Joseph Bottum

David Brooks once offered an explanation for an editorial job he held¯one of those jobs where you arrive in the morning to find twenty faxes, fifty phone messages, and a hundred emails already waiting for you. It was, he said, like camping beside a raging river. Every morning you pack up your . . . . Continue Reading »

The March issue of First Things is now available¯at newsstands and here, online, for subscribers.Look, I think every issue we put out is great. Truly great. Documents for the ages that ought, were the world rightly ordered, to be inscribed in stone for ages to contemplate in awe. Or, maybe, . . . . Continue Reading »

Are there enough great short stories to make a pro-life anthology?Perhaps, but the failure of contemporary art to join the fight against abortion is one of the saddest facts about the modern American scene. It was predictable, of course. One of the central intellectual problems of twentieth-century . . . . Continue Reading »

So what is one to make of the State of the Union address last night? A superior instance of what is, you have to admit, one of the low forms of American speechmaking. When did the State of the Union descend into this kind of oopy-goopy, forty-eight-ovation touchy-feely-ness? All of Clinton’s . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ll be lecturing in Baltimore on Monday, January 29, and in Denver on Tuesday, February 6. You might stop by, if you live near and haven’t anything better to do—like cleaning out your closets, or washing the dog, or finally writing that letter to your Great-Aunt Mabel. The topics . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s weeks into 2007 already, and I don’t really know what I’m going to read this year.Ronald Knox, maybe. He died fifty years ago, on August 24, 1957, and the coming months should see their share of anniversary revivals of his writing. I’ve never quite known what to make of . . . . Continue Reading »

College is time for learning things, and there have been several lessons taught by the accusations of rape made against the Duke University lacrosse players. The first is not to go to Duke.The school that likes to pride itself as the premier university of the South has, in fact, proved itself . . . . Continue Reading »

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese died yesterday, slipping away at age sixty-five after a long illness.A professor at Emory University and a member of the First Things editorial board, she was a well-regarded scholar and a successful author, at home in both the academic world and the public sphere. But she was . . . . Continue Reading »

Are lawyers intellectuals? They’re smart, certainly, as a class, and they work primarily with their minds. But, then, engineers are also smart, and engineers aren’t intellectuals¯at least, according to the old two-cultures distinction that C.P. Snow bemoaned back in the 1950s .For . . . . Continue Reading »

In response to last week’s news that the Durham prosecutor has finally dropped the rape charges against the college lacrosse players, Duke University president Richard Brodhead issued a statement that expressed relief, labeled the remaining charges questionable, and called for the replacement . . . . Continue Reading »