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HPV Vaccine Update: Dangerous to Girls?

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 »

Buildings & Boats

Here’s an interesting essay on the nineteenth-century Victorian architect Augustus Pugin, one of the leading champions of the Gothic revival—a man who thought Europe’s cathedrals were the world’s greatest architectural achievement, precisely because the point of pointed . . . . Continue Reading »

RE: Brideshead

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 »

CIRM Grants not as Advertised to Voters

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 »

Check out Cry Wolf

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 »

Save St. Nick’s

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 »

Hitchens on the Waterboard

“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 »

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