Seven Most Underappreciated Movie Villains

“A hero is only as good as his villain” is a stupid saying. Is MCU Iron Man only as good as War Monger? Do you even remember who War Monger is? On the flip side, there are hundreds of cases where the villain far outshines the hero: for example, every

AI and the Left Hemisphere

About once a month, I come across an online essay that is so lengthy and compelling that, after reading the first section, I merely scan the rest and print it out so I can study it later. Such is this essay by Adam Kirsch. It appears to be an explanation

QR Codes Aren't Evil

They just feel that way. We ought to be asking "why?"

Flannery O’Connor’s Prescription for Our Divided Times

By Christina Bieber Lake at Comment

St. Dann the Armed Robber

You ever notice how many saints die of drug overdoses? It's amazing. A newspaper article will recount a man or woman's last days in a way that makes the person sound sweeter than St. Francis, and then, buried in the middle of the article, there'

Edward Frenkel on the Limits of Large Language Models

"I wonder if a large language model could actually ever come up with the idea that the square root of negative one is something that is essential or meaningful because if all information you get, if all the knowledge that had been accumulated up to that point, tells you

Aragorn and the Rangers or Dirty Mike and the Boys?

New York Gazette August 28, 2021 NEW YORK. Cultural critics have grown outraged by the portrayal of Aragorn in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Ring series. “It's pretty clear that Aragorn is homosexual but Tolkien simply refused to admit it,” says Guy Chase, President of the

Ellis Sandoz, RIP

The Voegelin community is a puzzling one. To an outsider (i.e., to me), it seems insular but enthusiastic. It's like they're on their own island and eagerly invite others to the island but with one requirement: the others already be on the island. And what

Hamlet in the Metaxy

By Stephen Conlin at The Imaginative Conservative

In Praise of Clichés

Avoid stale phrases. Orwell called them "dying metaphors." Robert Fiske called them "moribund metaphors." They're sayings that have been used hundreds of time but haven't yet made it into regular vernacular. "Emotional rollercoaster," "It's a jungle out