Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood
I’m at Acculturated. Don’t worry, it’s not an endorsement of “happiness research”: The title of this article is also the title of a 2009 study by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. The study looked at data from the United States and Europe, focusing on the period from the 1970s to the mid-2000s: a time of [...]
One cheap but useful definition of natural law is that it’s the belief that there is a universal human nature which is knowable by reason (and here we fight about what we mean by “reason,” but ignore that for now), and so our desires can be rightly ordered based on what would express and support [...]
That was the original (and better) title of Mike Bartlett’s Contractions, a one-act play I saw at the Studio Theater on Wednesday. The play starts when Emma, some kind of saleswoman, is called to a sterile, glowy dystopian boardroom to speak with a corporate apparatchik about a possible contract violation. The apparatchik, also a lady, [...]
Recently watched “Marked Woman,” an early Bette Davis/Humphrey Bogart flick in which Davis is a nightclub hostess who tries to go up against the toughest gangster in town after he kills her sister. Bogart is the crusading, by which I mean lecturing, DA. It’s actually a startlingly powerful film, largely because it takes everything about [...]
“Everything’s permitted here, you see. I suppose one could say with the theology instructor that if God does not exist then everything is permitted; but here it doesn’t matter if God exists or if he doesn’t, since one is free to do everything. The result of making use of this freedom is that the one [...]
Just got back from the movie version of Bachelorette, which stars Kirsten Dunst. I reviewed the play version here. Some notes follow, but the most important note is: Don’t see this movie. Seriously, just do not. I don’t believe in advice and I rarely give it but in this case I will make an exception. [...]
One of the current liberal projects is the replacement of an old legal and cultural model, in which the paradigmatic public “person” is male, with a new legal and cultural model in which the paradigmatic public person is unisex. Both of these models are damaging because the underlying vision of human nature is false. This [...]
I rang in my 34th birthday watching Bridesmaids with my best friend, and I really can’t think of a better form of celebration. It is a very crude movie (it opens with a graphic bad-sex scene, which is cringingly, eyes-coveringly funny and painful), hilarious and poignant, with a real generosity of spirit. None of the [...]
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