Those of you who didn't lose your life savings with Mr. Madoff, and who can think about him with equanimity, may be interested in a very fine novel about his life: Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now.
True, the...
Alexandria, VA . The causes of the current economic collapse have been widely discussed and minutely explored. However, to date I do not believe that I have yet seen anyone offer what I regard to be the definitive and...
Los Angeles, CA At the risk of copyright infringement, I want to recommend a song of this title by John McCutcheon which appears on his album Hail to the Chief. I post the lyrics below. McCutcheon appears to be...
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY. Horton Foote, the playwright and screenwriter from Wharton, Texas, died last week at the age of 92. Foote, whose finest works include The Trip to Bountiful and Tender Mercies, once said of Robert Duvall that his...
ITEM: President Obama Calls for Longer School Day, Public Education for Toddlers, & the Abolition of Summer Vacation
RESPONSE: The fire captain in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “Heredity and environment are funny things…The home environment can undo a lot you...
JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. William Allen White, the noted editorialist of Emporia, once named our shared home country America’s tenth muse—the muse of prophecy. If Kansas is muse, surely one of her prophets was Sockless Jerry Simpson, the marshal of...
MT. AIRY, PHILADELPHIA. Before I say something rather abstract about concrete things, a few personal words about what (and who) lies behind these thoughts may be in order.
The photo above is of the front porch that entered my mind...
South Bend, IN. Back here, in the city where the St. Joseph River takes her perpetual turn for the worse, my family and I have come to pay our last respects to my wife's mother, who passed away recently...
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
I appreciated Professor Deneen's discussion of the problem of free-riding, and I agree that ours is a precarious position, but I would suggest that it is also paradoxically the strongest position available inasmuch as we are always trying...
'Tis the season to hie on down to the high school gym. Via First Principles, herewith my piece on Hoosiers, one of the precious few good films ever made about small-town America.
"FOR ALL THE SMALL SCHOOLS": OR, IT'S...