Thank heavens the NFL doesn’t play on Labor Day, otherwise we’d have one more holiday marshaled for militarism, with soldiers no doubt extolled as the real laborers, the hero “workers.” Not that we’re particularly well poised to celebrate labor in this country: while everyone trumpets on behalf of “the middle class,” you’ll hear next to…
There are certain streams of “emerging” Christianity which seem to think that doubt is some revolutionary new stance that has finally had permission to emerge now that we are “new kinds of Christians.” Formerly oppressed by fundamentalisms that quashed any hint of uncertainty, such Christians are at pains to point out that we can never…
Misreading Brooks’ The Social Animal seems to be all the rage. To H. Allen Orr’s skewed interpretation, we can now add this aside from one of my favorites, James Wood: These days, one is continually running up against a crass evolutionary neuroscientific pragmatism that is loved by popular evolutionary psychologists and newspaper columnists (of the…
The review of David Brooks’ The Social Animal in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books was a disappointment. Since there’s pretty much zero chance that the letter I sent will ever see the light of day, I reproduce it here as a small effort to counter this common sort of…
It is surely telling that Warren Buffett’s important editorial, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” did not appear in the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, I find myself wondering whether it was floated there, then rejected. Wouldn’t that have been most conspicuous place for Buffett’s offing? In any case, one wonders how the Tea Party ideologues in the…
It’s that time of year again, when my kids groan and roll their eyes as I, Uncle-Rico-like, relive the glory days of the 1980s, regaling them with tales of my freestyle BMX exploits. That’s right: it’s X Games 2011. My favorite event is BMX Freestyle Park–though what they’re doing today bears only an analogical resemblance…