I know I’m a little late to this, but I was reminded of Ross Douthat’s column a few days back about reactions to the Park51 project from what he sees as two distinct Americas. Refreshingly, the conservative Douthat uses some appropriate terminology in explaining the second America, the opponents of the mosque. He uses words like “crude,” “xenophobic,” and “darker suspicion.” He seems to see clearly the lineage from which the current crop of knee-jerk bigots arise: The first America... Read more
I’ve just read Nicholson Baker’s take on the first years of World War II, Human Smoke, and it is certainly unsettling. But I have come across a couple of reactions to the book of late that complain that Baker is trying to convince the reader that WWII was a bad war that should never have been fought, and that Churchill and Roosevelt were as bad as Hitler. This leads to a pretty much categorical dismissal of the entire work. Here’s a... Read more
This was such an important moment for me: my 8-month-old son meets his 96-year-old great-great-grandmother, with his great-grandma (as well as her cousin), his grandpa and his mommy and daddy all there to introduce the two. Read more
Much to my surprise, I was part of a panel of daddy bloggers on NPR’s “Tell Me More” with Michele Martin, which aired today. The piece is the latest of the show’s discussions on the recent New York Magazine article about a trend of parents finding no joy in parenthood. This installment obviously focuses on the perspective of fathers, and spoiler alert, I’m pretty pro-parenthood. I was joined by Jason Sperber of Rice Daddies, and Keith Morton of African American Dad, as well as Jennifer Senior, author... Read more
Over the past couple of days, I kept seeing this name pop up in tweets and around the intertubes: “Justin Bieber.” Now, look. I opted out of popular culture pretty much entirely after college, so I have no idea who that is. (I think he may have been on SNL this week? See, no idea.) So I asked my tweeps to tell me so I didn’t have to a) do the googling myself and b) stumble upon a website promoting or praising... Read more
I was at a Burger King near my office (stop glaring, wife!) and they were collecting donations for the charity Jerry’s Kids. If you donated a buck, they’d scribble your name on a construction paper shamrock and stick it up on the wall behind the counter. I was happy to donate the dollar, but I felt very odd about having my name scrawled up on the Burger King wall, a kind of semi-permanent reminder of all who came through that... Read more
Michael De Dora has written in a recent controversial piece that, in essence, questions the wisdom of “organizing [one’s life] around atheism,” and at the same time bemoans the tone of the New Atheists in their condemnation of religion. Some have suggested I write in response to this post, and so I’ll take on both of these points separately (the part about the New Atheists will be more of a postscript)—but I think it might surprise some where I agree and disagree... Read more
I recently read Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, and it took a couple of weeks before something about it dawned on me. While Obama gained a lot of early national political credibility when he began to strongly advocate for more engagement with and embrace of faith in the Democratic Party, and often espoused his own religiousness and Christian-ness during the campaign, these themes seemed wholly absent from Dreams. When Obama does deal with religion in the book’s narrative, it is almost... Read more
I am not reading a book. Washington, DC is shut down today, and besides doing some catch-up work here and there, I essentially have a bonus day off. Hooray! What a rare and often-wished-for opportunity to do some quiet, relaxed book reading! Visit my Goodreads page and you can see that I am juggling several books that I have yet to complete, and I have a list a mile long of “to-reads” as yet un-attempted. The baby is sleeping (scratch that, back in a second…)... Read more
About halfway through Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, one can’t help but come to a couple of stark conclusions. One, that most of humanity’s domestic life, for the vast majority of time time we had domestic lives, was full of suffering and misery the likes of which we moderns can barely imagine. Two, that the tiny percentage of the species blessed with an overabundance of money and/or status have not been content to simply live well, but have... Read more
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