“Violence, which plays a most conspicuous part in war, is a thing which belongs to wild beasts; wherefore we should take most diligent pains to temper it with humanity, lest by too much imitation of the beasts we forget how to be human”. Hugo Grotius Lest we forget how to be human, we should, for …
“If I am occasionally a little overdressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.” Oscar Wilde John Fetterman, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, has taken Wilde’s bon mot and flipped it on its head; not even by accident has the hulking Reading-native ever been overdressed, and by no metric has his intellectual …
A Short Story “¿Qué me dijo?” He asked the pretty young woman at his side, upon whose superior fluency with the English language he was, at important times such as these, unabashedly dependent. He had feigned, though not altogether convincingly, to understand the question I had put to him about his foot a moment ago. …
Summer 2020 An initial installment of my “Lives of the Philosophers”, composed in Plutarchian fashion during the summer of 2020. This series (on which I hope to expand) will comprise essays on the philosophers whom I find most interesting, and, more importantly, whom I can understand. It is my modest goal to compile a few …
On Friedrich Nietzsche: Lives of the Philosophers Read More »
Inisherin is an island off the coast of an island, which is itself an island detached from a slightly larger island, which is, if you’ll bear with me just a moment longer, patient friend and reader, a third island separated from the land-locked continent of Europe. This, I assure you, is more than a mere …
The Banshees of Inisherin: One of the Year’s Best Films Read More »
When I was in the seventh grade, at the unripe age of twelve, I had an English teacher by the name of Mr. Bodnar. He was a quiet, unassuming fellow of middle age and small stature, of receding hairline and protuberant eyes, in whose genial presence all the children of Bunker Hill Middle School felt …
Babylon (and on…and on…and ON…for THREE whole hours!), like the ungodly city after which it’s named, was a confused mess of biblical proportions. The plot was senseless, the filth gratuitous, the writing sloppy, the budget bloated, the talent wasted, and the running time unmercifully long. *** There are certain sights, sounds, and substances to which …
Tell me, dear friend and reader: have you traveled lately? Have you thought deeply lately? Please—don’t withhold from me your answers. I know just how static and monotonous life can sometimes be. I know how inert and incurious we can sometimes get. If, to those two questions, you answered in the negative, here’s what I’ll …
Do you dare discuss religion and politics over the holiday season? It’s an ageless maxim that, when gathered with family and friends during the course of the holiday season, all discussion of politics—and, to a lesser extent, religion—should be studiously avoided. These are the two guests, unique among all possible guests, to whom it’s not …
Written 6 November 2022 There’s a shrinking number of celebrities in whom we Americans place our collective trust. A very small number, indeed, for whom, no matter the direction toward which our political preferences incline us, there’s near universal veneration. Take, as one example, the late Alex Trebek, whose name was, and yet remains, synonymous …
Use Your Discernment (So Long as You Discern Nothing Different) Read More »