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<\/a><\/p>\nJoseph Epstein<\/strong><\/a>, who calls himself a \u201cmedia vegan,\u201d on news: \u201cWhat, you might wonder, do I do with all the time I don\u2019t spend in endless swamp of ephemeral news? Well, I\u2019ve made a little rediscovery of a marvelous invention called books, which I\u2019m told are going out of style but which give a satisfaction much deeper than any other means of communication I know. You might want to turn off your computer, trash your newspaper, flick off your television, and give them a shot.\u201d<\/p>\n Karen<\/strong><\/a> on the discipline of reading: \u201cI\u2019d like to tell you he\u2019s the first bookstore manager I\u2019ve met this year who doesn\u2019t read. In fact, he\u2019s the third one. All were men. All had backgrounds in retail. And all three of them are running bookstores that cater to the Christian marketplace. I think there\u2019s a message embedded in there somewhere but I haven\u2019t decoded it yet.\u201d<\/p>\n JR Briggs<\/strong><\/a> exploring discipleship. Ted<\/strong><\/a> explores godliness \u2026 Eugene Cho<\/strong><\/a>, good on you!<\/p>\n Jamie Arpin-Ricci<\/strong><\/a> on volunteerism: \u201cAs I\u2019ve dug deeper, I began to see a common thread: we all too view our involvement in missional church community through the lens of volunteerism.\u00a0 In other words, we love the vision and reality of ministry and want to be involved, as long as it fits.\u00a0 We have discipled entire generations of Christians to see missional engagement as a voluntary opportunity they can add to their lives when it works or isn\u2019t too demanding.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t to say that many people don\u2019t live sacrificially, but rather that the general trend reflects an attitude of optionality.\u201d<\/p>\n John Stackhouse<\/strong><\/a> takes on Mark Driscoll. Skye<\/strong><\/a> takes on ambition. Roger Olson <\/strong><\/a>takes on \u201cevangelical theologian.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael Kruse<\/strong><\/a> on textbooks.<\/p>\n It appears to me that Darrel Falk did what was right;<\/strong><\/a> the ID folks shouldn\u2019t have expressed themselves as they did. Sad, really.<\/p>\n Meanderings in the News<\/p>\n 1. Living la vida locavare<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cJosh Smith is the executive chef of\u00a0Local Roots<\/a> in Roanoke, Virginia \u2013 and the restaurant is just as its name implies. The farm-to-table eatery supports and utilizes locally-sourced produce and meats to crank out modern American cuisine with classic Virginian touches. (Did someone say pimento cheese?)For Smith, the local food movement has taken root. He\u2019s livin\u2019 la vida locavore and encourages you all to do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n 3. Charles Blow<\/strong><\/a> inveighs against Democrat complicity in programs that promote arresting minorities: \u201cHow can such a grotesquely race-biased pattern of arrests exist? Professor Levine paints a sordid picture: young police officers are funneled into low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods where they are encouraged to aggressively stop and frisk young men. And if you look for something, you\u2019ll find it. So they find some of these young people with small amounts of drugs. Then these young people are arrested. The officers will get experience processing arrests and will likely get to file overtime, he says, and the police chiefs will get a measure of productivity from their officers. The young men who were arrested are simply pawns\u2026. This wave of arrests is partially financed, either directly or indirectly, by federal programs like the Byrne Formula Grant Program, which was established by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 to rev up the war on drugs. Surprisingly, this program has become the pet project of Democrats, not Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n 4. Charles Murray<\/strong><\/a> on the New Elite: \u201cThat a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans. \u2026 The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite \u2014 the \u201ccognitive elite\u201d that Herrnstein and I described \u2014 becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama\u2019s example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent (\u201cShirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,\u201d as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.\u201d<\/p>\n 5. I think Juan Williams\u2019 comments were unwise, but Rich Lowry<\/strong><\/a> thinks otherwise: \u201cI often find NPR informative and enjoy my occasional appearance, but with this decision, it has chipped away at the country\u2019s shrinking common ground for discourse. Let the record show that it wasn\u2019t Fox News that severed its relationship with Williams because he said unacceptably liberal things, and it wasn\u2019t Fox News viewers who agitated to have him dumped over his appearances on NPR. It\u2019s the self-consciously tolerant\u00a0people\u00a0who behaved illiberally, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.\u201d<\/p>\n 6. Anita Singh .. so Jane Austen<\/strong><\/a> had an editor, who took her homespun prose and made it more delicate: \u201cThe reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on the issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation. But in reading the manuscripts it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing. This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book,\u201d Prof Sutherland said.<\/p>\n 7. Jonah Goldberg<\/strong><\/a> asks what I think is a very important question: \u201cAll of these [France, England, Greece] countries \u2014 and many more \u2014 are going through painful retrenchments because they spent too much money, made too many promises, and expected too little from their citizens. The era of European austerity is upon us, because the Europeans \u2014 or at least those in charge \u2014 understand the mess they\u2019ve made of their economies. This should present a real problem for Barack Obama and the vast (though shrinking) chorus of\u00a0experts, editorialists, and activists who support his agenda. In broad terms, all of the policies Obama and the Democrats have pushed are the sorts of policies the British, the French, and other Europeans had for years, even decades.As far as I am aware, no one has asked President Obama a simple question: If your philosophy is so great, how come the countries that have embraced it for generations are so much poorer than we are?<\/em>\u201d [Instead of \u201cpoorer\u201d I might prefer \u201cworse shape.\u201d]<\/p>\n 8. An argument for thrifty<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n 9. Microsoft<\/strong><\/a>, once mighty empire: \u201cNEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) \u2014 Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past. Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies likemobile<\/a>,\u00a0search<\/a>,\u00a0media<\/a>,\u00a0gaming<\/a> and\u00a0tablets<\/a>. It has even fallen behind inWeb browsing<\/a>, a market it once ruled with an iron fist.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>Jim Martin<\/a><\/strong> on the spiritual checkup. Rob\u2019s undoing the Fall<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a>2. Amy Gardner<\/strong><\/a>, on the Tea Party: \u201cBut a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.\u201d<\/p>\n