Assistant Village Idiot

I saw the misunderstanding again, so I thought I would put this out.  If you read CS Lewis's introduction to The Great Divorce, he expl...

Apparently the worst year to be alive .  It sure sounds it.  Notice at the end of the article that over a century later there is evidence of...

We make changes in life, weighing one thing and another, and sometimes come to a final decision, where foreverafter, we will not go down som...

I went to see Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old , built from actual footage and recordings from The Great War. Jacksons's atte...

I was listening to a podcast that included female pastors talking about Methodism, both noting with approval that John Wesley encouraged wom...

Andrew Sullivan has a remarkably good essay about American religion at the Intelligencer. Sullivan does not always get it right by any mea...

    I would rather listen to them than watch them, but they didn't overcomplicate and over-sexy this one.  Just wonderful arrangement a...

I go into most games expecting that my team is going to lose.  Certainly most big games. I suspect it is a hedge against disappointment. Tho...

Our Christmas card list is odd, mostly people that we now live far from and knew long ago, plus relatives.  A few friends. We have les...

Ann Althouse links to a story about the funeral of a young man who committed suicide . There is certainly a lot that it odd about the story....

Biden is leading and Sanders is second in the polls .  BT from Kentucky calls it "the Statler and Waldorf primary."

Because I have answered many questions on the Intelligence and IQ categories on Quora, I attempt many of the questions about being smart, im...

It pays to remember that if people had a reasonable argument they would use it. Like an attorney hired to defend you, they have to say somet...

I am in two fantasy football leagues, and have been int two others, all with different scoring. One is a family or nearly-family league, ESP...

I mentioned before that I had loved the book Why We Sleep , by Matthew Walker. It has changed my habits.  Now the University of Washington f...

One of my Romanian sons sent this.  Please push through it a bit, even when it is not fascinating at the moment.  People should remember. ...

With all the focus on Ancestry and 23andme these days, I thought a post from 2005 might need to be brought forward. Let me correct a myth th...

Every time I go over to Quillette, I not only like the article linked to, but i find a few more things in the sidebar worth reading. These a...

I had never read the poem.  It comes up in Helen Andrew's essay " Shame Storm, " in this month's issue of First Things . S...

Reprinted from 2007. A Garrison Keillor rerun had a News From Lake Wobegon about Lenore, a libertarian from San Francisco. One already s...