Author: J.L. Wall

In a post at American Times, E.D. writes: It’s the same in politics: conservatives aren’t so much interested with their own ideas about governance as they are about responding to and obstructing the ideas...

Maybe this would be otherwise if I’d followed the discussions around here of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart thesis a little more closely, but I was struck by the math in David Brooks’ column* today:

I wrote, some time ago, that Grant becomes the hero of Shelby Foote’s Civil War because “he fights, unlike his colleagues on either side, who dilly-dally, blundering into and through battle and prolonging the...

Rhetoric can reveal an unconscious trope moving — or maybe just stirring itself awake — within a society without attributing conscious malice to the individual speaker.  Thus the key line in Adam Kirsch’s consideration,...

At Literary Commentary, D.G. Myers engages Victor Davis Hanson’s question: Why read fiction anymore?  He agrees it teaches one self-mastery, and contrasts this with a more common self-affirming method of reading. I was wary...

Marilynne Robinson, doing what she does [NYT], talks about books, writing, and the Bible — as well as writing one of the politest harsh critiques of contemporary literature possible:

As part of two weeks of strips about the wind-down of American troops in Iraq, Garry Trudeau has used Doonesbury to present veterans confronting the inevitable “Was it worth it?” question.  The second strip...

Though I’m somewhat more moved by the loss of Paula Hyman, an historian with a different, but no less real type of bravery, and wonder whether we shouldn’t already be moving on to the...

I just spent six and a half hours driving — the sun somehow in my face while heading south — with a vacuum cleaner in the trunk, a sick tortoise in the backseat, and...

  Now I know that you’re sitting there deep in your velvet seats and you’re thinking “Uh, he’s up there saying something that he thinks about, but I’ll never have to sing that song.”...

Daniel Mendelsohn offers commentary on the problems and practice of translation not unrelated to the discussion held here a few weeks back:

“Which translation do you prefer?” has spent the past half-decade climbing my list of least-favorite questions.  While still somewhere behind “Favorite book/author/album – Go!” it is somewhat more mendacious in that it’s hard to...

Via Andrew, a new Way-Too-Soon general election snapshot: Obama now leads Texas Governor Rick Perry, the frontrunner in the GOP contest, 46% to 39%. Perry’s chief rival for the nomination, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney , holds...

If so, then perhaps this recording of Flannery O’Connor reading “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” at Vanderbilt, some fifty-two years ago, should be queued up for your next trip.  Or maybe just...