Last month my movie-night girl and I went to see Top Gun: Maverick at the second-run theater. It was, unsurprisingly, a mostly-anodyne tour of the tropes, actually-entertaining in the second half. But I give it credit for one thing: When we were struggling this month to find any movie, anywhere, that we wanted to see in a theater, my girl hopped right on the Devotion train after viewing the trailer. Last night I did my best to keep a straight face... Read more
Yesterday I shared on social media a legal-opinion piece on a highly contentious social issue. Within minutes, as I continued scrolling through my feed-reader, I saw that there had been a horrific shooting that appeared to be targeting the opposition-group in that same issue. As of this writing, I haven’t seen specific information about the shooter and what that person’s motivations might have been. That’s just as well, because: None of the victims of that shooting deserved to die. No... Read more
Canada’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” program is in the disability news as “mental illness” has been added to the list of rationales for state-approved suicide — despite the acknowledged difficulty of distinguishing the suicidal patients from the ones who just want suicide. I’d like to back up today and talk very frankly about the temptation to suicide when experiencing any of the conditions, physical or mental, that Canada’s euthanasia policies cover. Proponents of assisted suicide make it sound as if... Read more
Update: Here’s the episode link! Just learned this morning that my episode of The Journey Home airs tonight! You can watch it live (free) online at EWTN’s website, or on TV if you receive EWTN with your cable service. For the watch-party experience, Matt Swaim writes: I’ll be monitoring the show and adding a few links from the @chnetwork account using the tag #JHprogram, in case you want to follow along on Twitter. I cannot say enough times how much fun I had... Read more
This week I volunteered to answer a question posed to the Catholic Channel writers: Could the Pope be Black? Answer: Yes. Let’s narrow that question further: Could the next pope be Black, without any crazy circumstances, just a normal papal election producing that result? Answer: Yes. There’s no dogmatic (set in stone as a matter of faith and morals) way for choosing the Bishop of Rome, but the current procedures are this: There are (supposed to be) up to 120 cardinals... Read more
Today I want to dive into a study brought to my attention by a usually very sensible health and fitness blogger, but who erroneously interpreted the results as evidence “long covid” might be primarily psychological in origin. Here’s the study: “Psychophysiologic symptom relief therapy (PSRT) for post-acute sequelae of COVID-19: a non-randomized interventional study.” Click on the “full text” tab to read it for free (you can also download the PDF if you’d like to save a copy). It’s a... Read more
H/T to Emily DeArdo who brought fully to my attention the debate (“debate”) about John Fetterman’s auditory processing disorder. I have no opinion about Fetterman’s candidacy in general, though taking a wild guess about that (D) after his name, it’s unlikely our politics overlap in a convincing way. I do, however, want to make some very candid clarifications, from personal experience, about how the “thinking” of auditory processing is not the kind of “thinking” that is relevant to information processing... Read more
This morning while my kid was driving across town in an approaching hurricane to go babysit, I came across this headline at NPR and foolishly clicked: “More than 2.5 million Florida students have missed school during Hurricane Ian”. Pause for a moment and remind yourself that reporters at National Public Radio, and the editors who publish them, are presumably supposed to understand at least some tiny thing about their topic? At all? And on the face of it, the facts... Read more
It will surprise no one that I have a few criticisms of Suzy Weiss’s report “Hurts So Good” over at Common Sense. For those who haven’t read it, Weiss investigates the world of chronic illness social media, and makes a convincing case that there exists a genuine problem with aspects of that culture. I am going to accept at face value everything she does report, more on that in a second; where her journalism is sloppy, irresponsible, and shows profound ignorance of... Read more
Something that astonished me, but shouldn’t have, is just how divided Twitter has been over the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Andrew Sullivan, a fan, gets right to the heart of her appeal: Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human — for the rest of her life. . . . Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained... Read more
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