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Rod Dreher

News from the world of sexualizing children: PRIMARK have today stopped selling padded bikinis for seven-year-olds in a victory for The Sun. The discount fashion chain began clearing the shelves of the £4 bikini sets after shocked parents slammed the ‘sexy’ design. The bargain clothes retailer has promised to donate all profits from the sale…

I had occasion late last week to visit an area public school. There are 10 or so celebratory banners lining the hall, proclaiming, “We made adequate yearly progress in 2009!” Adequacy! It’s so … whelming. To be charitable, perhaps this school had to overcome lots of daunting obstacles on the road to adequacy, but it…

We had several threads about obesity here a few weeks back, and I urge anyone who felt strongly about them to, by all means, read the Atlantic essay by Marc Ambinder, who discussed obesity in America and his own decision to submit to bariatric surgery to conquer his weight problem. The article is long and…

Stanley Fish chews at length over Jurgen Habermas’s new position on religion. Habermas, an ardent Enlightenment secularist, now recognizes that secularity is missing something essential to being human. That, he now believes, is the religious sense. Habermas now believes that we need religion, and it should be admitted into polite society as long as it…

A great Edge exchange between Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky about how the Internet and digital technology works to affect power relations within polities. Morozov says he thinks techno-utopians in the press are taking a too-narrow view of how the Internet conditions and subverts power relationships in society: One of the reasons I’ve been so…

Time for a Southern culture break. Caroline Langston writes an affectionate appreciation of Southern Baptists she grew up with in Mississippi, and takes note of the ambiguous phrase “Big Baptists,” with which many Southerners will be familiar. Excerpt: So what was a Big Baptist? Depending on my mother’s mood, the phrase could be a compliment…

From an e-mail someone who attended Ruthie’s benefit concert sent to me this morning: I cried on my way home after having tears when I pulled into the benefit and saw all of the cars filling the parking lot. The next morning, I was trying to tell my husband about everything, and I cried then…

John Tierney reports on doctors who are revisiting the therapeutic effects of psilocybin, psychedelic compound. Excerpt: The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage. “This feeling that we’re…

Cheered by the magnificent Pulitzer Prize success of my friends and former Dallas Morning News colleagues, I decided to do something I hadn’t done in a while: go to print journalism analysis sites to see if things might be looking up for the industry. Big mistake. The advertising collapse hasn’t found bottom yet. (See here…

If you read my post titled “The impermanence of things,” about visiting my elderly aunts’ cabin as a ruin, please go take a second look at it. My cousin Kevin e-mailed an image of the old cabin when my (our) aunts were still living in it, as well as a snapshot of Aunt Lois doing…
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