David Mills

Yesterday, in Al Smith Scandal? , Anna Williams wrote on the controversial invitation to President Obama to attend the annual Al Smith Dinner. Offering a more critical response are our friends at the  Human Life Review , who just posted an article from the upcoming issue which, though written . . . . Continue Reading »

More on Paul Ryan from The Snug of the Pub, explaining why Ryan might be a good or a bad choice for Romney. Also relevant is this quote from a CNN story on why Romney is losing . . . . . Continue Reading »

The writer of the winsomely named The Snug of the Pub blog offers his thoughts on the conservative media’s framing of  Romney’s VP selection . A lot of commentators want a choice, like Paul Ryan, that “would force this election to be about ‘a big choice’ or . . . . Continue Reading »

Colson, California, Arius, etc. . . . . Continue Reading »

Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton notes that St. Francis never actually said “Preach the Gospel always. If necessary, use words.” and that his own apostolate shows the inadequacy of the quip. You know what it’s supposed to mean, and there is an error to which it’s a . . . . Continue Reading »

Most readers of “First Thoughts” are likely, being mostly conservatives of some sort, to feel that things are always getting worse and that the contemporary world has fallen a few steps down the slope towards decadence from the position its predecessors held. In many ways things are . . . . Continue Reading »

In The Wisdom of a Moral Panic , Ross Douthat responds to one example of the moral innovator’s typical claim that people once rejected with vivid slippery-slope arguments something we all now take for granted, meaning that we shouldn’t worry about falling down such slopes with present . . . . Continue Reading »

My friend Mark Barrett, a lawyer with an apparently amazing capacity to read and absorb legal decisions, writes with this interesting quote from Justice Ginsburg’s concurring opinion  (page 29): A mandate to purchase a particular product would be unconstitutional if, for example, the . . . . Continue Reading »

Our friend Randy Boyagoda, FIRST THINGS writer, novelist, and biographer of Richard John Neuhaus, has written a short personal essay on his reading of the English children’s writer Enid Blyton, Five in the Colonies: Enid Blyton’s Sri Lankan Adventures , published in the Paris Review . . . . . Continue Reading »

Reusing old articles without admitting it, as the new young  New Yorker  writer Jonah Lehrer did , is something you really shouldn’t do. You know you shouldn’t do it because it fails to pass a very simple test. As a writer for the website Gawker put it (the link is in the . . . . Continue Reading »