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Intellectual Takeout
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Why does someone past the Psalmist’s “threescore years and ten” find himself entranced by a 150-year-old novel aimed at adolescents, namely, Louisa May Alcott’s “An Old-Fashioned Girl”? The credit or blame – take your pick – for this infatuation lands on a friend whose passion is for older fiction aimed at young readers, like the
No life lacks disappointment. From the mundane (our favorite sports team loses yet again) to the life-shattering (an unexpected spot on an MRI scan), disappointments punctuate our existence. In politics, religion, finances, relationships, health, we’re forced repeatedly to confront the failure of hopes, the crumbling of visions. “We all break a little when we fall,”
One constant of my growing-up years was my family’s afternoon “quiet time.” My siblings and I would each be given a separate space in which to play – our room, usually, or a designated spot in the house – and we would amuse ourselves quietly for an hour or two. I loved the days when
With the 250th anniversary of our country behind us, I’ve been left with a lot of patriotism. It can be easy to focus on the negatives, but when we fix our gaze on gratitude, the solution to this pessimism is all the more evident. The American Way My small-town home is filled with good people,
One of the big questions emerging from the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is what exactly it means to know something at all. While advanced AI models can present the appearance of knowledge and understanding, scratching below the conversational surface shows that these models severely lack the capacity for what philosophers have considered knowledge. The
I’ve marveled before about how statements of the past can read like today’s headlines, especially those like the following taken from the front flap of Martin L. Gross’ 1997 “The End of Sanity”: “At the University of Pennsylvania, separate dorms have been set up for minorities in the name of racial harmony.” “An apprehended mugger
Online dating is the most common way couples meet today. One graph circulating on X shows that over 60 of today’s couples meet online. At 13, meeting through friends is a distant second. As recently as 2000, online was the least common place for couples to meet, with in-person social settings such as bars, workplaces, churches, and
In August 1945, the United States unleashed the power of the atom and leveled two Japanese cities. This new technology, the atomic bomb, brought an end to World War II, while simultaneously kicking off an arms race that would last nearly 50 years. The Soviet Union could not allow the U.S. to maintain its monopoly
In the summer of 2023, I fell in love with poetry. I was living overseas, struggling to navigate a job teaching English and a new life in a third-world country. Amidst the external and internal chaos, Saturdays were a reprieve. I’d mount my moped, drive to a nearby coffeehouse, and spend several hours reading and
In a recent article, Annie Holmquist maps out the twisting path leading eventually from liberalism to communism. She points to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Address in which he declared, “Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.” To avoid this slide, she urges a
