Introducing Blaise Pascal: The First Anti-Modern
If we’re going to battle against modernity, we need to recognize our champions. Pascal might have been the first.
Biography
We're on Information Overload. Here's One Solution
One forgotten ancient suggests what we might do with all of today's information
We Either Flee Devils or Fight Them
Toward the end of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield tells himself he will move out West and shut himself off from everyone and everything, possibly by posing as a deaf-mute.
If he pretends to be a deaf-mute, he reasons, people would have to write messages to him on
Gabriel Richard: The Only Saint Who Ever Served in Congress?
The first and only member of the U.S. Congress ever up for sainthood: Detroit’s Fr. Gabriel Richard, founder of the University of Michigan.
Thank Samuel Johnson for the Jane Austen Revival
Without his “Dictionary,” you probably wouldn't be able to make sense of “Sense and Sensibility”
How Not to Sacrifice if You're a Father
Hint: Don't be Rousseau
I’ve been reading some Nock. Albert Jay Nock, one of the premier American essayists of the early twentieth century and one of the founders of modern conservative/libertarian thought.
A weighty man, that Nock.
But also a disturbing man. In a 1964 biography,
Russell Brand: Baptized
Jane Stannus at the Spectator
Yogi Berra Loved. That's Why He Played
Words or world records? The Yogi Berra story shows how our words and images can even overshadow our greatest work.
“He was the most overlooked superstar in the history of baseball,” actor Billy Crystal explains.
You’re into sports? Me neither — but we loved every second of “It Ain’t
Toni Morrison's Rejection Letters
Melina Moe at the Los Angeles Review of Books
Listening to Podcasts at Oxford in 1374 and Kansas in 1974
Why do we love those conversational podcasts?
If you were a student at a medieval university, you listened to lectures.
And listened and listened and listened to lectures, often more than ten hours a day.
But they weren’t like lectures at today’s universities, where hundreds of students sit