HOW AMERICA CAME TO TORTURE ITS PRISONERS: …They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse,... Read more

FRIENDS IN NEED: At the pregnancy center, we see how certain norms which are destructive for everyone, but which may make some utilitarian sense from an upper-class perspective, have filtered down to poor women. The most obvious one is the idea that marriage is the final stamp of approval on a life well lived, the last item on the to-do list, to be checked off only once you’ve achieved economic stability. Marrying before economic stability has been achieved is actively... Read more

“You’ve turned into a log of wood,” he commented. “You’ve not only lost contact with reality and lost all interest in world events, in your civic duties, in yourself, in your friends (and you did have friends), you’ve not only lost all goals in life, except for winning at roulette–you’ve even renounced your memories. I remember you at an intense, vivid moment in your life, but I’m certain you’ve forgotten the best and strongest emotions that you experienced at that... Read more

UNEQUALLY YOKED IS DOING A SECOND ROUND OF THE “IDEOLOGICAL TURING TEST.” Talk to her about it here! (I infest the comments box.) Read more

FACES: A PET PEEVE. See also the comment of a friend of mine, after seeing the cover of a new book on Gay Catholic Whatnot, “Oh no–not the bandaged heart!” Read more

LETTING GO AND HOLDING ON: As we walked back from seeing Kid with a Bike, my friend and I passed a car with a bumper sticker reading, “I believe in unicorns, good men, and other mythical creatures.” I joked that it was especially appropriate for the movie we’d just seen, a Belgian drama about a boy trying to find someone to parent him. But the movie isn’t at all cynical or harsh. The kid is really lost and angry, and... Read more

SING YOUR LIFE: Recently watched Kiss of Death, a bleak and sometimes grimy little noir about a small-time robber who eventually gives in to the cops and turns state’s evidence so that he can go home to his daughters. The story sets out to tug your heartstrings and succeeds (the guy was only robbing jewels at the start of the movie because no one would give a legit job to an ex-con, and his kids needed Christmas presents!); it’s much... Read more

THE MIND ANSWERS THE BELL LIKE A SERVANT: A quick, necessary postscript to my recent long post about conversion–and I meant to say this earlier but got blown off-course by events! Anyway it would be easy to think that if you can become Catholic for reasons as intellectual as the ones I describe in that post, your faith would remain a papery husk, a bunch of moral laws rather than a passionate relationship with Jesus Christ. That kind of faith... Read more

A MAN FREED BY DNA EVIDENCE: And so Morton didn’t get to see Eric grow up. When Eric was 12, he stopped seeing his father in prison. When he was 18, he changed his last name from Morton. That broke his father’s spirit. Fourteen years into his life sentence, Morton hit absolute bottom. “The things that I was hanging on to in the world, and he was it. When that was gone, I just cratered,” he says. “When you are... Read more

But it’s striking that the things that therapeutic, God Within religion doesn’t seem to have delivered to Americans are the very things that it claims to be best suited to provide–contentment, happiness, well-being, and, above all, the ability to forge successful relationships with fellow human beings. …Therapeutic religion promises contentment, but in many cases it seems to deliver a sort of isolation that’s at once comfortable and terrible–leaving us alone with the universe, alone with the God Within.–Ross Douthat, Bad... Read more