An alternative to the sad choice Brittany Maynard made as she was dying. My father also had terminal cancer and chose to live. His witness, though he wouldn’t have called it that, is something that will form me for the rest of my life. Here’s the story I wrote about his death, which first appeared in First Things: He was a dignified man suffering all the embarrassing ways a hospice deals with the body’s failure as cancer begins shutting down the... Read more
Expanding the number of words you know excites the same parts of your brain as do sex and drugs. Scientists from Spain and Germany found that the the part of the brain called the ventral striatum is activated during a wide range of pleasurable activities, such as eating great food, having sex and taking drugs. During word learning activities, synchronization between the cortical language regions and the ventral striatum was also increased. Furthermore, those with better connections between these two circuits were... Read more
There’s tactful political spin and then there’s complete [male bovine excretions]: From the execrable Harry Reid: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has controlled the chamber since 2007, congratulated Republicans on their victory. “The message from voters is clear: they want us to work together,” Reid said. Read more
My friend Russell Moore of the Southern Baptists’ ERLC wrote on Twitter: I was disturbed to get a text from a staff member saying “I am happy that Christ lost.” Turns out he meant “Crist.” Proofread! Read more
For those of you who find this kind of thing interesting. From my friend William Tighe, an historian teaching at Muhlenberg College: Definition of BURKE transitive verb 1. to suppress quietly or indirectly 2. bypass, avoid Origin of BURKE from burke to suffocate, from William Burke †1829 Irish criminal executed for smothering victims to sell their bodies for dissection First Known Use: 1829 Read more
America needs more social capital than it has, but “many of the important forms of social capital take more time than a person holding a full-time job can afford,” observes Charles Murray on the AEI website. Stay at home wives, whether mothers or not, are the main people who create that social capital. If you live in a place that you cherish because “it’s a great community,” think of the things you have in mind that make it a great... Read more
In Brooklyn, the new Morbid Anatomy Museum is certainly morbid but also revealing. Its culturally Jewish but not religious owner says: “A lot of Americans don’t want to feel deep, painful feelings,” said [Joanna] Ebenstein. “The idea of death is that the world as we know it could end at any moment. Jews aren’t able to keep that distant from their minds because the world did end” — with the Holocaust. “This idea that the sun will rise and everything will be... Read more
A wise article on aging from a young writer. Beginning with Renee Zellwegger’s mysterious transformation, Danielle Berrin writes in Renee Zellweger’s tragic beauty lesson that the idea of aging well, without fighting to retain one’s youth, especially by artificial means, is a lovely ideal, and I’m sure that many people are content and proud that their outsides match their insides. But the fact is, with all that is available to us to augment our own images — images of God! — it has... Read more
Which is probably a good thing. As reported by a Mother Jones writer, the trade journal Folio reports that “magazines that feature Jesus on their covers see their issue sales jump by as much as 45 percent. (Putting the Bible front and center can boost sales as much as 51 percent.)” Even Popular Mechanics has tried it. Read more
In her “Memoir of Mary Ann,” published in Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor offered a famous comment on sentimentality: One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him. . . . Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents.... Read more
David Mills
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