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Rod Dreher

People like me, who chafe at the “no limits” ideology that characterizes contemporary America, rarely if ever think about what life would be like if we ceased to have economic growth. Well, Nate Hagens over at the Oil Drum has been thinking about it, and points out that nobody is considering the possibility that currently…

OCTOPUS STEWED IN WINE AND TOMATOES Ingredients: •1 lb octopus, either small or large •4 T. olive oil •4 cloves finely chopped garlic •1 cup crushed tomatoes or peeled, chopped fresh tomatoes •1 cup white wine •2 T. honey or sugar •2 T. chopped fresh dill •4 T. chopped fresh parsley •1 t. chile flakes…

I’ve been cooking. I’m sorry, Dutch people, I could have made stamppot, or found some herring, or boiled some potatoes, or made pannekoeken … but somehow, none of that says voetbal to my South Louisiana palate. So, I say to Oranje Nation, in my best LSU Tigers yell voice: “Hot boudin, cold coosh-coosh, come on,…

Paul the Octopus, who lives in a German aquarium, has correctly predicted the winners of Germany’s last seven World Cup matches, including yesterday’s third-place victory over Uruguay. He has selected Spain to beat the Netherlands today in the World Cup final. While I am made nervous by this — apparently the chances that the creature…

Ross Douthat on why it’s harder to write a certain kind of fiction in our freewheeling culture. Excerpt: But such “realistic social-familial novels” labor under precisely the difficulty that Jacobs describes — the absence of the kind of social limitations on private conduct that generate most of the dramatic tension in “Middlemarch,” or “Jude the…

Frank Beckwith takes a troubling case from the University of Illinois and draws a sharp, correct conclusion: The aggrieved student in the Howell case is the product of a generation of institutional coddling that rewards intellectual immaturity if it can feign personal offense. Read the professor’s own account of his dismissal. I hope we hear…

I invite you to go into the comboxes in the latest PA wine thread, in which I’m arguing with commenter Andrew about the crazy Pennsylvania wine laws. The whole thread is worth reading, I think, for full context. Here’s something from one of my recent posts explaining why I get better value out of shopping…

How many stories have you read in the past few years about people moving back into downtowns, leaving suburbs and exurbs to wither on the vine? Joel Kotkin says it ain’t true. Excerpt: Housing prices in and around the nation’s urban cores is clear evidence that the back-to-the-city movement is wishful thinking. Despite cheerleading from…

Just look at this thing. It’s a vending machine for wine, now being tried out in Philadelphia. As regular readers and/or PA residents know, this state has a Soviet-style liquor-purchasing system in which you have to buy all wine from state stores, whose selection is limited, and — in my experience — whose employees know…

Via Ross Douthat, here’s poet Christian Wiman on why, in approaching truth, Art and Religion can take us places that science, by its very nature, cannot: In the Gospels Jesus is always talking to the crowds in parables, which he later ‘explains’ to his disciples. The dynamic is odd in a couple of ways: either…
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