Joseph Bottum is a writer, poet, and essayist who served as literary editor and later a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, where he was one of the magazine's most prolific contributors. He wrote extensively on religion, culture, literature, and politics, with particular attention to Catholicism and its intersection with public life. He also served as editor of First Things and is the author of several books on faith and American culture.
Maybe you have to live in the bleak midwinter to get it. Maybe you have to see the countryside in its ash-white purity to understand—the landscape burnt-over by the dead indifferent cold. Maybe you have to wonder, as you wander out under the distant stars, what it would mean to live in a universe…
My daughter came to visit for the long weekend. Some friends mentioned that they were driving across the state, and so—on a whim, at the last minute—she threw some clothes in a bag, gathered up her schoolbooks, and piled into the car with her friends. And why not? It’s just 350 miles or so from the…
If you have lived almost any kind of active life, after age 50 someone you know dies every day. Not necessarily someone you knew well. Not necessarily a spouse, a child, a parent—one of those whose death is like a part of yourself, crushed and torn away. But someone you knew, yes: an acquaintance,…
You surely saw the news: At 8:07 on January 13, a quiet Saturday morning in Honolulu, Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency sent out to a million cell phones a text that read, “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
A beautiful simplicity seems to unfold when Ronnie O’Sullivan constructs a century break, potting 100 points’ worth of balls on a single visit to a snooker table. No one ever described snooker as an easy game, but when O’Sullivan begins to flow, he makes each moment look natural. Obvious, almost.…
As I drove across the prairie, I saw the corn fields, tall and ripe. I saw the fabled waves of grain, the endless tides of amber wheat. I saw the plains unfold, down miles and miles of blacktop road. Returning to the landscape of my childhood, I leaned my head out the car window to breathe the…
Josh Cobin seems a good enough guy. A little pudgy, maybe, with his hair thinning on top and a beard borrowed from a Civil War officer—one who forgot to get a trim before Mathew Brady showed up to take the battalion photograph. At 29, Josh is probably a little old for the sloppy look he affects. A…
Josh Cobin seems a good enough guy. A little pudgy, maybe, with his hair thinning on top and a beard borrowed from a Civil War officer—one who forgot to get a trim before Mathew Brady showed up to take the battalion photograph. At 29, Josh is probably a little old for the sloppy look he affects. A…
So, one day I'm in an antique store, looking at a dresser. Now, there's no denying it's a pretty little thing: late 1800s, walnut burl, brass drawer handles, an elegant shape. But the sales sticker says $4,800, which is more than a little out of my price range, especially for a dresser I don't…
Abortion is back: back in the news, back in the American political scene, back in the fights that rage through a party as it tries to understand itself. Last time we saw this, it was during Donald Trump's campaign for the Republican nomination, when three months in a row—February, March, and April…
Abortion is back: back in the news, back in the American political scene, back in the fights that rage through a party as it tries to understand itself. Last time we saw this, it was during Donald Trump's campaign for the Republican nomination, when three months in a row—February, March, and April…
In the fall of 1977—40 years ago now, when we were freshmen at Georgetown—four of us climbed up to steal the hands off the clock on the tower of Healy Hall, 150 feet or so above the quad.
In the fall of 1977—40 years ago now, when we were freshmen at Georgetown—four of us climbed up to steal the hands off the clock on the tower of Healy Hall, 150 feet or so above the quad.
Up on the third floor, in a bookcase against the south wall—the second shelf from the bottom, maybe two-thirds of the way along—there's an aging copy of The Art of Memory, written by the British historian Frances Yates back in the 1960s.
On March 14, 1976, a writer, academic, and Democratic party operative published a 1,200-word op-ed in the Washington Post called “A Closet Capitalist Confesses," and all hell broke loose. Nearly every intellectual journal in America felt compelled to opine about the absurdity of a modern…
A relative told me this story: She had gone to a neighbor's party, only to have the neighbor announce her arrival by saying something like, "You don't have to worry, everyone. She didn't bring the conservative with her." And then, after telling me the story, my relative began to weep—not because of…
A relative told me this story: She had gone to a neighbor’s party, only to have the neighbor announce her arrival by saying something like, "You don't have to worry, everyone. She didn't bring the conservative with her." And then, after telling me the story, my relative began to weep—not because of…
On January 13, 2017, a German regional court ruled that a lower court had been correct to find no anti-Semitism in the attempt by a group of Muslim men to burn down a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal.
On January 13, 2017, a German regional court ruled that a lower court had been correct to find no anti-Semitism in the attempt by a group of Muslim men to burn down a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal.
Flocking. No one outside the millinery trade—ladies' haberdashery—should ever have occasion to use the word, but there it is: a category of artificial Christmas trees. You can get your tree flocked, or unflocked. Made of green nylon, like AstroTurf in the Astrodome, or made of metal, like pink…
They squabble, scrabble, and squawk. They peck at the last windfalls, out under the fruit trees, until they're—I don't know, drunk maybe on the hard cider of the apple mash or rendered hyperactive by some mad avian sugar rush, and then they strut through the yard, chests puffed out, spoiling for a…
David Wootton has written a long book to save science from something, even if he’s not quite sure what that something is. The demystification, deconstruction, and doubt of post-modernity, maybe. Or revitalized religious faith, from Radical Islam to Protestant Fundamentalism. Certainly, Wootton…
Back in 1975, Richard Wilbur—probably the greatest translator of poetry into English that America has ever known—published a pair of rhyming riddles he had translated from the Latin of a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon monk named St. Aldhelm. Practitioners of formal poetry are always lured by Latin,…
Henry Clay Bottum was born in January 1826, in the town of Orwell, Vermont. As a young man, he moved west, first to upstate New York and then to Wisconsin, farming in Fond du Lac County. An abolitionist, he abandoned the Whig party of his namesake and became a Radical Republican, serving in the…
Portugal invented the Atlantic Ocean, the poet Fernando Pessoa once wrote—a bizarre claim that sounds a lot less bizarre once we start to ask ourselves how a small, broke, and backwater country in Europe ended up with a far-flung empire and vast system of trade. The power of European ocean travel…
If you are pro-life, you cannot vote for Donald Trump. The point is simple and unavoidable: If the man is not a covert supporter of legalized abortion, he has at least thought about the issue so rarely and so incompletely that he cannot articulate a coherent sentence about it. Forget walking the…
I'm a speed reader—a certified speed reader, certified ever since I was in junior high school and passed a genuine speed-reading course. An Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics speed-reading course, no less.
If we were angels, falling to earth -- or space travelers, maybe, gliding down in a shuttlecraft -- the Black Hills would be hard to miss. Eons of geographical grinding have left the small patch of Dakota mountains looking like an archery target, ring inside ring, when seen from above.
Sometimes in January, often in February—always somewhere in the course of the winter—I feel it settling down on me and the season: that icy fog that dulls the senses, the cold that gnaws the bone, the sadness that deadens the will.
The Little Sisters of the Poor are headed to the Supreme Court this year, seeking escape from the contraception mandates of Obamacare — under which they fall, the government claims, as insurance providers for the employees in their nursing homes. The Justice Department is fighting the Little…
Michael Dirda isn’t a scholar, although he has the learning to do scholarly things. He isn't a critic, either, although his writing consistently shows a finely edged sensibility. The man isn't even a writer, strange as that is to say about someone who has written six books, edited another dozen or…
No, this is a disappointment. To read the 132 poems chosen by this volume's editor, Christopher Carduff, is to realize that John Updike is not a poet well served by the popular impulse that reduces a large body of work to a greatest-hits anthology.
There was a kind of grandeur about René Girard—a creator of grand theories, a thinker of grand thoughts. Born in France, he spent most of his career in the United States, before slipping away this month, age 91, at his home in California. But to read him, even to meet him, was to feel as though…
She seemed more curious than frightened, the doe-eyed . . . doe, I suppose, and we studied each other for a long moment or two. She, calm in a farmer’s field, looking over the fence line. And me, unmoving in the wreck, staring back at her through the shattered glass.
You can find them here and there, scattered across England: the small green mounds, the hillocks and filled-in ditches, the hints of straight lines that once cut through the landscape. Just beneath the long grass lies the rich silt, piled up by the wind or washed in by the rain in the 62 years…
The man had tiny hands. Or, at least, hands that looked tiny on his huge frame. Six foot ten, 275 pounds, and Moses Malone had the hands of a 5′9″ grocery bagger. Embarrassing hands, he seemed to think, stubby and ill-proportioned, and when he was young he would often hide them—tucking them into…
I've always loved the sound of a serpent. Well, no, not really. The 16th-century musical instrument is breathy, buzzy, and inexact—consistently requiring the player to gesture at the note in what’s called falset: using the tension of the lips in the mouthpiece to approximate a tone that the…
Robert Conquest could easily have missed being . . . well, Robert Conquest, the most morally significant historian of the second half of the twentieth century. Now that he’s slipped away—dying in California on August 3 at age 98—it’s possible to see that he might well have failed to find his way.
In 1956, Doubleday published The Dragon in the Sea, the first novel by a California newspaperman named Frank Herbert. Even now, the book seems a little hard to pin down. It was, for the most part, a Cold War thriller about the race to harvest offshore oil—except crammed inside the thriller was a…
Morning comes like a great bird, sailing over the dark curve of the earth to illuminate the hills and trees. Dawn arrives like an angel’s burning sword, expelling night from the garden of this world. Sunrise melts to fresh dew the last wisps of frost across the lawn, a diamond sparkle in the golden…
Maybe American higher education was never all that serious about, you know, the education portion of its name. After more than a decade of teaching in the Ivy League, the philosopher George Santayana dubbed Harvard and Yale the nation’s toy Athens and toy Sparta. He actually meant it as a…
They’re outraged, the students at Columbia University—outraged that their professors would dare to put Ovid on mandatory reading lists, outraged that the ancient Roman author doesn’t share their sensitivities, outraged that a modern education would include something so . . . so . . . so…
It took me six hours to destroy it all, that cold, wet winter day. Freezing rain coating the leafless trees and the slush of snow left from the previous days’ storms. A weak fire in one of the stingy, grudging little fireplaces they used to build in Manhattan apartments. And me, alone with…
I found an error in Ted Gioia’s new history of love songs. It’s late in this 336-page book, when he mentions that Simon and Garfunkel gave their 1968 hit “Mrs. Robinson” to the movie soundtrack for The Graduate. As it happens, the adulterous Mrs. Robinson was first a character in the 1967 movie,…
It used to happen regularly. Some poor science writer for a magazine or newspaper would try to humanize an astronomy fact: The distance light travels in a year is enormous! It’s 5.88 trillion miles! Or try to tell a biology story in everyday terms: The grana stacks, where photo-synthesis happens in…
Rivers have rights, they say down in Mora County, New Mexico—“inalienable and fundamental rights,” beyond the power of any government to touch. Aquifers, too. Wetlands, streams, ecosystems, and even “natural communities,” whatever that undefined term means: All of them have rights to “exist and…
Christmas doesn’t really begin until Christmas—Christmas Day itself, that is. And I don’t mean just in the way the Christian churches lay out the season: the whole 12-days-of-Christmas thing, if you remember. And I know you do, because everyone remembers the song about the partridge in a pear tree,…
Speaking truth to power is easy—or easier, anyway, than speaking truth to money. We might resist a sovereign who commands us to preach his favored doctrines. But a sovereign who slips us a little cash on the side, just for a sermon or two on something we maybe don’t really disagree with all that…
I couldn’t make a snowball to save my life. Not that my need was actually desperate, this time around—although it might have been, if my life were a Robert Ludlum thriller. The Snowball Identity. The Winter Deception. The Coldland Conundrum. Anyway, even in a small town, snowballs are nice for…
1. The Return of Original Sin
It was a day like any other. Oh, the weather was a little cool, I suppose. A thin band of clouds moved across the early sun, threatening an angry rain—but then again, maybe not. Light around the edges but dark in the center, like a calculating woman’s smile, those morning clouds are hard to read,…
Vincent of Lérins was a Gaulish monk who lived and wrote in the fifth century. Little is known about him, really. It’s said that he was originally a soldier but gave up his military career to enter a monastery near Cannes, on the small Mediterranean island of Lérins (later renamed the Île…
The trouble with Christmas is that it would consume the whole world if it could—or subsume, maybe, like an amoeba. Left to its own devices, Christmas would wrap itself around the universe and digest it whole.
The early British and American reviews of this book are hilarious—hilarious, that is, in the sense of proving two of Melissa Mohr’s minor theses. In her account, the sex-based swear words so reviled by the Victorians have become almost commonplace: No real stigma attaches to their use these days,…
Herr Riegel’s father vas a candy maker. Was, I mean. Was a candy maker. This morning, over the phone, a friend made some passing reference to German economic policy—speaking, unfortunately, in that exaggerated German accent that used to be a standard of American comedy. You remember? Sgt. Schultz…
One of the things you learn when you read the letters of great writers is how rarely great writers talk about literature in their letters. Mostly they talk about money. The letters of Henry Ford show more interest in big ideas and artistic principles than do those of James Joyce. When Joyce wrote a…
Early in 1659, a strong-willed woman named Sarah Chevers and an even stronger-willed woman named Katharine Evans arrived in Malta. By chance—or, as they insisted, Providence—they had been diverted, their Dutch ship chased into the port of Valletta by rumor of pirates and bad weather. And since…
Most of the time, intellectual history is a tangle, the threads so snarled that the result looks like a skein of yarn after a dozen kittens have been set loose on it. That lump over there? The muddle that the Venerable Bede made of things. That twisted set of knots? The playful chaos that Thomas…
Jean Bethke Elshtain may have been the busiest woman many of us had ever met. Shuttling back and forth between her regular teaching appointment at the University of Chicago and her settled home in Tennessee, she wrote and wrote—and wrote and wrote. Essays, talks, books, memos to fellow directors on…
I woke this morning to the gentle coo of a mourning dove on my windowsill. The gentle coo, the mellifluous murmur. You know that sound—mourning doves are everywhere in this country, over three hundred million of them across North America, calling out their woo-OO-oo-oo-oo in wistful sorrow at…
There’s something in the new papal encyclical Lumen Fidei to disappoint everyone who longs for direct political action from the Vatican.
I met him once. Well, met in the loosest sense: I was introduced to Ray Manzarek at a Los Angeles restaurant in the 1980s and got to shake his hand. No more than that, but even at the time it felt like an encounter with passing greatness, a brush with the fading mythology of the age, and down…
There was much talk during the recent conclave in Rome, as there usually is at such times, about the Catholic church as a medieval institution. Occasionally that took the mild form of newspaper Sunday supplement pieces brightly describing the voting process in the Sistine Chapel. More often it…
The next pope will be Christoph Schönborn, cardinal archbishop of Vienna. The principal editor of the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church, Schönborn was among Benedict’s favorite students back when the current pope was a theology professor, and he stands as one of the few high clerics to act…
Athens and Jerusalem are not the sum of symbolic ancient cities. And in truth, they never have been. Even when Tertullian coined that distinction early in the third century—“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Or the Academy with the Church?”—he did so in the context of Rome: He was the son of a…
They squabble, scrabble, and squawk. They peck at the last windfalls, out under the fruit trees, until they’re—I don’t know, drunk maybe on the hard cider of the apple mash or rendered hyperactive by some mad avian sugar rush, and then they strut through the yard, chests puffed out, spoiling for a…
The good thing about the Electoral College—our strangely still-surviving 18th-century experiment in federalism—is that it’s clear, coherent, and -commonsensical. If you live in Ohio, say, a state that’s closely contested in the presidential race this year, you know down in your bones that your…
Pleonasm and pomposity, those twins of purple prose, define a certain kind of religious writing. A certain kind of holiday writing, for that matter—read a typical newspaper column about Thanksgiving, if you need another example—and any number of political orations. Historians, scientists, social…
In the great Nefud Desert—on the sun’s anvil—of my south yard, the noonday heat rises in shimmering waves and burns like ancient, unforgiven sin: the primal fault of the world laid bare. “From here until the other side,” my wife says as we stare out from the back porch, “no water but what we carry.…
He kept a diary—a friend, a boy we knew when we were young, all those years ago—and at the end of most entries he would assign himself a line from a baseball box score, defining each day as though it were part of some classic pennant race against . . . well, who knows? The general malevolence of…
Science fiction is idea fiction, you often hear—and it’s true. In a way. But trying to describe how it’s true proves surprisingly difficult, for the ideas in science fiction are much more often about the fiction than about the science. The rootstock isn’t the technological flourishes; those are the…
It’s John Stuart Mill’s world. Jeremy Waldron is just living in it. Not that Waldron isn’t a smart guy in his own right. A law professor at NYU and Oxford, the author of 10 books, one of Ronald Dworkin’s favorite students, and a leading figure in debates about the use of foreign law in American…
Back in the dark ages of superstition and disease, before science brought suffering humanity into our present era of perpetual peace and economic stability, people were very unenlightened. As Harris (2010) and Hitchens (2007) note, it was a dark time. Very dark.
North Dakota is a rich state, relatively speaking. Good Midwesterners of mostly Scandinavian descent, those Dakotans always tried to live within their means, with the result that the state never ran up much debt, even in the lean years. And recent times have been far from lean: The boom in oil…
When he died on May 16, the New York Times miscaptioned the photograph it ran with his obituary. And then misspelled his name in the correction it ran three days later.
This might have been a funny book if it hadn’t tried so hard to be serious. It might have been a serious book if it hadn’t strained so hard to be funny. It might have been witty, it might have been clever, it might have been profound—it might even have been good. If it weren’t so bad.
It’s around, say, 1979, and you’re trying to remember where you saw that article on rising radiation levels in Eastern Europe. It might have been in Foreign Affairs, but, then again, it might have been in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists or even the New Statesman, although that seems less…
The angry man at the town-council meeting snarled, “As Harry Truman put it, ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ ” “No,” answered his tension-easing neighbor, “that was Mark Twain. You remember, the guy who also said, ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in…
There was a time when John le Carré mattered, really mattered—back when he seemed a major talent and one of the best observers of our time: the man who had turned genre fiction into literature.
Mrs. Johansen always complained. She’d whine about newsprint smearing. She’d grumble that I folded the paper wrong. Never mind that I was delivering to all her neighbors; she knew that some of them, most of them, were waiting for a chance to steal her newspaper, and she’d make me wedge the…
The archbishop of Canterbury is going to resign next year. At least that’s the story making the rounds of newspapers in London, and the interesting part is not that the 61-year-old Rowan Williams should be willing to give up another decade in the job. Or even, if the Telegraph is right, that the…
I was at the clock-repair shop when a friend called with the news that Marion had slipped away—Marion Montgomery, the great Southern critic and teacher. I was dropping off my grandfather’s broken watch when the call came. I was standing at the counter, holding a run-down timepiece, when my friend…
The King James Bible—the Authorized Version of Holy Scripture, dedicated to James I as “principal mover and author”—is not really a triumph of translation. Not, at least, if perfect accuracy and re-creation of the original narrative voice are the proper goals of translation.
In retrospect, we probably should have paid more attention when, around 2005, activists shifted their primary vocabulary from global warming to climate change to describe the impact of human beings on this biosphere we call the Earth. Both phrases had been around for a while, of course. Global…
Catch a wave, and you’re sittin’ on top of the world.
"I don’t read fiction,” Billy Hunter proudly told sports reporters this month. “I only read stuff I can learn something from.” What a line, from the head of the NBA Players Association. It’s the kind of thing I used to treasure—except that I’ve begun to realize just how often I hear something…
Way down in what passes for my soul, I’ve always felt an impatience—a kind of ungenerous demand for efficiency, immediacy, and speed. Add to that the small tremor I’ve always had in my hands, and I may be the worst painter in the world today.
So, the vice president goes to China—and if that sounds like the beginning of a bad comedy routine, it’s because our current vice president has made it one. The man is a walking pratfall, a clown of the tongue-tied, stumbling kind, and only the media’s determined effort to shield the Obama…
On Monday, August 8, Governor Jerry Brown finally signed a bill the California state legislature had passed in July—a bill that binds California to “National Popular Vote” (NPV). Which is to say, to the committing of all its electoral college votes in a presidential election to the winner of the…
In the beginning, there was a glade. A green and foresty place, a meadowy clearing in the great big woods. The robins called from branch to branch. A laughing stream wove gently through the dell. A rabbit hopped through the long grass, bright with morning dew. All was well, and all manner of things…
The man squeezing his way through to the window seat smells of manure. Not a bad, rotten smell, exactly. Just that faint, fresh odor that farmers can’t ever quite get rid of. “He smells funny,” announces the little girl waiting in the aisle, and everyone stares carefully down at the airplane’s…
Early this month came the news that Notre Dame has agreed, at last, to drop the trespassing charges it had been pressing against the protesters who marched on its campus two years ago. The pro-life protesters. At a Catholic school.
The Alice Behind Wonderland
The Spirit of Vatican II
Back-alley butchers. That was the catchphrase. And 10,000 women a year killed in illegal abortions, that was another. Coat hangers were what those butchers used to perform their grisly trade, and the only thing American women wanted was medical safety on the rare occasions when they made the…
Duke Snider is gone, slipping away at age 84. Most fans today never saw him play. How could they? He retired all the way back in 1964, and even that was after a pair of lost final seasons: first with the Mets, which was a joke, and then with the Giants, which, for a Dodger, is almost a sacrilege.…
Dr. Gosnell was a little befuddled at his arraignment on January 20. Indicted for eight murders, the Philadelphia abortionist told the court that he understood the first count, a charge of third-degree murder for the death of a woman on whom he had operated. He didn’t understand, however, the seven…
So, Representative Hal Wick of Sioux Falls has introduced into the state legislature a bill that would require every citizen of the state to own a gun. And can’t we say that, as a way of making a point about the individual mandate in the health-care bill, this is much funnier than the endlessly…
American Grace
The plural of syllabus is syllabi. Or is it syllabuses? Focuses and foci, cactuses and cacti, funguses and fungi: English has a good set of these Greek and Latin words—and pseudo-Greek and Latin words—that might take a classical-sounding plural. Or might not. It kind of depends.
When Ralph McInerny landed back in the United States and cashed his GI check, a civilian again, the first thing he did was run to a bookstore to buy a copy of Lord Weary’s Castle, Robert Lowell’s new collection of poems.
If you're any kind of writer--if you're any kind of reader, for that matter--you know there are things that words want to do. Oh, we speak with them and write with them and read with them, often enough, using them as clumsy rocks to hammer out the rough meanings and crude messages we need for…
All across campus, the flowers have begun to bloom, their dull Indiana roots stirred by the spring rain, and the grass is almost green again at Notre Dame. Beneath a 16-foot statue of the Blessed Virgin, the main administration building sits, as always, its gold dome sparkling in the warm spring…
He was the greatest reader I ever met. The greatest reader, and a cigar smoker, and a walker, and a preacher, and a brewer of some of the worst coffee ever made. What odd items the mind latches onto in moments of grief: the tilt of a friend's head, the way he used his hands when he spoke, an awful…
Little Lord Jesus no crying he makes and What the gladsome tidings be and We three kings of Orient are--to say nothing of if thou knowst it telling: Have you ever noticed just how weird the grammar and syntax of Christmas carols are? Or I guess that should be: The songs of Christmas, noticed thou,…
Joseph Bottum on the disturbing authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul.
This summer, in the unlikely pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two astronomers made a grand literary announcement. It was precisely April 16, 1178 B.C., they declared, when crafty Odysseus, peerless and bold, threw off his beggar's rags, slew the hungry suitors infesting…
Do they think this is a debate they're actually going to win? Do they imagine the Catholic theologians of America--from Avery Cardinal Dulles all the way to Sister Sara Butler--are suddenly going to whack their heads and say, "My God, we never thought of that"? What impulse makes Catholic…
The car was parked across the street from the ice-cream parlor: a little, old convertible we'd gotten cheap to tool around the Black Hills. Or, at least, it was cheap to purchase. Actually owning the thing turns out to be a more expensive proposition. Your typical British motorcar from the 1980s…
He sent me a note on July 2, just some jokey line about politics: nothing unusual, nothing portentous, nothing worth a call to see how he was feeling. Two days later, according to the news reports, he sat down in his New York apartment and put a gun to his head--a July 4 suicide, the noise of the…
Thwart. Yes, thwart is a good word. Thwarted. Athwart. A kind of satisfaction lives in such words--a unity, a completion. Teach them to a child, and you'll see what I mean: skirt, scalp, drab, buckle, sneaker, twist, jumble. Squeamish, for that matter. They taste good in the mouth, and they seem to…
Space Vulture
In photographs from those days, the young William F. Buckley Jr. of the 1950s always seemed to have his legs stretched out--his feet up on a nearby chair, or a pile of books, or an open desk drawer. Slumped down, the phone squeezed to his ear by his shoulder, his fingers twiddling a pencil, he…
It was High Noon on television, and the camera kept cutting away to those narrow shots of wall clocks and grandfather clocks and cuckoo clocks and pocket watches: that annoying clonk, clonk, clonk as the seconds ticked by and the train barreled closer. You remember the film. Everybody in town knew…
In Sunday's 60 Minutes interview with the inestimable Katie Couric, Hillary Clinton explained one of the keys to staying healthy on the campaign trail: "Wash your hands all the time." It's probably not bad advice, but still, you'd think the echos would have stopped her saying it: Out, damned spot!…
In Sunday's 60 Minutes interview with the inestimable Katie Couric, Hillary Clinton explained one of the keys to staying healthy on the campaign trail: "Wash your hands all the time." It's probably not bad advice, but still, you'd think the echos would have stopped her saying it: Out, damned spot!…
The New York Times thinks it may have figured out why the Catholic vote is going for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries: "Mrs. Clinton owes some of her success to the nuns who were once a potent presence in American Catholicism." Well, now, that's an idea. I admit there's some resemblance…
The New York Times thinks it may have figured out why the Catholic vote is going for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries: "Mrs. Clinton owes some of her success to the nuns who were once a potent presence in American Catholicism." Well, now, that's an idea. I admit there's some resemblance…
I'd missed it earlier in the week, but over at Salon on Tuesday, Mike Madden noted that after the Georgetown-West Virginia game on January 26, John McCain called Mark Salter, his "longtime speechwriter/Senate chief of staff/intellectual alter ego," to describe the goaltend (er, block, I mean; yes,…
I'd missed it earlier in the week, but over at Salon on Tuesday, Mike Madden noted that after the Georgetown-West Virginia game on January 26, John McCain called Mark Salter, his "longtime speechwriter/Senate chief of staff/intellectual alter ego," to describe the goaltend (er, block, I mean; yes,…
Over at the First Things website, Jonathan Last gives an initial breakdown of the Catholic vote in six of the important (and very Catholic) states that voted yesterday. Along the way, he mentions my old Weekly Standard essay, "The Myth of the Catholic Voter," published just before the 2004…
Over at the First Things website, Jonathan Last gives an initial breakdown of the Catholic vote in six of the important (and very Catholic) states that voted yesterday. Along the way, he mentions my old Weekly Standard essay, "The Myth of the Catholic Voter," published just before the 2004…
Everyone thinks Hillary Clinton is a lock in her home state of New York. The RealClearPolitics average of polls has her up by more than 17 percent. "Clinton will carry the state that has twice elected her to the Senate," the reliable Michael Barone flatly concludes. The only independent source I…
Everyone thinks Hillary Clinton is a lock in her home state of New York. The RealClearPolitics average of polls has her up by more than 17 percent. "Clinton will carry the state that has twice elected her to the Senate," the reliable Michael Barone flatly concludes. The only independent source I…
Steve Hayes's point is dead on, I think - with the emphasis on dead: Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson murdered their own campaigns with a political strategy that declared themselves the ones who could transcend politics. Of course, many candidates pose themselves this way: Teddy Roosevelt did, and…
Steve Hayes's point is dead on, I think - with the emphasis on dead: Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson murdered their own campaigns with a political strategy that declared themselves the ones who could transcend politics. Of course, many candidates pose themselves this way: Teddy Roosevelt did, and…
The problem with Fred Thompson's campaign is that he didn't actually follow his strategy - which was based on the idea of his receiving an enormous boost by riding in late, as the white knight, just at the point when we were all sick of these guys. Instead, he came in before the divisions were…
The problem with Fred Thompson's campaign is that he didn't actually follow his strategy - which was based on the idea of his receiving an enormous boost by riding in late, as the white knight, just at the point when we were all sick of these guys. Instead, he came in before the divisions were…
Vote often and early for Mitt Romney! Turns out our Mitt is listed twice on the ballot in Belmont, Massachusetts. The Republicans' absentee ballots have gone out, and you'll find on them Romney listed both for president and for town committee. It's not just Mitt, for that matter: Taggart, Jennifer,…
Vote often and early for Mitt Romney! Turns out our Mitt is listed twice on the ballot in Belmont, Massachusetts. The Republicans' absentee ballots have gone out, and you'll find on them Romney listed both for president and for town committee. It's not just Mitt, for that matter: Taggart, Jennifer,…
Even the local Republican party wasn't ready for Mitt Romney's win in Michigan, sending out a congratulatory victory note to John McCain. O hateful Error, Melancholy's child, / Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men / The things that are not? For political junkies, the Republicans are making…
Even the local Republican party wasn't ready for Mitt Romney's win in Michigan, sending out a congratulatory victory note to John McCain. O hateful Error, Melancholy's child, / Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men / The things that are not? For political junkies, the Republicans are making…
I often wonder what the pollsters buy, one half so precious as the goods they sell. How did it get so bad? Obama a lock in New Hampshire, McCain rising in Michigan - it's some sad curse to be beloved by the pollsters with their clipboards. The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes - or…
I often wonder what the pollsters buy, one half so precious as the goods they sell. How did it get so bad? Obama a lock in New Hampshire, McCain rising in Michigan - it's some sad curse to be beloved by the pollsters with their clipboards. The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes - or…
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells. Fred Thompson has roused himself for the battle in South Carolina, and his sparkling performance at last week's Republican debate promises - um, well, mostly it promises what might have been. Why did it have to be this way? There was a moment when…
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells. Fred Thompson has roused himself for the battle in South Carolina, and his sparkling performance at last week's Republican debate promises - um, well, mostly it promises what might have been. Why did it have to be this way? There was a moment when…
There's hardly a dime's worth of difference among the Republican candidates when it comes to the judiciary. Or, at least, when it comes to what they say they'll do about the judiciary. Originalism, plain meaning of the Constitution, textualism - even the non-pro-life Giuliani uses these words.…
There's hardly a dime's worth of difference among the Republican candidates when it comes to the judiciary. Or, at least, when it comes to what they say they'll do about the judiciary. Originalism, plain meaning of the Constitution, textualism - even the non-pro-life Giuliani uses these words.…
How bad a day was it for Fred Thompson in New Hampshire? Here's how bad: He finished among Republicans in a worse position than Dennis Kucinich managed among Democrats - in sixth place, with 1 percent of the vote, and no delegates. The glamour / Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast /…
How bad a day was it for Fred Thompson in New Hampshire? Here's how bad: He finished among Republicans in a worse position than Dennis Kucinich managed among Democrats - in sixth place, with 1 percent of the vote, and no delegates. The glamour / Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast /…
The Christmas Almanac and The Little Big Book of Christmas. Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Christmas Collection and The Kingfisher Book of Classic Christmas Stories. A Child's Christmas in Wales and Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens, for that matter: I've never quite understood why people give…
New York is dead--that's what they said back in 1975. And 1929. And 1860. The city has died more times than you can count, and, like Nosferatu, it always manages to rise from its coffin. Not even the current mayor has been able to put a stake through its smoking heart.
Daschle vs. Thune
I can understand why somebody would want to live in Manhattan. And I can understand why somebody would want to live in Moscow, Idaho. It's all the places in between that remain a mystery. A great city excites your senses. A small town calms your nerves. A suburb eats your soul.
It was Scooter Libby who introduced me to the Washington horror known as "the breakfast meeting." That was back in 1996, as I remember. I hadn't met him before, but I'd just reviewed his novel, The Apprentice, and he sent me a thank-you note, diffidently suggesting that the next time I was in D.C.…
"Plagiarize," as I once wrote. "Let no one else's work evade your eyes. / Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, / so don't shade your eyes, / but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize ... / only be sure always to call it please, 'research.'"
Tinsel. No one needs tinsel. Even the word is a tinselly kind of word. It ought to have been a mild profanity, suitable for bridge clubs and 1950s sorority girls: "Oh, tinsel, I forgot my keys again, Janie." Instead, it names one of the most destructive substances known to humankind. Originally…
As communism was to Pope John Paul II, so radical Islam is to Pope Benedict XVI--the most pressing geopolitical problem of his time, of course, but also something more: a test of whether Catholicism is going to buttress the moral, political, and intellectual struggle against a violent and…
FOR MORE THAN TWENTY years, Pope John Paul II showed a way to work for the defeat of totalitarianism. It was not by armies, although it relied on the threat of American power to keep the dictators from military adventures. And it was not by appeasement, although it knew how to practice patience…
I GOT A CHECK FOR $78.23 in the mail today, a reprint fee for an article I did twelve years ago on the way Charles Dickens uses names in David Copperfield. I'm sure you all saw it when it came out--even in those days, who missed an issue of the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature? But I didn't…
ON THE MORNING PRESIDENT BUSH nominated Samuel Alito to become the fifth Catholic on the Supreme Court, I was sitting on an airplane next to a joke-teller, one of those people whose idea of travel is the chance to pass along to strangers all the latest gags. "So," he began, patting his jovial…
WHEN I LONG FOR ESCAPE, I dream of the prairie. The last time I was out west, visiting my childhood home in Pierre, South Dakota, I drove up to one of the river hills on the edge of town. Why is the sun so much bigger out on those plains than it is back east? Sitting on the warm hood of the car to…
A FAILING CIVILIZATION CAN'T BE argued out of its failing. It can be led, perhaps, or inspired, or converted and reformed. But argument requires the application of universal truths to the particular facts of the moment, and when a culture is tumbling downward, all its truths and facts--indeed, the…
HISTORY LABORS--A WORN machine, sick with torsion, ill-meshed--and every repair of an old fault ruptures something new. Or so it seems, much of the time. Our historical choices are limited, constrained by the poverty of what appears possible at any given moment. To be a good leader is, for most…
HERE'S A CURIOUS THOUGHT. Maybe the single most important person in the 20th century's long struggle against communism wasn't Ronald Reagan. Maybe it wasn't Karol Wojtyla or Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa or Václav Havel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Mikhail Gorbachev. Maybe it wasn't anyone whose…
"WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE political philosopher?" a group of Republican candidates were asked early in the 2000 race for president. And the frontrunner at the time, a Texas governor named George W. Bush, calmly answered, "Christ, because he changed my life."
THE MAYOR OF SOMERVILLE, Massachusetts, is sorry. Really sorry. He recently called the city's annual December celebration a "Christmas party." And we can't be having that. What he meant to say, he explained, is "holiday party," because the word "Christmas" contains . . . um, a word they don't use…
LAST NIGHT I built an igloo for my daughter out of books. A model of an igloo, you understand. We were talking about how nice it would be to have a white Christmas, and then we got talking about snow, and then we got talking about the way Eskimos live, and then, well, what with all the unread…
I Am Charlotte Simmons
LAST NIGHT, Tom Daschle threw his campaign into the shredder. What is it that makes South Dakota politicians do this kind of thing? There must be something in that Missouri River water that makes even the best of political pros tuck their thumbs into their armpits and squawk like demented chickens.
The American Catholic Voter
SUPPOSE you were doing a little research into the history of Supreme Court nominations, and you learned from one book that Grover Cleveland "bested Benjamin Harrison by almost 100,000 votes in the election of 1888, but the vagaries of the electoral college caused him to lose the election" (p. 130).
LAST YEAR--on August 16, 2003, speeding in a borrowed white Cadillac down one of those long, dusty South Dakota highways that glide across the plains like endless ribbons--a Republican congressman named Bill Janklow ran a stop sign at 70 miles per hour and killed a passing motorcyclist.
Sidebars Laurence H. Tribe's God Save This Honorable Court (1985), p. 83: Taft publicly pronounced Pitney to be a "weak member" of the Court to whom he could "not assign cases." Henry J. Abraham's Justices and Presidents (1974), p. 164: Taft publicly pronounced Pitney to be a "weak member" of the…
Another Harvard Copycat
Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004 We drove before dawn through frozen fields, Czeslaw Milosz once wrote.
My Summer
MY GRANDMOTHER was a Catholic Republican--which is to say, she was an Irish woman who married an old-fashioned South Dakota lawyer, and since he became a Catholic for her sake, it seemed only fair that she become a Republican for his. But like many converts, she soon outstripped her sponsor in the…
IN AN ACT OF ASTONISHING SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS and self-congratulation, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has forced the question of marriage upon the entire United States.
THE PERFECT SHOWER requires very hot water and a great deal of steam. It needs extra nozzles to surround you with spray, a hot-water heater big enough to run for ages, and a place to lounge while contemplating the enormity of God's creation and placing bets with yourself about which condensed-steam…
HOW MUCH is worldwide access to abortion worth? What price are the international activists who cluster around the United Nations willing to pay to achieve the ability of any woman--at any place, for any reason--to have an abortion?
IN SMALL TOWNS across America--from New England village greens to sun-drenched county seats in California--there are FBI agents pounding on the doors of libraries, demanding to know what books the citizens are reading. Inside stand librarians, white-haired and apple-cheeked, resisting as best they…
What fades in memory is not the fact, but the feeling. I can call up every detail of those Christmases of my childhood. A cold sparrow peering out across the lawn from under the snow-covered lilac hedge, while I sat at the window, waiting for my parents to wake. My father cocking his head to the…