Readers of SHS will recall when the HPV vaccine first came out and with it, a great political push made by business interests and those of a certain cultural persuasion that expected (wanted?) teenage girls to be sexually active to require all girls to receive the vaccine. That effort stalled, and . . . . Continue Reading »
I have heard rumors of stories like this from my contacts in the UK, but have not posted on it because that is what they were: Rumors. But now, the BBC has reported that a care facility might have tried to starve an elderly woman to save money. From the story: Ellen Westwood, 88, was in . . . . Continue Reading »
The New York Times reports an interesting new find in Jerusalem: “A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus . . . may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.” According to the . . . . Continue Reading »
Here’s an interesting essay on the nineteenth-century Victorian architect Augustus Pugin, one of the leading champions of the Gothic revivala man who thought Europe’s cathedrals were the world’s greatest architectural achievement, precisely because the point of pointed . . . . Continue Reading »
I don’t mean to be contrarian, but I suspect that the remake of Brideshead Revisited which Nathaniel mentions may not be as promising as he thinks. I wrote a little bit about the outrageously silly trailer : The new adaptation seems remarkable mostly because Emma Thompson’s Lady . . . . Continue Reading »
This is an interesting analysis on a Nature blog on how the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine is spending money taken out of the hides of Californians. In addition to spending hundreds of millions of borrowed taxpayer dollars to build the plushest buildings, designed by the world’s . . . . Continue Reading »
The first reviews of Cry Wolf have appeared. That’s the novel, an anti-immigration parable, by Paul Lake, the poetry editor of First Things . Paul and I don’t quite see eye-to-eye on all these issues, but there’s no denying he’s written a fun, fast, and powerful read on the . . . . Continue Reading »
Leona Helmsley left her hundreds of millions of dollars to care for dogs. And now the animal rights groups want that action. From the article by the industry funded and excellent information source, Center for Consumer Freedom: Helmsley’s money, which may amount to as much as $400 million in . . . . Continue Reading »
St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, built in 1916 across the street from what would become the home of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, is a little-known casualty of the September 11 attacks. The four-story church collapsed with the fall of the south tower, leaving only “a handful . . . . Continue Reading »
“I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.’ Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.” So writes Christopher Hitchens in the August issue of Vanity Fair , after . . . . Continue Reading »