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A collection of 249 issues

Paul Johnson's Intellectuals: A Micro-Review

If you're interested in biography, perversion, and modern ideas, I highly recommend Paul Johnson's Intellectuals. I read it on my honeymoon (heh, heh), so it's been awhile, but I remember greatly enjoying the min-bios on Rousseau, Shelley, and Sartre. I later read E. Michael

Flannery O'Connor on Her Writing Habits

I'm a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and

Ten Bad Books

Human Events asked conservative scholars to compile a list of the most harmful books of the past 200 years. Here are the results: 1. The Communist Manifesto 2. Mein Kampf 3. Quotations from Chairman Mao 4. The Kinsey Report 5. Democracy and Education 6. Das Kapital 7. The Feminine Mystique

Tom Bombadil

The big willow tree swallowed Pippin and Merry and threatened to suffocate them. Frodo and Sam were frantically yelling for help when they heard someone carelessly and happily singing a ludicrous little song and making all sorts of noise as he stomped. The person listened to the hobbits' plea

On Mirth

When humor returns, sanity comes with it. Maybe the insane era of political correctness is nearing an end. Not only have comedians been poking fun at it for a few years, but even academicians are getting into the act. To wit, The Mirth of Nations by sociologist Christie Davies, who

Can You Fit 37,000,000 Into a Monster Truck Show?

Whenever I see a clear vehicular mark of blue collar-dom (say, a big-wheeled pick-up that requires a stepladder to access its cab or a sticker of a urinating cartoon character) dragging a trailer with a jet ski or some other recreational contraption, I'm reminded of the words of

Brownson, the Radicals, and God

Although he was a collaborator with the radical Fanny Wright (and her partner, socialist Robert Owen), and had veered strongly toward agnosticism himself, Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) quickly found their anti-religion stance intellectually clumsy. The radicals taught that religion/superstition (the two are synonymous for radicals) were coeval with the human

Negative Vice

Writing about the tendency of materialism to enervate the higher faculties of man, Russell Kirk described materialism as a "negative vice." Shopping and possessing material things are fine in themselves, but a passion for shopping and material things is a negative vice: a vice that negates the positive.

Alyosha Karamazov

There were four Karamazov brothers: Dmitri, the sensualist–loving God but indulging his sins; Ivan, the intellectual–unable to believe in a good God; Smerdyakov, the twisted and cunning bastard son–and parricide; Alyosha, the monk and budding saint–a handsome young man who loves God and humanity. Few literary