SWEET HOME ATHENS: You guys. You guys!!! …Auburn is a land-grant university: it became one in 1872 under a federal program geared toward helping the working class obtain practical college educations. That mission continues largely to this day. A public university with an annual tuition of less than $6,000 for Alabama residents, it accepts roughly 70 percent of those who apply. Among its 20,000 undergraduates, business and engineering are the most popular majors. When students choose liberal-arts majors, they tend... Read more

There will little learning die that day thou art hang’d.–somewhere in Timon of Athens… I’m re-reading old emails from my freshman year of college, obviously! Read more

BUT NOT EVEN VERONICA MARS COULD MAKE “FRAK” AN OKAY WORD: Mark Shea has a terrific column on cussin’. I find myself more or less diametrically opposed to the most common Catholic views of obscenity. I would absolutely, always in all cases, write “God d–n” rather than the horrific unhyphenated word, if it would read as reverent rather than twee; of all the four-letter words, it’s obvious that “damn” and “Hell” are the worst, and yet they’re the ones our... Read more

CALLED TO SINGLENESS… OR JUST WAITING BY THE PHONE?: So I found this Christianity Today article to be provocative, but somewhat naive. You know, I’m thirty, and single, and not interested in marriage for boringly obvious gay-Catholic reasons, and yet I still feel tripped out by these attempts to recast singleness as just as normative as either marriage or a vowed religious vocation. They so often seem to rest on an ideal of self-knowledge which I think is probably chimerical,... Read more

CA MA DIT LACAILLE EN ARRIVE? What will you say, when you arrive at the final judgment, about the hurricane devastation in Haiti? Read more

KENLEY IS THE MARK MILLAR OF FASHION. She critiques (as much by her persona as by her designs) in a way that really should be interesting, and which other people have made interesting, and yet her own work just comes off as ridiculously “I’m fifteen and so edgy.” (I haven’t seen her design for tonight, though–this is based on previous weeks plus Bryant Park.) The critique is so desperately needed that even a bad version can briefly seem refreshing… but... Read more

KEEP YOUR MUSIC FOR EVENINGS, AND YOUR COFFEE FOR CALLERS: Offer your suggestions in the comments for the music of tomorrow’s monks. I’m therein with a theremin, baby. Read more

NOT JUST ANOTHER MOUTH IN THE LIPSTICK VOGUE: Hey, so one of the things I do to earn money involves a newsletter from the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy. I don’t pick which stories go in it, but I will say that it’s usually a really interesting collection–five interesting marriage-related stories (sometimes with multiple perspectives and iterations) each week. If you want to keep up on all of the various marriage-related controversies in our culture (not solely or even... Read more

CHANGE THE OIL AND OIL THE SQUEAKS…: Just realized yet another of the five thousand things I love about the Weakerthans: They can sound like the most sentimental, wailiest country; with lyrics about Bigfoot, which are also lyrics about sublimity. Read more

I WILL LET YOU DOWN: The comments to the post linked below reminded me again of my hatred of all things Giving Tree. You all, the tree is the villain. It spoils the child, gives him no basis for a real life in the world, and then martyrs itself so he can keep being dependent on it forever. There are reasons to martyr oneself… and some of them are awful. As I said once on a whiskey-soaked evening: “That tree... Read more