Helen Andrews

If you ask me why conservatism has become intellectually impoverished, my answer is going to be a lot more prosaic than David Brooks’s. He starts his decline-of-the-conservative-mind column with a relatively rare allusion to his years working for National Review , and I could do the same but . . . . Continue Reading »

I don’t want to be one of those women who spends all her time denigrating other women’s life choices, but I have to say that of all the tattoos to get, the full text of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” has got to be one of the worst imaginable. . . . . Continue Reading »

The blogger called Miss Self-Important has said in response to this post of mine that my hostility to meritocracy, far from being radical, is now the consensus view, especially among meritocrats themselves. This is wonderful if true. She also says that critics of meritocracy who themselves have . . . . Continue Reading »

I wrote this article in the fall of 2008, shortly after I graduated, when I was much preoccupied with the question of meritocracy and the proper role of schools like Yale. My editor at Culture 11 declined to publish this draft, then the site went under and the piece was abandoned. I think I posted . . . . Continue Reading »

I can’t decide whether I have a legitimate reason to be annoyed with the opening sentences of this post by Diane Ellis Scalisi over at Acculturated, or whether I’m just being a snob. My default assumption is the latter, but you be the judge. Let’s take it line by line. This past . . . . Continue Reading »

Most proper scientists regard publicity as something of an affliction. After years of specialized and outwardly incomprehensible labors, when it comes time to go public with their findings, their hard-won conclusions are always twisted by illiterate newsmen to fit the crass demands of . . . . Continue Reading »

The Roman Catholic archdiocese of Shkodra, in northern Albania, has declared  that it will excommunicate anyone found to be participating in blood feuds, which are a something of a national sport in Albania, except that they are responsible for hundreds of deaths every month, which most . . . . Continue Reading »

It is impossible to tell from this short news item the exact religious affiliation of the man who unsuccessfully sued the city of Berkeley over its outdoor smoking restrictions on the grounds that they violated his free exercise rights. His complaint uses the phrase “ indigenous faith, . . . . Continue Reading »

I love Nick Lowe, I really do. In my benighted age bracket, my love for him is probably second to none. But Jiminy Christmas, how many tribute albums can one man’s back catalogue support? First there was Labour of Love   in 2001, and that was fine—we didn’t know what was . . . . Continue Reading »

I need to confess something about my contribution to the American Spectator ’s young conservatives symposium . The two points I try to make are, first, that the Right should stop carping about relativism because practically no one on the Left is a relativist anymore, and second, that the . . . . Continue Reading »