EPISTLE TO A YOUNG FRIEND

                             — Robert Burns (1786) 

ELENA writes:

I want to endorse your comment about kids benefiting from interaction with people a little older than they are, who seem interesting and grown-up without being, you know, parents (ugh!). Read More »

APROPOS of the discussion here on homeschooling, I recommend this essay by William C. Michael, director of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy for homeschoolers. He writes:

Working in education and being a father of 5 young boys, I face the same questions any time someone learns that I live on a farm and teach my own children at home:

“Do your kids play video games?”

“Do your kids watch TV?”

“Do you kids play sports?”

My answer: “No, they don’t.” Read More »

Study of a Lemon Tree, Lord Frederick Leighton (1859)

Read More »

INEZ writes:

I just wanted to add my experiences, as a private SAT prep teacher, to the discussion about the SAT scores. The SAT is not a valuable test; by this I mean the score a student receives on it does not correlate strongly with any substantial measurement of success or intelligence. Read More »

GREG JINKERSON writes:

My wife and I have a baby boy so far, with hopes of having several more kids. She is a full-time mom. I am absolutely bound and determined to keep our children out of state schools, and my wife is to a great extent in agreement with me. However, she is having doubts and anxieties about her ability to educate our kids herself. I have told her my opinion: that simply by virtue of being protected from statist brainwashing and kept in our family orbit, our children will wind up perfectly civilized, especially in comparison with what government schools are turning out. Read More »

YOU MAY have heard that American college students are doing worse on the SATs, but a look at the official breakdown of scores according to race reveals that whites, who represent the majority of test-takers, are doing better in math than they were in the early 70’s, when scores overall were at their highest, and are doing only marginally worse in reading scores. Read More »

JOHN MICHAEL COOPER is the wedding photographer who coined the term “trash the dress” and set off a “new creative, artistic, movement in the world of wedding photography” with his portraits of a bride in a flaming wedding gown. Instead of “trash the dress,” I suggest “trash the photographer” – and every other purveyor of the modern, highly-stylized, narcissistic, mind-blowingly expensive wedding, which turns couples into mock celebrities or even porn stars for a day. Wedding photographers, with some notable exceptions, are the used car salesmen of modern romance.

Here is Cooper responding to remarks that his work is perverse and sickening. This vulgar philistine is actually considered a bright light in the world of commercial photography: Read More »

IN THIS recent post, I discussed a piece in the Wall Street Journal advocating “child-focused divorce,” which is sort of like “homeowner-focused burglary.” I said that any couple capable of following Elizabeth Bernstein’s advice should be capable of staying married. In this excellent letter to the editor, a reader of the WSJ makes the same point:

In “the Child-Focused Divorce” (Personal Journal, Sept. 6) you imagine a world where divorced parents cooperate with an abundance of civility, mutual respect and charity, and you offer advice from experts who liken raising children of divorce to a kind of “business venture.” You encourage attention to details, planning, coordination and even a kind of professional respect between the parents.

As a child of divorce, I found this almost laughable. Read More »

RESPONDING to recent posts here about ugly architecture, Daniel H., at his blog Out of Sleep, advises individuals to cultivate resistance in small ways.

DAN, in a note to Lawrence Auster, writes:

To see how far suicidal liberalism has crept into the clerical establishment of the Catholic Church one only need to review the recent statements of a German bishop praising the construction of mosques in Germany:

The Hamburg auxiliary bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke has called for the construction of new mosques in Germany. At the same time he called on Christians symbolically to support the opening of such buildings. “I think that it is conceivable that Christians will give Muslims presents at the opening of a new mosque — as a sign of sympathy, good neighbourliness and religious solidarity,” said the spokesperson for the German Bishop’s conference for interfaith dialogue as reported in Hamburg’s daily paper, Die Welt. Read More »

BRIAN writes:

From your posts on “trash-the-dress,” you obviously don’t understand what it’s all about.

Firstly, there are two totally different types of trash-the-dress photoshoots.

The most common one has the intention of taking beautiful photos of the bride (and sometimes the groom as well) away from the overly sterile traditional settings. Some of these photographs are truly beautiful and far from being anti-traditional actually hark back to very old styles of photography. These may or may not include stunning water scenes. In many cases the beauty of the bride is emphasized by the use of contrasting backgrounds, such as an industrial type background. In nearly all these cases, the dress is not truly “trashed” and can be dry cleaned. Read More »

IS it possible to draw a clear line between modern anti-Semitism and reasonable criticism of Jewish leftism? In this excellent 2005 piece, Lawrence Auster wrote:

It is essential to distinguish between anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and legitimate, rational criticisms of Jews. For example, to say that many Jews fear some fictional white evangelical anti-Semitism more than they fear Islamic anti-Semitism, and to say that this belief is both wrong in itself and harmful to society, as Stephen Steinlight has argued, and I expanded on the argument, is a legitimate criticism. It does not demonize Jews as Jews. Read More »

THE AUSTRALIAN government announced today that passports will be changed to offer three gender options: male, female and indeterminate.

Here’s my question.

Given that being of “indeterminate” sex is purely wishful thinking, why don’t passports add more options? What if you consider yourself an angel? Or a goddess? Read More »

A bride and groom on their special day

JEANETTE V., who is a professional photographer, writes:

Regarding the wedding dress, it is the “fashion” these days to do a “trash the dress” shoot after the wedding. I suppose a bride will ask me eventually to photograph her doing this to her dress. I don’t get it, I took great care to save my dress for my future daughter.

Another fad is the “cake smash,” where a child is photographed destroying his first birthday cake. Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The Chastity/Chaz Bono topic has a personal resonance with me. Decades ago, I was a grocery-store worker in Malibu, where I grew up. Occasionally my boss asked me to deliver groceries to celebrities who did not want to be bothered by fans and preferred not to come into the supermarket. One of them was Cher, who used to answer the door with her toddler-daughter in hand. The distance between that distinctly female toddler-daughter and the hulking weird pseudo-male of today is one measure of how utterly perverse the project called postmodernism really is. Read More »

JOHN E. writes:

Megyn Kelly seems to be a sign, one of many, of women who are out-of-place. She is doing what women excel at, and accomplish so beautifully in the proper context, which is to accept another unconditionally. The problem is that there are circumstances, many circumstances in our day, for which unconditional acceptance is among the last things that are needed, and Bono’s are such circumstances. Ms. Kelly is thrusting her womanly strength onto a situation in which it has no place, and in so doing, demonstrates how this strength becomes a weakness. Read More »