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The trouble with blogging …

Joseph Bottum

The trouble with blogging, RJN, is narrative structure. Or maybe voice. Or maybe diction. Or maybe syntax. Or maybe I just don’t have a clue about the deep configuration...

Sweet Home

Joseph Bottum

In a letter to the TLS, Susan M. Fitzpatrick admits that she was wrong about Alabama: “Two decades ago I moved from my home city of New York, to...

Mandatory Chapel

Joseph Bottum

Add up the music conservatories and the seminaries, the enormous land-grant universities and the tiny Bible colleges, the Harvards and the would-be Harvards, the art institutes and the yeshivas,...

Faith in America’s Colleges

Joseph Bottum

Wheaton College in Illinois is the single best place to go to college in America. Or Thomas Aquinas College in California. Or the utterly secular Princeton University in New...

Predictions

Joseph Bottum

So here’s what I think about the election: The forecasts—based on complicated models—found in the APSA’s PS by real social scientists—with the exception of the one by the astute...

Truth in Direct Mail

Joseph Bottum

So the subscription request from Ms. Magazine reads: “Content and design that will not be uncompromised by the demands of advertising.” A weak attempt at cutesy honesty, or just...

A Bit of Rome

Joseph Bottum

Just clicked through to read about something mentioned earlier : A 55-square-foot apartment is on sale in Rome for just over $69,000. 55 square feet. That’s 5’ by 11’....

Why Mahler?

Joseph Bottum

Every time I think I might be wrong about the essential meaningless of most music criticism, I read stuff like this—a catalog by Philip Kennicott of some of the...

Defining Politics

Joseph Bottum

Interesting Senate race in Connecticut, writes David Bernstein : One candidate’s adult life has been spent in a profession in which testosterone-infused alpha male types engage in well-choreographed bombast...

Religious Mysteries

Joseph Bottum

Browsing an Agatha Christie anthology the other night, I reread for the first time in years the Poirot story “The Apples of the Hesperides,” which ends: In the little...

How We Live Today

Joseph Bottum

Imagine an organization”a bowling league, say, formed by a group of people who get together simply because they like to bowl. And imagine that, over time, the demands and...

Defining Thumbsucking Down

Joseph Bottum

Just in case any of you teachers out there need a definition of “the rule of law,” the New York Times today explained , in a long thumb-sucking piece...

A Uniter, Not a Divider

Joseph Bottum

The (now-former) CNN personality Rick Sanchez will “be remembered as a uniter, bringing left and right together in shared amazement at his lunkheadedness.” Forget the politics for a minute....

Impersonating a Scholar?

Joseph Bottum

In the news: Man Convicted of Impersonating Scholar . How could they tell? Instapundit’s funny snark : “SHOCKINGLY, NOT MICHAEL BELLESILES.”

The Conservatives’ Spiritual Leader?

Joseph Bottum

David Brooks writes today that “Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who I think is most likely to win the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 2012, is the spiritual leader”...