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Rod Dreher

From New York magazine’s profile of David Brooks: Brooks’s favorite social-science study is known as the Marshmallow Experiment. A child is left in a room with a marshmallow for fifteen minutes. If he restrains himself from eating the marshmallow, he gets a second one. If not, he doesn’t. The test turns out to be a…

Reihan Salam’s piece on the future of American family structure put me in mind of an episode of the Diane Rehm show I listened to yesterday. Diane’s guest was historian James Patterson, discussing his book “Freedom Is Not Enough,” a reappraisal of the controversial Moynihan Report 45 years after its release. It must have been…

I live in a fairly prosperous part of the Philadelphia area. It’s not obvious at all here who is suffering from unemployment. In fact, I wouldn’t even know the man I’ll call Dave is part of the long-term unemployed if I hadn’t met him at a neighborhood bar, where I’d gone to watch a Saints…

First Things’ David Mills comments on the failed Radical Homemaker essay that we talked about here the other day. Excerpt: Living something like the life Hayes describes has its attractions, in theory, at least for someone brought up as I was, but in practice we have other, more pressing and enjoyable, things to do. We…

With his column saying that we may be inside a pessimism bubble destined to burst, Ross Douthat was trying to cheer me and my gloomer tribe up. Douthat FAIL! He introduced me to this recent NYT profile on stock forecaster Robert Prechter, who makes Nouriel Roubini sound like Jiminy Cricket. Excerpt: “I’m saying: ‘Winter is…

Before you say anything, this is not one of those rants in which the writer accuses liberals of poisoning the minds of the young with dirty movies and stuff. This is from the German magazine Der Spiegel, and it’s a story about how the Left — as in, the activist Sixties radical left in Germany…

We went last night down to Penn’s Landing, on the Delaware River waterfront, to attend the Ice Cream Festival, and to watch the fireworks. The fireworks display was fantastic, one of the best I’ve ever seen. But it’s the last one I’m going to with the kids, or ever. I don’t enjoy crowds as a…

Via Andrew, here’s a pretty interesting commentary by Jonah Lehrer in praise of the Wii as a videogame experience that fully engages the emotion because it engages the body in ways other videogame systems do not. Excerpt: To understand how the Wii turns stupid arcade games into a passionate experience, we have to revisit an…

Twisted Japanese art student lady invents device to teach men what it’s like to endure painful menstruation. As one of the Gizmodo comboxers wisenheimered, “So when will they invent a machine that simulates the unmitigated hell a man goes through when he’s living with a PMS-ing woman?” Heh. I, uh, only quote the Gizmodo commenter…

As readers of my book “Crunchy Cons” know, I’m a big fan of small houses. Architectural historian Jayne Merkel thinks we Age of Austerity folks have a lot to re-learn about the virtues of small houses. Excerpt: In an era of economic austerity and a seemingly permanent energy crisis, can “less is more” become popular…
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