Vouchsafe O Lord
Glory be to Thee, 0 Lord, glory to Thee. Glory to Thee who givest me sleep to recruit my weakness,...
Jul 1st
Remy en Paris
Jun 30th
one of William Morris’s wallpaper designs
Jun 30th
American power, soft and hard
The surveys that show America’s soft power to be less respected than it used to be also show...
Jun 30th
me on Ratatouille
Jun 29th
Wired Magazine: There's a great line on your new album, Werewolves: "My geekiness is getting in the way of my nerdiness." What's the distinction?
Patton Oswalt: A lot of nerds aren't aware they're nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, "I speak Klingon — who am I fooling? You win! I'm just gonna openly like what I like." Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves.
Patton Oswalt: A lot of nerds aren't aware they're nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, "I speak Klingon — who am I fooling? You win! I'm just gonna openly like what I like." Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves.
Jun 29th
on movies about English professors
In the popular imagination, humanities professors don’t have anything to be ambitious about. No...
Jun 29th
“Ratatouille” is a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as...”
— A. O. Scott in the NYT
— A. O. Scott in the NYT
Jun 28th
Jane
Part of what differentiates this round of Austen consumption from dozens of past infatuations is the...
Jun 28th
moved to tears
There was a moment near the end of Ratatouille (Disney)—the scene in which a snooty food critic,...
Jun 28th
my first post at The American Scene
Jun 27th
Santeria in MLB
CHICAGO — On a shelf in the office of Chicago White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen, mixed in among the...
Jun 27th
the surprising survival of the buffalo
Extirpated on the prairie, the buffalo found their last, tenuous refuge in the newly established...
Jun 26th
Waiting for Harry
Jun 25th
Watch
climbing the tallest tree in the world (115.5 meters, or about 379 feet)
Jun 25th
Uncle Stevie's gotta have it
This season’s biggest pop dope: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. No doubt. You know it, I...
Jun 25th
under torture
Neither man would describe what they’d endured. “It is secret, intimate,” Fr. Roman said, “I saw...
Jun 25th
Melissa Dean, 2006
Jun 25th
courtesy Bibliodyssey
Jun 24th
I've been waiting YEARS for this
For its first stores here, Whole Foods, the gourmet supermarket, directs customers to form...
Jun 23rd
“Angelina Jolie is so famous that when she looks in the...”
— Anthony Lane
— Anthony Lane
Jun 23rd
Keith Thomas on what historians write...
Nearly all the fashionable topics of the present time owe their vogue to essentially non-academic...
Jun 23rd
the mysterious power of the pointless
Kundera suggests that no one can become a novelist who has not passed through a long night of...
Jun 23rd
Mise van der Rohe’s famous glass house
Jun 23rd
Philip Johnson’s famous glass house
Jun 23rd
Terry Eagleton responds to Richard...
Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this...
Jun 23rd
Watch
Jun 22nd
Joe Strummer (1952-2002)
Jun 22nd
choosing the world
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children maintains that one out of five kids who use...
Jun 22nd
Julian Beever (with oar), sidewalk artist
[more here — I...
Jun 22nd
revenge of the characters
It’s every urban writer’s dream: setting up in a stone cottage in rural France and...
Jun 22nd
A. O. Scott on Evan Almighty
There is … a fruitful franchise in the making here, a potentially endless series of movies...
Jun 22nd
one of Lou Romano’s “devil drawings.” His...
Jun 21st
Lou Romano, Nativity
Jun 21st
Pixar’s next: WALL-E
Jun 21st
Chris Ware’s cover for a new translation of...
Jun 20th
“If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little...”
— Kingsley Amis
— Kingsley Amis
Jun 20th
the ruin of their own history
For decades, Arab society granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time. The...
Jun 19th
Fillippino Lippi
Jun 19th
Velazquez
Jun 19th
Rembrandt
Jun 19th
artists' self-portraits
I have noticed a curious phenomenon in self-portraiture, which I hereby christen the doggy effect....
Jun 19th
Watch
Daniel Day-Lewis directed by P. T. Anderson. Cool.
Jun 18th
steampunk laptop
Jun 18th
against nature
The Caduveo founding myth recounts that, lacking other gifts at the moment of creation, the tribe...
Jun 18th
the president of Gambia cures AIDS
On Thursdays — Jammeh’s healing powers are only available to him on that day of the week...
Jun 18th
an evening prayer of Lancelot Andrewes
By night I lift up my hands in the sanctuary, and praise the Lord. The Lord hath granted His...
Jun 17th
passiveaggressivenotes (via 3 Quarks Daily)
Jun 16th
no concept of God
I originally went to the Amazon to convert the Pirahã, to see them all become Christians, to...
Jun 16th
Profession
I believe that Thou hast created me: despise not the work of Thine own hands; that Thou madest me...
Jun 16th
second opinion
But the moment that really wrenched the show off its axis was a brief, almost throwaway scene in the...
Jun 15th
God Wondering If He's Being Too Cruel
PARADISE—God, the omnipotent and omniscient Creator of the Universe who recently saw fit to allow...
Jun 15th
Howard Zinn and history for children
But as Zinn himself points out about his discipline, telling the truth is not Job 1 for historians....
Jun 15th
the last scene of Harry Potter. . .
Someone approached the table. Harry looked up, hoping it might be Hermione, but instead it was a...
Jun 14th
Les Murray, "Through the Lattice Door"
This house, in lattice to the eaves, diagonals tacked across diagonals, is cool as a bottle in...
Jun 14th
Jun 14th
Les Murray on writing a poem
It’s wonderful, there’s nothing else like it, you write in a trance. And the trance is...
Jun 14th
refusing solitude
The steady stream of words coming out of our mouths—with cell phones, and voice recognition, and the...
Jun 14th
Adam Kirsch on blogs and literature
In fact, despite what the bloggers themselves believe, the future of literary culture does not lie...
Jun 13th
Watch
My friend Mark Gornik and students from City Seminary in New York on a pilgrimage to Senegal and...
Jun 12th
in the Vineyard of Love
The vicar arrived in a black cassock and barefoot. He announced that eroticism and lust are not...
Jun 12th
Peter Hitchens on Christopher Hitchens
“People sometimes ask how two brothers, born less than three years apart, should have come to...
Jun 12th
Luke Timothy Johnson on intellectual...
The task demands intellectual honesty. I have little patience with efforts to make Scripture say...
Jun 11th
the "acquired situatonal narcissism" of...
Being a good husband (or a good wife) means telling your spouse when she (or he) starts sounding...
Jun 11th
a boy buttons his father’s shirt, Sierra Leone (photo...
Jun 10th
McMurdo Station, Antarctica (photo by Alan Robock)
Jun 10th
Sgt. Pepper at 40
If Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band doesn’t have a concept, it does have a theme....
Jun 10th
hope toward God
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to...
Jun 9th
touching yet somehow also a little...
The US military is developing a robot with a teddy bear-style head to help carry injured soldiers...
Jun 9th
Peter Callesen, Broken Vase (2006)
Jun 8th
the staff of life
Many factors determine the perfect loaf of French bread, and Kaplan anatomizes them in great detail:...
Jun 8th
necessary wastes of time
“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a...
Jun 7th
“I have three reactions to your talk and the first is...”
— Keith Hopkins, late Professor...
— Keith Hopkins, late Professor...
Jun 7th
London Olympics poster, 2012
Jun 6th
London Olympics poster, 1948
Jun 6th
Dana Gioia, "Money"
Money is a kind of poetry. – Wallace Stevens Money, the long green, cash, stash, rhino, jack or...
Jun 5th
o blessed forgetting
Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend,...
Jun 5th
“First come I, my name is Jowett; If there’s knowledge,...”
— a student song about Jowett
— a student song about Jowett
Jun 4th
“You mustn’t believe in God, my dear, no matter what...”
— Benjamin Jowett,...
— Benjamin Jowett,...
Jun 4th
the famous Edmund Wilson all-purpose...
“Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, write articles or...
Jun 3rd
pistol-whipped by Thomas Hardy
The gnashing of teeth never stopped the year my 15-year-old son brought home “A Tale of Two Cities”...
Jun 2nd
a century defined by 1984 and Bridget...
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s dystopic vision of a totalitarian future in which the...
Jun 2nd
Aristotle’s Fall (tapestry, Augustiner Museum,...
Jun 1st