcentury liberalism, Bridge of Spies and The Post, especially, very mediocre stories that won him Oscar nominations and praise in the mainstream press at the price of the popularity he once enjoyed. Continue Reading...