A great headline : "Violent Crimes Drop 12%, Reason Unknown; In Other News, Record Number Of Americans Carrying Concealed Weapons....

I'm not sure how sympathetic I am to these complaints .  On the one hand, I think, of course it's true:  and what did you expect ? O...

The State of Georgia has the death penalty, but uses it fairly rarely.  Of the 1,267 people executed by the United States since the restorat...

Mr. Sparkle sends this cache of the Trinity College, Dublin, webpage in which Trinity  introduces its newest Fellow .  I salute Dr. B's ...

We hear a lot about gridlock, but most of the gridlock results from the fact that there is a huge disagreement about the proper role and fun...

You have to feel a bit bad for the poor woman with whom he speaks. The real question isn't whether Social Security is a Ponzi scheme...

Steven Pinker, a philosopher with whose views I generally do not accord, has a good review of a book on self-control .  While some neurosci...

Lars Walker has a good insight . The "May Day Carol" is my favorite hymn on the subject of repentance.  It's a concept not m...

He's supposed to be my dog.  Sometimes when they get to playing together, he seems to forget.

The Volokh Conspiracy (these days, I suppose we could abbreviate that to "VC," but I still prefer not to do so) questions whether ...

Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah , from the Boy Scout Handbook to profile...

Via our friends at Brandywine Books , a review of On Being Certain. The subject is that feeling of certainty that you have in your gut, wh...

Rep. Bachmann hasn't settled up on the vaccine issue yet, but the question has caused quite a few people on the right to slam her hard. ...

While I agree that this sort of thing is both ugly and improper , I think it shows a remarkable sense of optimism by the President's r...

I'm not sure what exactly has happened, except that Blogger appears to have decided to force the blog into some new template. Apparentl...

Dad29's comment below points to this essay on the collapse of civilization, which dovetails with another piece I was reading today. He...

Rep. Bachmann's standing in the polls has eroded sharply since Gov. Perry entered the race. She is trying to position herself against G...

Read Side by Side - In Michael Totten's latest essay , a photo of a senior Muslim Brotherhood member, with the characteristic bruised fo...

Dad29 sends an essay by Russell Kirk on the failings of our system of higher education as he encountered it during WWII. Let's run thr...

On 9/11, after a while, I turned off the televisions and went to an island in a river to write the poem I posted below.  This year, I rode t...