Isn’t it funny how "experts" eventually discover what those with a modicum of common sense have known all along? The latest example of experts stating the obvious, having expended much time and money "proving" it, emerged from research published in the journal Demography . . . . Continue Reading »
I’ll confess that I “paid my nickels” (for the interested, that’s 490 nickels¯or $24.50¯a head) to see the Bodies exhibition at South Street Seaport . I also think that the exhibition (or at least its concept) is worthy of defense. Four categories of objections to . . . . Continue Reading »
The recent visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Spain exposed the schizophrenic psyche of the Spanish nation. While more than a million faithful Spaniards, including King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, attended the pope’s valedictory Mass in Valencia, the country’s prime minister, Jose Luis . . . . Continue Reading »
Allow me to pick up a thread I began to weave in our last conversation . My experience is that believers and unbelievers live in a darkness that is remarkably the same. More than once I have been in conversation with a respected scholar who confessed to me that he would like very much to believe in . . . . Continue Reading »
"The whole frickin’ world is comin’ to an end today," someone says in Oliver Stone’s new film World Trade Center . It didn’t. But Stone demonstrates quite convincingly why many could be forgiven for thinking it would. Forget about JFK, Nixon, and Natural Born . . . . Continue Reading »
The New York Times has finally caught on that there is a gender crisis in America that concerns men, not women. That is hard for much of the media to absorb, given the dogmas of feminism, with its perpetual battle against intransigent sexist forces. Even at my college, which is one of the last . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m a stringer for one of those “major American newspapers”—it’s fun to see your byline as long as you remember it’s lining a bird cage tomorrow—and as part of an assignment last week I interviewed a pretty successful gospel/country/pop singer, “pretty . . . . Continue Reading »
For the past month, the New York Times has been running a series on “the new gender divide," which "examin[es] what has happened to men and women several decades after the women’s movement began." Sunday’s article , "Facing Middle Age with No Degree, and No . . . . Continue Reading »
Why do so many people these days sound like conservatives but still insist they are liberals? I recently had a conversation with a female lawyer who spoke as if she had just finished reading Oswald Spengler. When she learned that I was a college professor, she unleashed a torrent of vitriol against . . . . Continue Reading »
I spoke last week of the fictions of relativism and concluded with one of E.M. Cioran’s typically laconic aphorisms about the East’s greater honesty toward the absolute. Well, maybe. But maybe not. I once read a marvelous book by Dava Sobel called Longitude: The True Story of a Lone . . . . Continue Reading »