Infinite Jest
Bill Burr has a great bit where he describes parenting as a 25-30 year sentence. You're sucked into a bubble, cut off from the outside world as you try to raise your kids. When you come out, you're stuck in, say, 1993 but it's
Briefly
Ice Backs
Vermont and Texas are the only two states that were once independent republics. That's now not the only thing they have in common.
Forrest Gump
đź’ˇI wrote the following decades ago. In light of the Hemisphere Hypothesis, I re-consider it. Is Forrest a left hemispheric or a right hemispheric? If his odd character is on "the Spectrum," he's a man bereft of the right hemisphere (autism is left-hemispheric). But maybe he&
We Need More COVID Outrage
The COVID debacle doesn't rankle enough: not enough people seem ashamed or apologetic; not enough people seem to appreciate the enormity of what our politicians did. I, no exaggeration, find it greatly disturbing for an obvious reason: they'll do it again and too many of us
Nashville, Austin, Charlotte . . . and Detroit?
Are NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia just going through a bad phase and will eventually rebound? Probably, but that doesn't mean they're not in a secular bear cycle (picture a stock market graph, jaggedly going down, with bumps up but overall, down).
According
Why St. Patrick Matters
Or "Why You Should Appreciate Those Indian and African Priests Who Say Mass for Your Parish"
Leftists Trying Not to be Gnostics
Current Affairs seems like a worthwhile magazine. It describes itself as "the left magazine for people skeptical of leftism." Based on this essay, it seems pretty far left . . . Bernie Sanders-left . . . but intellectually honest left.
In the perspective of the Hemisphere Hypothesis, an "intellectually honest" leftist is
The Right Hemisphere Way of Therese Lisieux
St. Therese's is the "little way." The left hemisphere values the big. The left hemisphere demands answers and solutions, which require increasingly large effort. The Little Way is a rebuke of such a disposition.
She placed no value on abstractions, opting instead for the real and
The Importance of Being is the Flipside of the Importance of Doing Nothing
"It's because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to worship reverently the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion." G.K. Chesterton
Here's a great
Henry Fowler and Ernest Gowers
Henry Fowler (1858-1933) wrote A Dictionary of Modern English Usage after a career of pretty much nothing. He worked hard; he was honest and honorable, but he had never amounted to much: teacher, journalist, soldier (lying about his 57 years so he could fight), and editor.
But then, in 1925,