GUYS AND LADIES: My post about Damsels in Distress, at AmCon. Read more

THIS IS THE DENVER POST STORY ON MY TALK. Very nice! And I love that their blog is called “Hark!” Read more

IN SCHEMES BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES: I have a post about the Great Brain books, over at Acculturated! Read more

A SUMMARY OF MY TALK IN DENVER is up at the Spiritual Friendship blog. Read more

About midnight, while Paul and Silas were prayingand singing hymns to God as the prisoners listened,there was suddenly such a severe earthquakethat the foundations of the jail shook;all the doors flew open, and the chains of all were pulled loose.When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open,he drew his sword and was about to kill himself,thinking that the prisoners had escaped.But Paul shouted out in a loud voice,“Do no harm to yourself; we are all here.”He... Read more

STRUGGLING CITY’S COFFEESHOP SERVES IT ALL: The key to the shop’s comprehensive business plan: offer as many services as possible to any conceivable customer. In the florescent-lit rooms behind espresso machines, walk-in clients can see a notary or submit a urine sample. If that’s not enough, go upstairs to have family portraits taken in the on-site photography studio. Jimmy Jackson made use of the document-services center last week, printing job applications as he waited to testify in court. He said... Read more

AND SPEAKING OF TAC, CHECK THIS OUT!: I’ve recently released a website providing convenient access to the digitized archives of a wide range of periodicals from the last two centuries, most of which have never before been available outside the dusty shelves of research libraries. Although many of these are generally conservative or rightwing, such as The American Mercury or Social Justice, many others are liberal or leftist, including IF Stone’s Weekly, The New Masses, Encounter, and The Reporter, while... Read more

“AGAINST THE AMERICAN JESUS”: My review of Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Also, I will be blogging at TAC’s group blog, State of the Union, mostly talking about arts-and-culture. Look for more on Damsels in Distress later today/tonight. And come see me tonight in Denver! Read more

“THE DECLINE OF DECADENCE”: I wish I had seen Damsels in Distress before its closing night here in DC, so I could tell you all to go see it! It was terrific–funnier and more wide-ranging in its satire than Metropolitan, I thought. In When Sisterhood Was in Flower, Florence King’s obvious love for the ’70s feminism she satirized made the satire itself sharper and brighter. WSWIF:70’s feminism::Damsels:”Beauty will save the world.” Read more

…The paradox is that although war is waning in the classic configuration of brigades fighting an enemy on foreign shores, we are not rid of its specter, burdens, threats, costs and restrictions. What should we make of wartime that has the appearance of peacetime? Mary Dudziak’s new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is a crucial document. Dudziak, a legal historian at the University of Southern California, argues that we are experiencing “not a time without war,... Read more