News Comes in Threes, Israeli Edition
The past three days have seen three important events in Israeli politics, which, taken together, will have ramifications for American policy and the region as a whole. On Tuesday—as the title of my prior,...
Author: J.L. Wall
A Note for the Sake of Historical Accuracy
I wasn’t going to write about this, but the one-two punch of Rod Dreher and John Podhoretz — in agreement,* no less! — has somehow made me shift into gear. Anna Breslaw penned a not-quite...
Peter Singer Is Wrong
The famed bioethicist nods in approval at a Dutch politician’s assertion that animal rights trump religious freedom. This was occasioned by ongoing attempts in the Netherlands to ban traditional Jewish and Muslim practices of animal slaughter....
The Tikkun Olam of Rabbi Hillel
Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on inequality. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click here. I. ...
The Artist as Judge
Some months ago, I wrote of Marilynne Robinson that, Regardless of her political preferences, her worldview, in its starkly Calvinist way, and insofar as it’s expressed in those novels and Absence of Mind, is...
It’s a Mad, Mad World
Since E.D. has pointed us toward Acculturated today, I figured I might point you toward its take on recent Mad Men developments, focusing on the question of what can give us happiness. I only want to...
Wendell Berry’s Passion Play
I don’t hesitate to say that damage or destruction of the land-community is morally wrong, just as [Aldo] Leopold did not hesitate to say so when he was composing his essay, “The Land Ethic,”...
Thoughts Obama and Appalachia: It Ain’t (Quite) About That Southern Thing
1) Voter registration. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Arkansas are disproportionately Democratic—that is, when you compare voting preferences with party identification. In Kentucky and West Virginia, the margins are 56-37 and 54-29, respectively. While the Old,...
What Makes a War?
In his writing on the Civil War and American slavery, Ta-Nehisi Coates frequently refers to a “war” on the slaves and/or America’s black populace. (The violence done to slaves — or at least the...
Wendell Berry Studies I: Mother Nature’s Son
Wendell Berry’s recent Jefferson Lecture was not, as both his supporters and detractors have acknowledged, his finest piece of writing. His use of the lectern to present a theory of Kentuckian animosity for all...
A Mentsch Trakht, un Got Lakht
I was as surprised as anyone to wake up this morning and discover that Kadima had agreed to enter Netanyahu’s governing coalition. This, in case you missed it, broadens its reach to 94 of...
Mid-Season Mad Men Studies: “And would it have been worth it, after all?”
I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white...
Can We Have Post-Modern Faith?
A new study out of the University of Chicago shows, in its words, a “modest” decline of belief in God globally, with dramatic variations among individual countries. I don’t want to argue about the...
World’s Greatest Mystery, Solved
…Maybe. An intrepid CNN.com reporter attempts to answer the question that has plagued all of us for years: did Levon Helm sing “Annie” or “Fanny”? (For the record, I’ve always thought “Fanny” — but...
On Faith After the Holocaust
(I promised myself I would attempt to respond to this article on Yom HaShoah. The latter fell sooner than I thought, and no complete response, I suspect, is possible. So with my caveat aside…)...
Mad Men Open Thread
I’m building it, so y’all better come visit now, here? I haven’t seen this week’s episode yet, and probably won’t until later this week — there are more important things in the offing today/tonight...
I Wanna Catch That Fireball Mail…
It’s not quite Friday night, but Earl Scruggs, one of this country’s musical greats, deserves it.
Mad Men Season Five Premiere Open Thread
According to Wikipedia (to which I had to turn to figure out when we were), Mad Men is, in the wake of a 1966 Kentucky-Duke all-white Final Four bout to play Texas Western and...
Stray Thoughts on This Week’s Peter Beinart To-Do
1) I don’t know why I’m writing about this tonight and not Dr. McCoy’s technophobia. Probably because I’m a masochist at heart. 2) I haven’t read The Crisis of Zionism. Neither the university nor...
Sympathy with the Kabbalists
I once wrote a short story for workshop that involved, I believe, the narrator dismissing any approach to grief informed by the Kabbalah as guilty of a kind of heretical dualism. It wasn’t this-worldly...
