thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Some tricks worth thinking about: Seeing through the lies. Long pauses, short sentences, and frequent errors in diction or grammar can be a tip-off that someone’s lying. Here’s a more complicated system: Become a Human Lie Detector. Act truthful in one way and something else you do will betray you.
No system works … More ...
Here in New York we didn’t know what to say about the September 11 atrocities, so we repeated old patriotic speeches and spent a couple hours reading the names of those who died in a sort of spoken equivalent of the Viet Nam Memorial. In England they apparently had the same problem, and Spiked provides … More ...
The forces of built tradition are rallying in Britain and making headway against modernist tyranny: All the King’s Architects: The surprising success of Prince Charles’s anti-modernist crusade. Unfortunately, there are no pictures in the online version of the article, so unless you’re unusually good at visualizing buildings from lists of details you’ll want to … More ...
This woman sounds like a parody, but not by much: Smith presidency offers a bully pulpit . Carol Christ, the college’s new president, thinks that “equity and access are some of the key issues facing American higher education.” She’ll therefore be pushing for colleges to bring more gender balance to their faculties, especially in the … More ...
What happens when journalism gets too real? ‘Philly Daily News’ Ponders Photo Controversy. The paper ran a spread on the city’s at-large murder suspects and two of them got caught. Unfortunately, the suspects were all the wrong color. The paper had to apologize in response to a flood of angry phone calls and emails, … More ...
Rumors that the Right owns the ‘net are greatly exaggerated. It sometimes seems that way, since the Internet is one of the few settings in which the Right is allowed to exist and make its points, but Google searches on leftist and rightist slogans suggest the contrary. The buzzwords of the Left (e.g., … More ...
The French are doing our schools’ “zero tolerance” policies one better: French pupils face jail for insulting teachers. Apparently they mean it. The cabinet has already allocated $5 billion for hiring specialized judges and constructing detention centers.
Why can’t something more informal and gentle than the slammer keep young people in order? The old … More ...
It’s interesting that The New York Times gave a reasonably straight account of Michael Rose’s book that blames a decline in religious devotion among American Catholics on the anti-transcendence of recent church architecture. Rose is, of course, the author of Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church, which blames unorthodox, … More ...
What’s going on here? Gang membership spirals among under-16s in England. The Guardian—possibly acting in its role of Platonic guardian, noble lies and all—apparently doesn’t want to tell the whole story. It’s a problem, they say, of big cities, schools, and “gun violence,” which apparently is an active principle like the drug trade. It … More ...
The crypt has opened, and CDAW once more stalks the land! As most VFR readers know, the treaty passed out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the beginning of the summer and may be voted upon by the full Senate at any time. Since we’ve discussed it before we won’t repeat how bad it … More ...