A Young Leader I drove to Houston today for a terrific shape-note singing. This youngster is the newest member of an extensive and famous s...

Brined Turkey Mark asked for our turkey brining recipe in a comment below, so here it is, from an old Food & Wine article. This is guar...

Daring: In one of our recent discussions, Ymar asked about the question of whether the 9/11 hijackers demonstrated courage. I answered that...

Competition & Women: We've got some pretty competitive women around here, one of whom wants to talk about this story . So let's...

Legalize What ? This story presents a very good opportunity to discuss that field of philosophy called consequentialism . The research foun...

A "Science" of Literature: There was a time when history went through the same argument . In fact, history went so far down this ...

A Brief, Splendid Life The death of a former colleague is very much on my mind this week. At the height of a splendid career, only 47 years ...

A Surprise at St. Cadoc's: Why it makes sense to fix the roof of the church once in a while... at least, if your church is six hundred y...

Epicurus: A professor of French literature has some advice about eating . Being reasonably good advice, we find that its source is ancient ...

Currahee! I took a few hours today to spend with Currahee Mountain . Here is a short movie of the view from the top.

Cyberwar The more I read about the Stuxnet worm the more interesting it gets. This clever weapon was designed to lurk in personal computer...

Vikings and the Indian Maiden: So you're a viking, and you go out to take a look to see what's out west. Naturally, you're goin...

The Onion on the President: The Onion had two pieces skewering the president this week, one in print and one on video. Obama Outlines Mo...

The Prodigal Teen Sailors Perhaps most of you already have caught this wonderful Thanksgiving story on the news or in the local paper , but ...

Thanksgiving: Happy Thanksgiving. (Image from DVIDs, photo by Brian Ferguson. Pvt. Carlos Ortiz walks from the serving line at Forward Oper...

Oh, Yes: It's obvious to me now, and I don't see how I never thought of it before: the turkey needs to be bacon-wrapped this year....

You might as well call it the heartbeat of God and be done with it. The current widely-held theory of life, the universe, and everything hol...

The Seven-Day Week Over at Brandywine Books [link corrected -- thanks, Lars!] they linked to an article about "the book you've alw...

Meat Happy Birthday to the NPH. Part of his birthday present was the encyclopedic River Cottage Meat Book , which we've both been enjoy...

What a Great Idea: A new amendment to increase Federalism is coming before the new Congress. It's one of the better ideas I've hea...