On the Square Today

R. R. Reno on capitalism and conservatism :

Freedom creates problems. It’s a good thing, often rightly encouraged, but it has costs. This is true of political freedom, as the Founders recognized, which is why they feared pure democracy. It’s also true of moral freedom: see the decline of marriage and rise of illegitimate children. And it’s certainly true for economic freedom.

Also today, from our May issue, Alan Jacobs contrasts HBO’s Girls with Jane Austen :

The moral world of  Girls —or, more precisely, of many of its most devoted fans—does not strike me as corrupt so much as innocent: “innocent as grass,” as Auden puts it. Such confidence in human nature!—or at least, in the nature of those who have been to the right schools, who live in the right neighborhoods, possess the right ambitions, have the right kind of grandmothers. It’s a moral world in which Edmund’s phrase about Mary, “perversion of mind,” can have no place.