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 Jersey. In terms of final scores in First Things’ extensive new college survey, there’s not much difference among the top . . . . Continue Reading »

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, and there are over 4000 recognizable institutions of higher learning in the United States. It . . . . Continue Reading »

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 bad copyediting? . . . . Continue Reading »

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’. I mean, sure, it’s on the Piazza di Sant’ Ignazio , but $69,000? I’d trust the story a little . . . . Continue Reading »

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 idiocies he found in Norman Lebrecht’s new book Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World : Lebrecht is . . . . Continue Reading »

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 for the benefit of the credulous masses. And the other has spent her career in . . . . Continue Reading »

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 parlour of the Convent, Hercule Poirot told his story and restored the chalice to the Mother Superior. She murmured: . . . . Continue Reading »

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 rewards of being the organizers of a bowling league begin to grow, particularly as the members are drawn into organizing leagues for other sports … Continue Reading »

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 on the Tea Party, that it is “[F.A.] Hayek’s term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the . . . . Continue Reading »

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. The line just has that kind of Web-perfect construction that keeps me reading online. . . . . Continue Reading »