So it looks as though the Koch v. Cato struggle is drawing to an end. Ed Crane will be out as president of the Cato Institute at the the end of September. John Allison, former president of the megabank BB&T will take over the reins then, not as interim president but as the guy who will run the show indefinitely. Here’s the detailed Cato press release and here’s Dave Weigel making the case that this is a win for the... Read more
“Did you show them your beard?” That’s what Real Clear Science editor Alex Berezow wanted to know after he learned I’d been carded at the Lynden Safeway. What happened was I went shopping for a few groceries this evening and snagged two beers on the way to checkout. The checkout girl asked to see my ID. I was visibly flabbergasted. She tried to come up with a reason why the question she’d just posed wasn’t absurd to the nth degree.... Read more
This Matthew Lee Anderson piece in the evangelicalish Relevant Magazine cites Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body and the Apostle Paul. Its title is “The Theology of the Body.” What could it possibly have left out? UPDATE: The author has replied here. Read more
Why, yes, that is a Mazda Miata towing a large, recently used dirt bike with a Jack-in-the-Box in the background. Read more
Man, the Deadwood mini-marathon tonight got awkward. Friends first took great efforts coax me out of a chair onto the couch. They then remarked that I looked tired and uncomfortable and was something the matter, Jeremy? Instead of walking them through the long answer, I kicked up my feet on the coffee table, made a joke, and we went back to watching. They didn’t pry, yet it’s unlikely they bought it. Not sure I would have bought it if I... Read more
This morning, I would have been almost on time for Mass. Fortunately, yours truly got so caught up with a Darrell Issa interview on the radio that Father Flapdoodle’s homily was half-way over by the time I walked in. Listening to him tell us the story of his week made me wish I had listened to This Week a little longer. The above is included to demonstrate, dear reader, that I am not a devout Catholic. “Devout” is an emphatic.... Read more
For over a decade, my fair state had its own version of Saturday Night Live. It was called Almost Live! and oh how I miss it. To play you out for the week, here’s one of my favorite bits from it called “Folk Songs of the Slightly Inebriated.” Read more
My Real Clear Religion deputy Nicholas G. Hahn III just called me to say that it was my turn to do the weekend update. I was nearly inconsolable. “Nick,” I asked him, “how can a good and loving God stick me with the weekend update?” “I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s your turn.” Obviously, he’s never heard of theodicy. Or guilt trips. Read more
This is one of those times where one probably ought to announce one’s biases up front so as to avoid any misunderstanding: I do not believe Mormonism to be metaphysically true because I accept a different and competing set of metaphysical truths. While I cannot claim to have given the Latter-Day religion every possible consideration, I have a) had Mormon missionaries over to my house for several weeks running; b) read parts of the Book of Mormon; c) read articles... Read more
Looking for a gift for a friend, I tripped over a small booklet by novelist David Foster Wallace titled This Is Water. I’m quite late to the game here. The volume is an only slightly cleaned up transcript of a commencement address Wallace delivered to Kenyon College in 2005 and “went viral” on the Internet long before we had a term for it. Wallace killed himself in 2008 and This Is Water was published posthumously. It’s a morbid interest of... Read more
Jeremy Lott's Diary
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