Thank Samuel Johnson for the Jane Austen Revival
Without his “Dictionary,” you probably wouldn't be able to make sense of “Sense and Sensibility”
Eric Scheske
Maybe We Should Thank the Buddhists for Mindfulness Meditation
Catholics keep flogging their tired old nag of a gripe about mindfulness meditation, even though heavyweights like Peter Kreeft and Kevin Majeres have given it their thumbs-up. Their big beef? “The Buddhists kicked it off!” Cue the pearl-clutching and incense-waving, as if that’s a knockout punch.
Gen-Z Needs Community Gardens
It’s dang near Chinese coolie labor time again, that grand American spectacle where hordes of lunatics, armed with shovels, hoes, and a rabid gleam in their eyes, descend upon their garden patches like it’s a sacred calling. Think of it as the nation’s biggest hobby—a manic,
A Meditation on Gnosticism Over at Substack This Morning
The guy who demands that everyone be rational becomes the most irrational of all.
That’s an old Taoist zinger. It rang true when Lao-Tzu swayed atop his water buffalo to the misty hills of eternity; it’s true today as we clatter along in our mechanical Jacobins, guillotinely
The Pilgrim Plague
Ah, the elite progressive white people. Those insufferable, self-righteous bastards who've managed to infect the American psyche with their millenarian madness for centuries. It's a flippin’ disease, a gnostic virus that's been festering in our national bloodstream since the first Puritan set his
Minimalists are Hoarders but with Better Hygiene
Few things feel better than disgust. It's the rocket fuel of reality TV, propelling us to smirk and gape at the human wreckage on display: the obese, the addicted, the mentally ill, the hoarders, and that woman who won't eat anything except cheesy potatoes. It'
Scratching with Modernity
Why are some people such jerks?
Or, to borrow from our British cousins, so disagreeable?
I mean "disagreeable" in the most expansive way possible. I'm talking boors and bastards, cretins and creeps, every person labeled with a derogatory term derived from the nethers of the human
14 Funny Passages from David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster
which means that some staff photographer came in and popped a flash in the face of a traumatized kid at prayer.
Get Ready to Re-Write History
The Don is declassifying. The Elon is dismantling. The Establishment is defecating.
Can America handle the truth?
We think we’re going to learn who shot JFK, but we better be prepared to learn that Oswald shot from the jealous apex of an Oswald-JFK-Marilyn Monroe love triangle. And
Shellenberger on Carlson
You used to be able to draw a line across California. South of Santa Cruz, where those Lost Boys hung out, things started to stink of something right-wing. By the time you hit Orange County, you were in Oklahoma. San Francisco was Peter Coyote and sandal-wearing freaks. Los