I’ve recently decided that I’m gonna play it a little looser around here, which means I can bring back an old feature: Other People’s Words. The document doesn’t list an author, but it’s pretty deeply related to everything I’ve been trying to say when I’ve used the Life category in the last year. Built from […]

This last Monday, this country celebrated—to the extent that it celebrates any federal holiday—Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. In honor of the occasion, the New York Times ran an interesting essay by Sarah Vowell that I couldn’t help but agree with. Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. […]

mrpattersonsir Everywhere you look, especially as a teenager, the world is full of others. Of people “not like me.” And though teenagers feel this most intensely, few do not feel it regularly. Just look at the latent antipathy that exists in this country toward Iranians. Or Arabs. Or Mexicans. Or even the French. Surely these […]

By now you’ve probably heard something about a teddy bear in the news. But it seems to me that the way people understood the story had a lot to do with where they heard about it. So in the tradition of this piece, I’ve created two very different interpretations pared down from different news sources. […]

While trolling the internet, I came upon a rather pedestrian claim that in the coming election the liberals will try to “get God” as a way to convince Americans that there are issues more important than ending abortion and stopping gay marriage. The claim is profoundly absurd, not least of all because by now most […]