RAPHAEL’S oil painting The Deposition (1507) depicts an unusual scene in which Christ is being carried to the tomb. It is one of the Italian High Renaissance artist’s greatest achievements and a dramatic masterpiece. Above is one detail; I will post others before showing the painting, which was part of a larger altarpiece, in full.

The youth in the foreground above, who is one of two people carrying the body of Christ, is believed to be Grifoneto Baglioni, who was killed in a feud between the Baglioni and Oddi families in Perugia in 1500. Atalanta Baglioni, the murdered youth’s mother, commissioned the altarpiece for the family chapel. In this detail, Calvary is in the background, the crosses standing out against a blue sky and billowy clouds. Mary, the Mother of Christ, has fainted and is supported by the three other Marys.

The bright vividness of the blues, golds and reds in this painting, which hangs in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, is not captured in this Internet image. In reality, the picture is brimming with exuberant color and passion.

Giorgio Vasari, the biographer of Italian artists, said of Raphael’s Deposition: (more…)

A FEDERAL appeals court ordered the Department of Justice today to clarify its interpretation of federal judicial powers in light of President Obama’s remarkable statements on Monday calling the Supreme Court “an unelected group of people” and suggesting it doesn’t have the authority to overturn Obamacare.

The president stated on Monday, in response to questions about the case, that it would be an “unprecedented, extraordinary” move for the court to overturn a law passed by Congress. He added: (more…)

THE Associated Press reports:

An 11-year-old Dutch boy has gone where many of the best economic minds in Europe have feared to tread and proposed a radical solution to the European single currency’s problems – using a pizza as his inspiration.

Jurre Hermans received a special mention from judges for the prestigious Wolfsohn Economics Prize, which comes with a $401,000 award. He came up with a scheme for an orderly return of the Greece economy to its old currency, the drachma.  The boy suggested Greeks hand in all euros to banks and receive drachme in return. The banks would use this enormous euro “pizza” to give out slices – extra cheese, please – to Greece’s creditors.

I would also like to be considered for that prize. I say, why not use miniature pizzas – coated with shellac to keep the sauce from getting on people’s hands – for currency?

(more…)

MICHELLE OBAMA may have taken inspiration for the outfit she wore to the Kid’s Choice Awards from the Klingons of Star Trek fame.

(more…)

THE DISCUSSION continues in the entry “Law and Disorder: The End of Male Mentoring at Law Firms,” an extremely important topic that is relevant to many other professional fields.

The dream of an egalitarian work force is a lie. Male and female are radically different. The attempt at equality boils down to favoritism for women. Indeed deference to women is rooted in human biology so it is no surprise. Equality means the gradual emasculation of professional fields, with men deprived of the favoritism that is their due. This is a trend that is opposed to the better interests of both men and women. (more…)

AT Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat writes about Michelle Obama’s latest fashion transgression, yet another hideously ugly get-up that represents a finger in the air to the institution of First Lady. She’s more the First Bratty Teenager who needs a mother to tell her to go home and get changed.

Michelle is like so many adults today. They think the duty of a parent is to act juvenile. She reminds me of Christine Lagarde, the chief of the International Monetary Fund, who, when presented with a job opportunity in Chicago that entailed leaving her sons in Europe, asked her eleven-year-old son for permission to go. Of course, her son said, “Go for it, Mom!” But then most children out of love for their parents will become authority figures, if asked. They then go on to become juvenile adults, having never had childhoods of their own.

Below is Michelle further demonstrating the dignity of her office while presenting an award to Taylor Swift, who displays the stiffness characteristic of a woman trying to keep her dress from slipping. (more…)

REGINA HESS writes:

I am grateful to Alan for the beautiful piece about “The Lady in White.” It gave me the boldness I needed to stand my ground on the way my daughters dressed as we went to a baby shower on Saturday afternoon. (more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

Thomas Fleming has a very good article on the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and his prophetic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which was later adapted into the film Blade Runner). (more…)

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The death of Adrienne Rich, in calling disproportionate attention to itself, has overshadowed the nearly simultaneous passing of another important figure in the evolution of modern feminism. That few people have heard or read the name Zera Selbstwerther-Eigenwerth is not surprising considering that Ms. Eigenwerth’s bold, transgressive style of thinking roused the hackles of her male colleagues in the elite world of meta-mathematical theory, causing her to be marginalized on the fringes of academic respectability. Ms. Eigenwerth, who suffered the indignity of never being promoted beyond full professor, was repeatedly fired from various mathematics departments during her early career until she switched subjects and became an expert in Women’s Studies, where she pioneered such areas of femino-numeric theory as Clitoriparabolistics, Gynosymptotics, Tribadometrics, and Sapphoconics. (more…)

JOHN PURDY writes:

According to the Times’ obituary of Adrienne Rich, “poetry’s formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against.”

Huh, what century was Adrienne Rich living in? It’s probably been a hundred years since there was anything like ‘formalist rigor’ in poetry. Anyway, just to prove the Right (i.e. non-marginalised men) can produce bad modernist poetry too…  (more…)

JIM writes:

I recently quit my job after a 10-year career at large and mid-size law firms in a big city. I do not believe in whining, sour grapes, or blaming women for the world’s problems. I have never told anyone what I am about to write, which is in response to the following comment you made on January 31, 2010:

“Like all other occupations which women have moved into, a large stratum of men choose to quit or not join rather than put up with the PC nonsense of aggressive feminism.”

Sometimes this decision is unconscious. But there is an iron law regarding the entry of women into formerly all-male vocations. These jobs instantly become less desirable to men. Therefore, to allow women to become police, firefighters or soldiers is to jeopardize our safety.

At both law firms where I worked, the male partners of the baby boom generation would select a female as a favorite associate. Every male partner had his own younger female sidekick that would have the opportunity to tag along with him and work on important cases. These women excelled at the tasks expected of a junior associate; they had meticulous attention to detail and strong organization. The partners got not only excellent support but also the satisfying feeling of having a young, attractive woman look at them with reverent, adoring eyes. As far as I know, these relationships were not sexual, but they were personal. The younger female associates would know the details of “their man’s” personal life–his relationship with his children, his hobbies, where he went on vacation, what he did there. It is impossible for most men to forge this kind of a personal bond with a senior man in the workplace. (more…)

HENRY E. McCULLOCH writes:

Remember the feminista kerfuffle early in the decade just past about forcing the Augusta National golf club to go co-ed because one Martha Burk, CEO of something-or-other, thought membership somehow was her due? Augusta stood its ground, and Martha and her legion of perpetually aggrieved Amazons eventually went away. Well, they’re baaack, this time because IBM has appointed a lady CEO, Virginia Rometty, who must be A Very Serious Person, because she is “a 31-year veteran of IBM who has been ranked among the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” by Fortune magazine the last seven years. Rometty was No. 7 last year.” (more…)

ALAN writes:

One day three years ago, I happened by chance to see an elderly woman walking slowly near an apartment building. She was dressed all in white and wearing an attractive white hat. Her distinctive dress caught my eye, and I thought to myself how extraordinary – and pleasant – it was to see such a lady in a culture where so many women agree to dress like men or adolescents.

About a year after that, I caught sight of the same woman, walking slowly and using a cane. She wore a white blouse, black-and-gray dress, black dress shoes, and a hat the color of straw. Everything about her suggested gracefulness and good taste. (more…)

DIANA writes:

Witness this cringeworthy piece of verbal incontinence from Sarah Palin (my comments in brackets):

I grew up hunting, fishing, playing sports, plowing snow, and chopping wood just like the guys. [Sarah, you may have done all that, but you didn’t chop as much wood or plow as much snow as a guy.] My parents raised my sisters and me to never consider gender an unequal element in anything…

(more…)

LESBIANS have had special status on the obituary pages of The New York Times for some time now, but today’s front page eulogy for lesbian leftist poet Adrienne Rich is a tour de force of feminist beatification. One would think Joan of Arc had just passed away.

We learn all about Rich’s struggles in an oppressive society. She once knew the “pulverizing onus of traditional married life,” the “strain of domestic duties first hand” and “the soul-numbing dailiness of women’s lives.” Her husband knew the pulverizing onus of married life too. He committed suicide. She mysteriously preferred not to talk about her husband’s death.

Rich’s mother, we are told, forsook her career because she was “cleaving to the social norms of the day.” I guess it hadn’t even occurred to her to become a lesbian poet. Fortunately, Rich was able to escape her own domestic hell and become a leftist working for the “creation of a society without domination” — except of course domination by lesbian leftists and The New York Times. Though she sold almost a million copies of her books, Rich, a graduate of Radcliffe, was “triply marginalized,” as a lesbian, a Jew and …. what was it, oh yeah… a woman. If only she’d been black. Then she would have been quadruply marginalized and might have sold millions. (If only I could be doubly marginalized, I might be rich and oppressed too. Alas, I am just singly marginalized, and not very good at it.)

The obituary is excerpted below. (more…)

JESSE POWELL writes:

It appears very easy to get young men fired up by simply asking the question, regarding young college women who are promiscuous, “What do you guys think about all those sluts?” The women then respond, “Where do you get off calling me a slut!” You know, this is just a thought, but maybe the “Slut Walks” are an effort to diffuse growing condemnation of “sluts” among men. Maybe men are growing in their hostility towards promiscuous women and women are seeking to combat this with “slut pride,” so to speak. Maybe the “Slut Walks” are not a sign of growing cultural liberalism but are instead a reaction against growing cultural conservatism being expressed as hostility from men towards women. (more…)

ANDREW L. writes:

As a recent graduate of an Ivy League college, I find Mary Eberstadt’s recent Wall Street Journal piece about the sexual revolution and its negative effects familiar.  I can attest to a sense of shell-shock as a freshman. My first few weeks were quite an education, as freshman girls, nervous, anxious, and eager to make friends, were exposed for the first time to co-ed living, alcohol, and freedom from parental supervision. (more…)

  The Daily Mail reports that an extensive Canadian study has found that middle class children in day care suffer more developmental delays, aggressive behavior and health problems than those at home. Affluent families are little affected by day care because they don't use it. And children from poor families benefit somewhat. Boys suffer more adverse effects than girls. In addition, parents become gradually more detached from children who have been in day care. For years, feminists insisted that government had a duty to provide families with day care and never expressed the slightest concern for the effects on children. The 10,000 plus children in the study were part of a government sponsored program in Quebec. Will those who long advocated day care now admit in the aftermath of this and other studies that they were wrong and that they failed children? Don't hold your breath.