Note to publishers: Be nice to Michael Kinsley. That’s gospel, Jack. You can tug on Superman’s cape, spit into the wind, and even pull the mask of the old Lone Ranger, but you’d better not mess around with the former co-host of Crossfire and the founder of Slate. Otherwise, he’ll give you a piece of his very nimble mind. As Kinsley explained in an e-mail, after Si Newhouse offered Kinsey a job editing the New Yorker, then withdrew the bid:... Read more
In the Tmes’ “Modern Love” series, Diane Farr relates how her relationship with a Korean-American man taught her that “stick to your own kind,” as a parental injunction, is alive and well, at least when it comes to marriage: That may seem just as random and hurtful as “they will never accept you” had sounded to me over breakfast. But at least I knew the context of my mother’s racism. As a first-generation American, my mother had grown up in... Read more
On its website, Zoe Carter Fitzgerald’s memoir, Imperfect Endings, is billed as “the uplifting story of a woman determined to die on her own terms and the family who has to learn to let her go. “She may need to fire her blurb writer, because her thoughts on the subject of assisted suicide seem to be much subtler than that. Reflecting on Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s own natural death, she writes that natural death may, on average, be no messier or... Read more
According to the New York Times, the federal government’s programs to save unemployed homeowners from foreclosure are failing. Somehow “no income” and “mortgage payments” just don’t mesh: Critics of the Obama administration’s approach to preventing foreclosures have pressed for two years to get officials to focus more of their attention on unemployed homeowners, with meager results. As part of the bank bailout, the Treasury Department was given $46 billion to spend on keeping homeowners in their houses; to date, the... Read more
I, of all people, have no right to make this kind of assumption, but I’m betting Slate contributor Nate Heller is not a Catholic. Not to prosyletize or anything, but he really ought to think about signing up. He’d be a natural. All the best Catholics I know have a strong fussy streak; they are ruled by an all-powerful gag reflect. Everything about the liturgy has to be just so, or else they flip out. When considering the list of... Read more
In National Catholic Register, self-professed introvert Jennifer Fulwiler advises other people-shy Catholics on how to give and receive the Sign of Peace without dissolving into a puddle of self-consciousness. She must be a very good Catholic indeed, because she breaks the whole process down into a long series of — you guessed it — rules. Thomas Aqunas would be proud: WHAT TO DO The sign of peace occurs shortly after the Our Father. You want to be able to focus... Read more
A vigilant reader has informed me that I was entirely wrong in supposing that Foreskin Man, the comic put out by San Francisco circumcision opponents, was someone’s bad idea of meta-humor. The artist, Matthew Hess, is a real person of real German ancestry — not, as I had hoped, a Jewish prankster who named himself after a Nazi for a lark. Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Hess. The interview is brief, but still revealing: UPDATE:I spoke with... Read more
Tatler of Pajamas Media claims to have found proof that behind San Francisco’s proposed circumcision ban lurks the blue-eyed monster: 19th-and 20th-century race-based anti-Semtism, the philosophy that brought you the Final Solution. The smoking chimney, so to speak, is an indie comic book, allegedly circulated as “campaign literature.” The eponymous hero, Foreskin Man, battles a gang of fanatical orthodox Jews led by Monster Mohel, whose goal, apparently, is to seal the Abrahamic covenant with every child in the world, whether... Read more
For the past three years, ever since Sarah Palin introduced her winsome self to our great nation, I have promised myself I would rewrite the Tilbury speech in her idiom. The Tibury speech, many of you will know, ranks among the greatest PR coups in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Drake had just defeated the armada sailing in the name of Phillip II of Spain, Elizabeth’s brother-in-law (a far more dangerous man than Trooper Mike Wooten, even... Read more
Unchivalrously boiled down, this is the conclusion of a study by Christy N. Glass and Eric Reither. Women who are overweight early in life, they find, are less likely to complete college and for that reason, earn significantly less than better-proportioned. They found no such differences among men of varying sizes. As they summarize their findings in the New York Times: Why doesn’t body size affect men’s attainment as much as women’s? One explanation is that overweight girls are more... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
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