Alan Jacobs has, in the past, tried to put his finger on why some of us find podcasts so unsatisfying, even as they’ve become wildly popular. (I remain convinced that there are more people making podcasts than listening to them, but still.) Alan hits on a couple plausible problems here, but I don’t think that’s […]

Many people I know would assume that pretty much anything published by Breitbart is not worth rebutting, and particularly not this missive by Milo Yiannopoulos, arguing that the real source of America’s perpetual mass murder problem is, of course, feminism. Yiannopoulos argues that these lone wolf killers, like the one responsible for the horrific recent Oregon […]

This summer, Alan Jacobs had a great post responding to a recent biography of Virginia Woolf. In the post, Alan points out that actually respecting Woolf means taking seriously her heart-wrenching last letter to her husband, in which she praises him in some of the most genuine and intense language I’ve ever read. Instead, the […]

I’m trying to hate this blog a little less, lately, and part of the way I’m gonna do that is just write stuff that I think is interesting and worthwhile to me, to be a little more esoteric and a little more weird. For most people, this may be translated as “even more self-indulgent.” In […]

Five years ago this month, Jeffrey Goldberg staked The Atlantic‘s credibility on a sensationalistic cover story proclaiming that an Israeli attack on Iran was imminent. The story included the typical weasel words and qualifiers, but the message was unmistakable: an Israeli attack on Iran was coming, and coming soon, which Goldberg knew because he had such […]

Some have lamented about the increasingly bitter and acrimonious fight going on right now about #BlackLivesMatter and the Bernie Sanders campaign. It’s true that this is a classic left-wing circular firing squad. And it has certainly brought out the worst in performative white anti-racism, the kind where people care more about being perceived as one […]

Michael Ross decided he wanted to die, to begin with. Ross was a horrific serial killer, a man who in the early 1980s raped and murdered 8 women, most of them teenagers. He had been on death row for two decades when he decided he would like the state to end it; he had converted […]

I am so truly thrilled to share with you all that Miles is home after a week in the animal hospital and two weeks after the initial onset of his condition. He has received excellent care at both VCA Animal Hospital in Lafayette and at the Purdue Small Animal Hospital in West Lafayette. I need […]

I’m very sorry to tell you that my dog, Miles, has taken very ill this past week, and I’m forced to ask for some help in paying his vet bills. Miles is an 8 year old hound mix, about 70 pounds. Before last weekend, he was in fine health, very energetic. But this past weekend, […]