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Dr. & Dr. Figes, Amazon.com, and the TLS

This week’s intellectual gossip from England: An historian’s wife, herself an academic, is discovered writing anonymous reviews on Amazon.com praising his books and trashing his peers’. He claims not to have known, after threatening to sue publications that even mentioned he was . . . . Continue Reading »

Not Gay Enough to Play Softball?

During the middle years of the Clinton presidency (1995-1998), I served as a recruiter for the Marine Corps. Although the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy had been in effect for several years, everyone in my station could recite from memory the recruiting scene in the 1981 movie . . . . Continue Reading »

The Bible, Condensed

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson was a junior fellow here at First Things before heading off to the seminary, and we miss her—mostly because she was such good company, but also because she could do things like this: a run through the Bible , picking the one verse in each book that best exemplifies and . . . . Continue Reading »

Papering Debt

” Could the U.S. become Argentina? ” asks the Washington Times , and Instapundit links to a similar discussion from the Washington Post in 2005. It’s a complicated question for economists to figure out, involving debt levels as percentage of GNP, but maybe there’s a simpler . . . . Continue Reading »

Jacob’s culinary legacy?

What would it be like to eat lentil soup made from lentils older than the ones Jacob used to trick Esau out of his birthright? According to Turkey’s Today’s Zaman, we may soon find out: 4,000-year-old lentils ready to be planted in . . . . Continue Reading »

A Call to Recollection

The National Gallery of Art is, until the end of May, home to more than twenty Spanish devotional pieces of art—many exhibited for the first time outside their permanent homes in churches and monasteries—as part of the exhibit The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, . . . . Continue Reading »

So You’re a Pastor Without a Church?

As competition for pulpits increases there are fewer and fewer opportunities available for domestic ministry. Bible colleges and seminaries are cranking out trained pastors by the hundreds and thousands, but these men have no churches where they might serve. Those who do serve are often plagued by . . . . Continue Reading »

Building our vocabulary, part 2

The following definitions are not from Webster’s or the OED:LAX Security, prop. n., the guards at the Los Angeles Airport. Semicolonoscopy, n. an invasive exploration of the rules of punctuation. Thesaurus, n. the only creature to survive the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years . . . . Continue Reading »

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