The latest chapter in the hilarious misadventures of Concerned Woman for America Matt Barber involves blowing a fuse over an Illinois high school’s addition of the Tony- and Pulitzer-award winning play Angels in America to their curriculum.  Though Barber avers that it “takes a lot” to shock him, he writes (emphasis mine): The book is […]

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The Claremont Institute is apparently posting some “classic” essays from its archives, beginning with Harry Jaffa’s “Macbeth and the Moral Universe.”  As a prelude to his argument about the Scottish Play, Jaffa offers up a modern point of contrast: Macbeth is a moral play par excellence. In this, it stands in stark contrast to two […]

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Anyone out there happen to know the etymology of the expression “to be in the tank for”? As in “Fox is totally in the tank for Bush,” or “the friendly coverage suggests a lot of reporters are in the tank for Obama”? It’s apparently a sufficiently wonky (or recently minted?) expression that the usual online […]

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Ok, I’m no Romney fan, but I want every blogger who’s making a fuss about how Mitt only figuratively “saw” his father march with Martin Luther King to try the following exercise. Google your own archives for “I saw” or “we saw” and scan for instances where, especially if you’re talking about something that happened […]

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From The New York Times‘ coverage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act: The Democrats also carved out a blanket exemption for religious groups, drawing the ire of civil liberties advocates who argued that church-run hospitals, for instance, should not be permitted to discriminate against gay employees. The civil liberties groups wanted a narrow exemption for religious […]

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If you are not British or being deliberately pseudo-formal (and even this is kind of twee), it just looks silly when you write “whilst” instead of “while.”

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“You know my methods in such cases, Watson. I put myself in the man’s place and, having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances. In this case the matter was simplified by Brunton’s intelligence being quite first-rate, so that it was unnecessary to make […]

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You’ve probably seen this happen—or, if you’re less lucky, been the person it happened to. A group of people are standing around discussing some topic where either expertise or native intelligence make them all pretty conversant on the subject. Suddenly, one person pipes up with what he clearly thinks is a profound insight, an important […]

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Ross argues that Hitch is reading the Harry Potter books through a godless glass, darkly: It’s true that the Potter novels aren’t an explicitly Christian fantasy in the same sense as the Narnia books (although Christian themes and motifs abound in Rowling’s universe); what they assuredly are, though, is a series in which the central […]

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John Derbyshire asks: I want to know why “owning the insult” doesn’t seem to work any more. It used to be a standard ploy—not just “liberal,” but “Whig” (originally “cut-throat cattle rustler from the wild Scottish borders”) and “Tory” (orig. “illiterate Papist peasant from the remotest bogs of Ireland”). Yet nobody could now start a […]

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