Young Fogey - Notes from a student of human nature

The Gods We Make Will Fail Us

November 15, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

Last weekend’s plans did not include having a Twitter chat with Eric Weinstein about God. Nevertheless, that was a thing that happened last weekend. But first, I should explain who Eric Weinstein is. The very short version: Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, a physicist, an economist, and the guy who manages Peter Thiel’s money. Some of his side projects have included becoming an immigration expert, working to develop a new unifying theory, and most recently, christening the Intellectual Dark Web…. Read more

A Lament for Armistice Day, 2018

November 11, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

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Today marks the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day: November 11th, 1918. Perhaps it’s just me, but I haven’t seen a surplus of retrospective pieces about World War I this year, despite its being the centennial of the war’s end. Maybe this is because we here in America have never remembered the first Great War like Britain and Europe remembered it. We contributed, certainly. We had a brush with the war. But we crossed the ocean to meet the war. The… Read more

5 Rules for Christian Voters On Election Day

November 2, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

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In anticipation of Election Day 2018, I am blowing the dust off an old article I wrote for Summit Ministries in the spring of 2016. Funnily enough, the “five rules” I came up with then still seem pretty applicable today (except at the time I called them “five principles,” but post-Jordan Peterson any article of this sort can’t not be called “X Rules For…”) So without further ado, here are my five rules for voting. 1. Know where your identity lies…. Read more

To Pittsburgh, And To Life

October 29, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

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Others have already written at greater length than I will be able to muster about the Pittsburgh shooting, the largest anti-Semitic mass murder in U. S. history. I especially recommend that everyone go read Bari Weiss’s stirring tribute, if they have not done so already. A more fitting homage to Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood could not have been penned in this moment. When I encounter overwhelmingly sad news, bits of music tend to flood to mind. The news out of Pittsburgh… Read more

Creationism is Bigger Than the Age of the Earth Question

October 26, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

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It’s not every day that you get to see Ken Ham pick a fight with Matt Walsh, but it happened this week, after the conservative firebrand posted a video explaining why he rejects young Earth creationism. Walsh states emphatically that the evidence has spoken loudly across multiple disciplines, that this is not a hill anybody should be dying on, and that evangelical Christians are damaging the impact of their witness by making it so. This was a follow-up to a… Read more

First Man is NASA’s American Sniper

October 19, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

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Last weekend was not a soaring opening weekend for Neil Armstrong biopic First Man. Bringing in about 16 million, it lagged behind films like Venom and A Star is Born, which are vying for portions of First Man’s already limited target audience. Some have wondered whether the film was additionally hurt by the controversy swirling around the presence of the American flag at the moon landing. (In fact, it does show the flag on the moon, but it does not show the moment when the flag… Read more

Jordan Peterson Might Leave Twitter, But I Hope He Stays

October 16, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

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Twitter is a fickle creature. You can ride it well, if you keep a good seat. But sometimes it can be a bumpy ride. Even those of us with followers in the four or three-digit range (sniff) can attest to this. Now amplify that by a few orders of magnitude, and you’ll have some sense of what Jordan Peterson’s week has been like. And all it took was one tweet: “If confirmed Kavanaugh should step down.” People Being Upset With… Read more

Oh Sinners, Let’s Go Down

October 12, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

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Did you see this lovely story of a father and daughter who were recently baptized together in a Virginia jail? Remarkable thing. Unbeknownst to each other, both were serving time on drug charges and joined the men’s and women’s Bible studies respectively. Eight women and three men made the choice to be baptized on the same day. That was when someone put the pieces together and realized the father and daughter were, indeed, father and daughter. The girl is pregnant too…. Read more

#MeToo, Borders, and the Tyranny of Empathy

October 8, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

109 Comments

The Brett Kavanaugh circus is officially over. Our news and social media feeds can now gradually revert back to their usual levels of hysteria and toxicity—still high, but please God, not quite this high, thank you. Yet even while life in 2018 returns to as close to normal as life in 2018 can be, the memory of these last few weeks will fester in the American mind for a long time to come. For ideologues on the left, Kavanaugh’s confirmation… Read more

We Went Through Hell For Kennedy II

October 6, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly

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The other day, I was FaceBook PM’ing back and forth with a very good friend of mine about all this. We compared theories and hot takes. We told each other exactly what we thought, the way very good friends do. We didn’t agree or disagree 100%. At the end of the day, I signed off: “I am so ready for this to be over.” She messaged me back: “You and me both.” According to my social media feeds, I should… Read more