Eric Scheske

Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine [http://www.chesterton.org/explore-the-acs/gilbertmagazine/], I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a

Edward Snowden is back with yet another spying scandal. In a new interview, Snowden revealed that NSA employees regularly pass around nude pictures of people they spy on. It got even weirder when German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, "So, vat do you think?"

Kontent from the Kindle I was pleased to see an Oscar Wilde crack the Top 25 of most-highlighted passages on Kindle [https://kindle.amazon.com/most_popular]. Here's the passage: "I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my

From the Notebooks “Our lives as philosophers cannot be radically divorced from what we do when we are not doing philosophy.” Gerard Casey. Indeed, I have heard the same thing said about theologians: theologians must be saints. Nassim Taleb makes a similar point in Antifragile when he writes, “Never listen

A Random Passage "In the hall outside the Rothschild offices in nineteenth-century Paris, it was claimed that a man took off his hat when the Baron de Rothschild's chamber pot went past. Prestige can have that kind of effect on people." Joseph Epstein, Snobbery.

Body and Soul "Bodies are mutually attracted by nearness, knowledge, and pleasure but souls by distance, mystery, and suffering." Such thinking could trend into Cartesian dualism, which undermines the sacramental nature of existence, but it's always important to reassert that the soul and body are not

Even though both Israel and Hamas fired on one another during the five-hour humanitarian period yesterday, the U.N. secretary general said both sides "mostly respected" the cease-fire. That's like leaving the house without pants and saying you're "mostly dressed."

Here's an article about the surging hard cider market [http://www.cleveland.com/drinks/index.ssf/2014/07/cider_finding_its_refreshing_n.html#incart_river_default] . Excerpt: > "Cider is made just like wine, but you drink it by the pint," said Richard Read of

After Nigeria was eliminated from the world cup, the Nigerian captain personally offered to refund all the expenses of fans that traveled to Brazil. He said he just needs their bank details and pin numbers to complete the transaction.