Some deaths are more deathless than others
Or that seems the lesson to be drawn from the fact that Mary Stachowicz gets 1350 Google hits and Matthew Shepard gets 563,000.
Society and culture
Decoding Da Vinci
What does it mean that something as idiotic as the Da Vinci Code has had a strong effect on how people answer pollsters’ questions about Christianity and Catholicism? (No, I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, and yes, I feel entitled to dismiss them as idiotic anyway.)
Some possibilities:
- Polls mean nothing. When
A celebration of the life of the mind, A.D. 2006
Last weekend I attended commencement exercises at a very prestigious Northeastern liberal arts college distinguished by its selectiveness, its commitment to social progress, and its extraordinarily beautiful and lavishly funded campus. I was struck by the unity of view of all the speakers. Here’s the gist of what I heard:
- The “scriptural reading” opening the
What does it mean?
Here’s an image that appeared on a piece of junk mail I received from the U.S. Postal Service pushing their “premium forwarding service,” which lets your mail follow you when you go on vacation. Whatever happened to feminism?
I suppose it matters that other panels on the card make it clear that what’s being shown … More ...
Draft rant about how Lao-tze was right
The more organized knowledge becomes the less people know. Formal studies are good for some things. Even football coaches have chalk talks, which are a kind of formal instruction. There are limits though. You don’t become a good cook from food science or a good teacher by studying teaching.
When knowledge is over-organized what counts … More ...
News flash: Roman art not crude
No big surprise: when they finally found a classical bust that still had its paint on, they noticed something:
… More ...It had … been assumed that classical statues were painted brightly. In fact, the colouring on the head is a delicate shade of orange-red, which, although faded, indicates that classical colouring was subtle and sophisticated.
Where are we
In France, an MP is fined and denounced vehemently for criticizing homosexuality, and the Culture Minister wants him kicked out of the party. In this country we mostly don’t fine people for saying the wrong thing, we just re-educate them or put them in therapy. And then there’ll always be an England, … More ...
A slice of the future
A neat dramatization of digital privacy concerns: The Google Robot FAQ (Last update: November 1st, 2030).
Discriminations and our common life
There’s a recent piece at View from the Right pointing out that while the call of Harvard academic Noel Ignatieff to “abolish the white race” sounds radical, it is really no different than the usual liberal and even mainstream conservative position that we should all work toward a state of affairs in which race doesn’t … More ...
Sidelight on Islam (or something)
Little-known fact (to me anyway): the Iranian fertility rate is now 1.82 children/woman, well below replacement. According to the BBC, it’s plummeting in the 3rd world generally, except for sub-Saharan Africa.