There’s a book I keep in the bathroom at home, a big blue volume of 750 pages titled, somewhat ironically, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes. A terrific book to browse in, with more than four thousand brief anecdotes about more than two thousand individuals from ancient times to the near . . . . Continue Reading »
Celebrations of Ruskin’s polymathic genius usually miss the role of Christianity in his outlook and writing. Continue Reading »
The Times of Israel recently reported that archaeologists had uncovered a “miniscule biblical stone weight” from excavations of the foundations of the Western Wall of the Second Jewish Temple. It is round, about the size of a marble, and marked with the Hebrew word beka. . . . . Continue Reading »
Around 1980, those of us coming up in literary studies learned that we could no longer refer to a work of art. The term had become obsolete. If you uttered it even in passing, you appeared behind the times, not up-to-date. You had to use another word: text. Roland Barthes announced . . . . Continue Reading »
The current regime in Rome will damage the Catholic Church. Pope Francis combines laxity and ruthlessness. His style is casual and approachable; his church politics are cold and cunning. There are leading themes in this pontificate—mercy, accompaniment, peripheries, and so forth—but . . . . Continue Reading »
The Romanovs: 1613–1918 by simon sebag montefiore vintage, 784 pages, $35 The Romanovs Under House Arrest: From the 1917 Diary of a Palace Priest by afanasy belyaev translated by leonid michailitschenko holy trinity, 136 pages, $29.95 The Romanov dynasty begins and ends with one name: . . . . Continue Reading »
Everybody knows the Decalogue and, in particular, the commandment “You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain” (Exod. 20:7). In spite of this warning, we too easily call God “Lord”—nay, we invoke him as “the Lord”—as if such a word were devoid of ambiguity and not badly . . . . Continue Reading »
As the #MeToo movement has spread from the upper echelons of Hollywood to the halls of Congress, what has most struck me is the startling disconnect between the movement’s feverish sensitivity to sexual impropriety, on the one hand, and women’s eager embrace of our nation’s sex-drenched . . . . Continue Reading »
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus belongs to the literature of the uncanny. But the young Mary Shelley who wrote it—or rather, the teenaged Mary Godwin who sketched it in a summerhouse near Geneva—was nothing if not canny. Her 1818 debut novel was and still is hugely . . . . Continue Reading »
Incerto: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile by nassim nicholas taleb random house, 1,568 pages, $70 Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by nassim nicholas taleb random house, 304 pages, $30 Boethius’s ambitious goal to synthesize all . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
