postcards from a nut

This old story was in my backlog of tabs to share. https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/20/first-complete-t-rex-skeleton-found-locked-in-battle-with-triceratops-13625874/ It’s about a fossil … two fossils, really … which were (as of November 2020) supposed to go on display early last year. I looked up the exhibit and apparently it’s not happening until 2023. That’s academic timing for…

Recipe: Fall Cider Punch (I'm very proud of this!)

Here’s the short version: you live in Texas, where it’s hot until mid-November, but you still want a spiced apple cider cocktail because it’s FALL dangit. So you come up with a kind of punch that uses a boozy spiced-cider base and then chilled cider and sparkling wine to fill up the glass. I made this for a party, it was a hit, and I don’t want to forget what I did. The cocktail recipe Behold,…

I didn’t expect an article about Justin Bieber to make me cry, but here we are. It’s amazing to see when God moves in someone’s life: The Redemption of Justin Bieber

Last week I complained about manipulative articles encouraging marriage. I found this essay about parenthood much more compelling, so I share it with you: I Spent Every Waking Moment with My Kids This Year. It Wasn’t Enough.

A bit of advice on writing pro-marriage articles

There’s a piece to be written about how pro-marriage articles use the same over-selling tactics used in pandemic public health initiatives, with the same predictable pushback. People want the truth, and truth is often complicated in the real world. It’s my contention that when you oversimplify the narrative because you fear what will happen if people know the whole truth, you are doing greater…

A new blog post: @Phil_Christman Appreciation Day

I hereby declare today to be Phil Christman Appreciation Day. I am doing this mostly because I want to share this paragraph from his recent piece for The Hedgehog Review, “The Strange Underneath of Middlebrow“: In the classroom, I take things I love and adapt them. I abridge them. I simplify. I commit the heresy of paraphrase. I make comparisons and explanatory analogies at which specialists…

A note of thanks

Thank you to all the small Youtube channels that upload very detailed descriptions of how to do repairs on specific car models. Thank you especially to the man who made a video about how to jump start your 2nd generation Prius, which I had to do on a Friday afternoon a couple months ago. And thank you to the other man who made a video about how to replace the license plate bulb, because there’s…

Tales of academic horror: Papyrus Edition

If you haven’t followed the Obbink papyrus scandal, you’ll want to read this article from the Atlantic that details just about everything you would want to know. I became aware of it in 2018, when rumors about the “First Century Mark” fragment started to swirl, and I’ve checked in a couple times a year since to see what the update is. I just discovered that last summer, the Atlantic published a…

Ok, fine, just one hot take

Notwithstanding my strong dislike of hot takes, I do want to share an excerpt from my “outbox” (except it’s not from email, it’s from chats with my friend in Idaho) about the TX power outage situation: There’s one thing I think really needs to happen: existing regulations about winterizing need to be enforced with stiff penalties. Apparently in 2011 there was a big outage on Super Bowl weekend,…

Leon Kass on the book of Exodus

I know we’re all weary of Zoom events and participating “virtually” (which usually conforms more to the OED II.4.a entry, “supposed, imagined,” than to anything approaching reality). But I signed up for an event a couple weeks ago that was actually really worth it, and I’ve been meaning to share it with you: Leon Kass being interviewed by Yuval Levin about his recent book on Exodus. It’s worth an…

I am intensely averse to providing hot takes; this is hard for me, a person whose chosen field is politics, because it feels so often like I’m missing any chance to be relevant if I don’t hop on board the train as it whizzes past the station. But I can’t bring myself to do it. Which is why I was glad to see this piece, whose author backs me up: [E]ven when I squint and see how [truth and…

I’ve been reading Unbinding Prometheus by Donald Cowan in preparation for the seminars being hosted by one of my employers on campus. It’s amazing how prescient Cowan was on some things, and how far off he was on others. I can’t remember where I read this, but somebody once observed that the pace of technological change has slowed d r a m a t i c a l l y in the last 50 years, compared to the two…

After the lovely snow day on Sunday, everything here went kinda to shit. (Sorry not sorry for swearing in the first sentence). Our power went out around 2:30am, which is why the cold woke me up early. It was, uh, not fun waking up early in the cold with no chance for a hot drink or meal. The power came on at 10:30am, at which point I frantically microwaved some food and made a pot of tea (which…

The snowstorm of the century came through Texas yesterday! At first I was embarrassed that so little snow (not even a sheet, just a film) had shut everything down. But as the afternoon wore on it turned into a proper snow. It was too cold to take my roommate’s dog Yzma out for a walk, but I traipsed around for about half an hour and got home just as the wind was picking up. This bitter snowy…

What do *you* do with print journals?

I’m really asking. I don’t know what to do with them when I’m done reading. Some, like the annual Dante Studies are obviously worth keeping the way one would keep books. But I’m flummoxed, baffled, bewildered, by how to manage my stacks of Plough Quarterly and The Hedgehog Review (pretty soon I’ll be adding the Lamp to the mix, and I used to get First Things and Commonweal — that last because it…

Europe Highlights: Rome part 1

hahahah this has been sitting in my drafts for, like, a year. I’m just going to post it now without edition. Good heavens. Rome (Part 1) I may not attempt to report in its fulness our young woman’s response to the deep appeal of Rome….She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. The Portrait of a Lady, ch. 27 Tuesday was a…

2. The Sign of Tanit-Do you know about the Sign of Tanit?-No.-It’s a women’s restroom icon, but old. Also it doesn’t have a face, but then too somehow it is a face, for someone else. Not Tanit. […] -I find it very disturbing. Tanit is there, where there is child sacrifice. -Have you ever been to the Tophet? -No never. -It’s in a very posh neighborhood, which is weird because of all the dead…