Although I haven’t seen it much reported on this side of the Atlantic, the Church of England has moved on from its last concession to feminists — with the appointment of female bishops — to an apparently serious discussion of whether or not the Church is henceforth to address the author of the Universe with…
The Guardian reports on a new study published in Science purporting to show — at least according to The Guardian — that "early men and women were equal." The article’s author, Hannah Devlin, quotes Mark Dyble, one of the authors of the study, as saying: "There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho…
Isn’t it enough for us to concede that you’re more hip than we are? Must you be more moral too? — From The New Criterion of May, 2015
That George Stephanopoulos happened to have $75,000 in spare change lying around to donate to the Clinton Foundation was ultimately owing to his association with the Clintons in the first place. He was just "giving back" by way of a monetary thank you to the celebrity presidential couple who have, perhaps inadvertently, done so much…
The media’s appetite for scandal is scandalously limited to only one side of the political divide — From The New Criterion of April, 2015
Just over a year ago I wrote of the Twitter-bombing I had received on account of having written that the movie 12 Years a Slave would have been better, and even more effective as propaganda, if it had allowed itself to present an ever-so slightly more benign portrait of slavery in the ante-bellum South than the exaggeratedly…
As a scandalologist of long standing, I am fascinated by the Clintons’ apparent invulnerability to the sorts of claims of wrong-doing that routinely cripple or disqualify other, lesser politicians, at least since Bill’s impeachment back in 1998. To some extent, of course, this is easily explained. For scandal to be wounding or fatal, it has…
What do Jonathan Chait, Rotherham borough counsellors and the French Revolution have in common? — From The New Criterion of March, 2015
Peter Tait, the Headmaster of Sherborne Preparatory School in England — where, by the way, a preparatory school is one that prepares children to take at age 13 the "Common Entrance" exam into that special class of private schools that can call themselves "public"— wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph the other day insisting that…
The old maxim about not picking fights with those who buy ink by the barrel doesn’t apply to dictators or terrorists — From The New Criterion of February, 2015
Is it just me or has the theatrical culture of the English-speaking world gone into a terminal decline? I would think that perception a sign of my advancing age but for the occasional straws in the wind to suggest that I am not entirely alone. Janice Turner in The Times of London, for example, writes…
Decapitation in the good old days — From The Weekly Standard of February 16, 2015
