Reason magazine's inverview with Ayaan...
Hirsi Ali: Right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.Reason: Don't you mean defeating radical Islam?
Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it's defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It's very difficult to even talk about peace now. They're not interested in peace....There is no moderate Islam. There are Muslims who are passive, who don't all follow the rules of Islam, but there's really only one Islam, defined as submission to the will of God. There's nothing moderate about it.
Reason: So when even a hard-line critic of Islam such as Daniel Pipes says, "Radical Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution," he's wrong?
Hirsi Ali: He's wrong. Sorry about that.
Oct 1st
"That would be so God."
When I was young, they told me that when I died and went to Heaven, the angels would take me into a...
Oct 1st
saving civilization
Founded in 1994 by the elders of a fast-growing and radically conservative church, New St. Andrews...
Oct 1st
Charles Taylor on sex and Christianity
[I]n the Victorian era, in both England and America[,] sex was meant to bond the couple. Sex was...
Oct 1st
Ian Buruma allows a place for faith
I have never personally had either the benefits nor misfortunes of adhering to any religion, but...
Oct 1st
WP:NPOV
As Wikipedia ages, its editors increasingly write in a bureaucratic patois thick with internal...
Oct 1st
seaweed
Sep 30th
A still image from a 3-D animation shows how nicotine...
Sep 30th
how Jains live by impossible ideals
How then, is it possible to live by impossible ideals? The advantage for addressing this question to...
Sep 29th
James Wood on Alter
The Psalms (like the Book of Job) were relentlessly Christianized by the King James translators....
Sep 29th
Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. In grass meadows He makes me lie down, by quiet waters...
Sep 29th
Google and "the bookish character of...
The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also, on...
Sep 29th
philology and nationalism
In 1848, the year of revolutions, a “National Assembly” was convened at Frankfurt, to discuss...
Sep 29th
Stephen King on the American short story
What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that...
Sep 29th
Helvetica coffee mug, eighteen bucks
Sep 28th
O Lord, let it be true . . . O please,...
Don’t you find it funny that the foods in many traditional diets - starting with breast milk...
Sep 28th
Justin Quinn, “Moby Dick chapter 71,” via...
Sep 28th
Sep 27th
the Hitchens makeover
I’d noticed a touch of decline here and there, but one puts these things down to Anno Domini...
Sep 27th
integrating the country club
After the literary critic Anatole Broyard died in 1990, his family arranged a memorial reception at...
Sep 27th
Alter's Psalter
If many of the Psalms express a powerful longing for the divine presence, they register it as an...
Sep 26th
Brooklyn Books of Wonder
… certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy...
Sep 26th
an end, at last, to the suffering
A patriotic pensioner has been given an Asbo for playing his Vera Lynn records too loudly. George...
Sep 25th
Reihan's Facebook etiquette 101
Last week, I launched the Great Facebook Purge of 2007. In one fell swoop, I whittled down a list of...
Sep 25th
learning to forget
IMAGINE CARRYING AROUND an entire research library on an iPod. Such a feat suddenly seemed feasible...
Sep 25th
then why am I doing this to myself??
Just last month, the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine...
Sep 25th
history as written by the dissenters
[In The Lost City] Alan Ehrenhalt writes about how history is written. It is a commonplace, and...
Sep 24th
Evan Coyne Maloney's Automatic Bob
According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News, veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has...
Sep 24th
the modes of human thinking
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come...
Sep 24th
Stephen Bates's farewell to his religion...
This week’s meeting between Rowan Williams and the American bishops will be my swan-song as a...
Sep 23rd
via Strange Maps
Sep 23rd
Sep 22nd
Sep 22nd
Sep 22nd
Sep 22nd
Sep 22nd
Sep 22nd
the Jews
That Christ is more than idea - no Christian can know this. But that Israel is more than an idea,...
Sep 22nd
I wish I had a pi room
I also had one little side room we called “the pi room,” because on its walls were 53,000 digits of...
Sep 22nd
[London Kerning, via Monoscope]
Sep 22nd
Theodore Dalrymple on addiction
Dalrymple is a cultural conservative; he firmly believes that human beings should be held morally...
Sep 22nd
I'm a sucker for stories like this. . ....
Very late last night I found myself in the City Hall subway stop with 8 other stragglers waiting for...
Sep 21st
on lectures
H. L. Mencken: I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.Question following a lecture on Mencken: Do you think it’s possible that come January of 2009, Bush could decide to ignore the election results and keep himself in power?
Sep 21st
spray-fire atonement
Fasting aside, most non-Jews I know envy Yom Kippur, holiday of atonement. While not intended as the...
Sep 21st
Edward Gorey
Sep 20th
Meghan O'Rourke on Madeline L'Engle
While the physics at work here were totally exotic to me as a young reader, the metaphysics somehow...
Sep 20th
Sep 19th
"the most beautiful mechanical objects...
These days, Leica makes digital compacts and a beefy S.L.R., or single-lens reflex, called the R9,...
Sep 19th
Martin Heidegger’s hut in Germany’s Black Forest...
Sep 19th
talking 'bout my generation
What experts label “adolescent risk taking” is really baby boomer risk taking. It’s true that 30...
Sep 19th
marmalade to Marmite: a tragic tale of...
The creator of Paddington Bear has defended himself against accusations that he has sold out by...
Sep 19th
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition,...”
— Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler
— Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler
Sep 18th
John Crace summarizes In God We Doubt,...
It was to reconcile these contradictions that I broadcast my now famous series of groundbreaking...
Sep 18th
“At fifteen hours, “The War” is too much of a not good enough...”
— Nancy Franklin
— Nancy Franklin
Sep 17th
Sep 17th
"a manifesto for a new environmentalism"
Increasing energy use is the primary cause of global warming, but it is also a primary cause of...
Sep 17th
notes for a new Kafka novel
Nalini Ghuman, an up-and-coming musicologist and expert on the British composer Edward Elgar, was...
Sep 17th
Cecilia Alfonso Esteves (via Monoscope)
Sep 16th
Allan Bloom, twenty years later
The historian Tony Judt, a self-described “old leftist” and the director of the Remarque Institute...
Sep 15th
unseen stars
In 1610, Galileo Galilei published a small book describing astronomical observations that he had...
Sep 14th
is it proven that conservatives are...
The conservative case against this study is easy to make. Sure, we’re fonder of old ways than...
Sep 14th
Malignant fluid-nations (etc.)
Entire research departments have now embarked on the herculean task of identifying all extant...
Sep 13th
Sep 13th
humours
As Arikha’s narrative comes closer to modern times, she succumbs gradually to the same kinds of...
Sep 13th
the future of atheism
Sep 13th
Dylan in type
Sep 13th
page from a Gospel in Armenian script, produced in Poland,...
Sep 12th
via Bibliodyssey
Sep 12th
the end of book reviews?
The NYRB, alas, was a singular intervention in American letters, and its appearance did little to...
Sep 12th
writing is scary
I’m not really even all that confident or concerned about the differences between nonfiction and...
Sep 11th
Sep 11th
Alex, R. I. P.
He knew his colors and shapes, he learned more than 100 English words, and with his own brand of...
Sep 11th
Hindoo Stuart
Moor was not the first British enthusiast to collect Hindu statuary. That honour goes to Charles...
Sep 10th
how to write badly
So this is the crux of the matter: Email is a medium of bad writing. Poor word choice is the norm—as...
Sep 9th
Jeff's Bible
I made sure to make my Bible at least half about Jesus, because he’s the main guy. I’ve...
Sep 9th
mem, mem, mem
Clearly we are dealing with shadowland at its bleakest, and should not expect too much. It is not...
Sep 8th
Spengler on Mark Lilla
For the few of us who asked not how to avoid religious war, but rather how best to fight it,...
Sep 8th
[here]
Sep 8th
“The advantage that well-read, reflective, leisured people...”
— Richard Rorty
— Richard Rorty
Sep 8th
Schmemann on life and death
Secularism is a religion because it has a faith, it has its own eschatology and its own ethics. And...
Sep 7th
tomemos on John Leonard on Jonathan...
The key to this dispute, I think—or more accurately, the key to Leonard’s misreading of Lethem’s...
Sep 7th
Watch
Andy McKee
Sep 6th
a fun new game!
Sep 6th
Philip Rieff's sacred
In all his books—indeed, on virtually every page—Rieff propounded a single thesis: the urgent...
Sep 6th
Sep 5th
via Monoscope
Sep 5th
efficiency
In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in...
Sep 4th
Michael Jackson, The Beer Hunter: R.I.P.
In 1976 he published a guide to the English pub, and the next year the first edition of his guide to...
Sep 3rd
what people learn in art classes
To determine what happens inside arts classes, we spent an academic year studying five visual-arts...
Sep 3rd
monks vs. ninjas
BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s Shaolin Temple, the cradle of Chinese kung fu, is demanding an...
Sep 2nd
Dylan, Chronicles Volume 1
"What was your home life like?"I told him I'd been kicked out.
"What did your father do?"
"'lectrician."
"And your mother, what about her?"
"Housewife."
"What kind of music do you play?"
"Folk music."
"What kind of music is folk music?"
I told him it was handed down songs.
Sep 2nd
The Youngest Brother's Tale
Sep 1st