THIS IS a heartbreaking picture of the sister of Yoselyn Ortega, the nanny who murdered two children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last week.  Mylades Ortega said she was horrified by what her sister had done and could not comprehend it. Her 50-year-old sister appeared to enjoy and love the Krim children. According to reports of neighbors of the Krim family who saw the nanny with the children, she was kind and sociable. It is unlikely she would have been kept in the position of nanny for two years by a doting mother if she had not been. Marina Krim apparently saw no warning signs, or did not take them seriously, but such things happen even in close families. Not long ago, an otherwise normal family near where I live was killed, the mother, father and son all stabbed with a samurai sword by another son, whom they knew was mentally ill but believed they could help on their own. Call it a psychotic breakdown or demonic possession, the Krim murders similarly defy all human motivations.

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THERE is a brief essay at Tradition in Action by the late Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira on the Santa Maria Formosa Square in Venice in the 18th century. From the piece:

This small world assembled around a square is ceremonious and distinguished, yet it is also marked by a note of intimacy. It reveals the spirit of a society where men, far from being dissolved in the anonymous multitudes, tend to create organic and distinct groups that escape the isolation, anonymity and desolation of the individual facing the masses.

In this square, so picturesque and human, so distinguished and so typically sacral with the radiating presence of the small church, the different classes live together harmoniously. How it differs from some of the immense modern squares, where on the mare magnum [enormity] of asphalt and lost in an agitated mob walking madly in every direction, men can only see the cyclopean skyscrapers that dishearten them.

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NICHOLAS writes:

Your post about a young woman in college who wants more than anything a traditional marriage was an immense consolation to me. I am a young man in college in the perfectly complementary position. (Though by God’s grace with more hope, I think.) To the wise, the path that God has set for us should always appear terrifyingly impossible, but for the confidence we have in his providence.

To Sophia, may God bless you. And to God, may I meet someone like her someday!

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Giovanna Garzoni

PENNY writes:

I was paging through my copy of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen last evening and ran across a couple of passages that really jumped out at me, probably because of some of the things you’ve been writing about.

The first concerns Fanny and her cousin Edmund.

“Kept back as she was by everybody else, his single support could not bring her forward; but his attentions were otherwise of the highest importance in assisting the improvement of her mind, and extending its pleasures. He knew her to be clever, to have a quick apprehension as well as good sense, and a fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself. Read More »

GUILAIN writes from France:

This is in response to your recent entry on French women.

I would not say that the French are not classy anymore. Actually, many women look like very classy prostitutes.

In general, there are two kinds of women. Those who spend lots of time grooming and choosing clothes in their wardrobe, and those who don’t. Read More »

IN AMERICA, a vote is a shockingly trivial thing. And it’s the most important thing in the world.

In this ad for the Obama campaign, a young actress describes the ecstasy of voting for the “first time,” playing on the double meaning of “the first time.” Lena Dunham is hideously tattooed and simmering with righteousness. She suggests girls must be wary of doing it with just any man. He might not be a supporter of the Lily Ledbetter Act, a piece of legislation most 18-year-old girls probably know nothing about. The bill, which allows older women to sue for retroactive wages, stands for brutal oppression. Miss Dunham also brings up the contraceptive issue, and how important it is, (there’s something a feminism-addled girl can understand) linking democratic participation again to sexual fulfillment.

This ad is so telling. For the liberal, a vote is like sexual intercourse. It’s a form of transcendence. Through politics, heaven on earth can be realized. “Before I was a girl, now I was a woman,” Miss Dunham says about her initiation. She voted for the greatest lover a girl could have, Barack Obama.

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WHAT happens to a woman as lovely, talented and patrician as Helena Bonham Carter when she embraces modern Hollywood? She becomes a raging nihilist. See Kidist Paulos Asrat’s post on Bonham Carter’s latest role as Miss Havisham in a remake of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Forty horses couldn’t drag me to see this movie.

Remember how charming Bonham Carter was as Lucy Honeychurch in the film version of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View? She’s now more Medusa with snakes in her hair than Miss Honeychurch.

Bonham Carter with What's His Name, her partner in crime

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Six's Bridge, Rembrandt

LEGEND has it that Rembrandt completed this sketch of 1645 in the time it took a servant to run to a nearby village for a pot of mustard.

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JESSE POWELL writes:

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I write in response to the postings, here and here, on the life-damaging consequences of the cost of higher education and student loans.

Modern people generally, liberals, logical positivists, moral relativists, and the entire tribe of sociologists, vehemently deny that correlation is causation. Personally, correlations impress me – as do analogies, to which the same people listed above also deny significance.

When I began as a freshman at UCLA in the fall semester of 1972, the cost of a college-term was under one hundred dollars. My memory, which might be faulty even though it is quite good, is that the price (it was not called tuition, but a “registration fee”) of a ten-week quarter (three quarters in the academic year) was forty-eight dollars. Books were an extra cost. Life in the dorms or in an apartment near campus, was an additional cost. Commuting was an additional cost. But the cost was affordable. Of course, admission to the UC system was still more or less strictly by meritocratic measurement. Anyone in the top tenth percentile of his high-school graduating class was guaranteed admission to the University of California – as I recall, at the campus of his choice. Affirmative action existed in some primitive form, but it was not the totality of the game. Read More »

MANY excellent comments have been added to recent discussions. I hope you will go back and read the additions. Please see the entry on student debt, in which Proph from The Orthosphere responds to the story of a recent female graduate of a top university whose parents have advised her to default on her student loans. Proph is $60,000 in debt for his higher education, and makes occasional loans to his father. He writes:

I can certainly agree … with David’s indignation at the rank, monstrous irony with which a grown man would complain about the irresponsibility of young men, while himself selling his daughter into debt slavery so she could pay his Social Security bills. I’m 26 myself, $60,000 in debt, with a strict budget and a plan to get myself debt-free in six or seven years, and I’m still lending money to my father, who, with twice my income and half my debt, often finds himself surprised and bankrupted by modest, anticipated expenses. His is the “dumbest generation of narcissists in the history of the world” (to borrow a turn of phrase from The Last Psychiatrist), and they’ve made a mess of everything.

SOPHIA writes:

As a young woman with traditionalist values, I am finding things difficult. I am enrolled in college and find it more disagreeable and unfulfilling with each leftist professor and aimless course. I have found a select few schools that offer compelling curriculum, such as Thomas Moore College of Liberal Arts and St. John’s College, but their accumulative tuition and board costs surpass my available funds, and I am not willing to go into debt. Thus, I seem to be stuck getting this “education” and for what purpose I’m without a clue. I feel I am merely going with society’s flow and look to the future with vague, idealist dreams and simplistic trust in God. Read More »

INTERESTING comments have been added to the discussion about an Alaska woman who is too impoverished by student loans to join a cloistered convent. In that entry, David C. tells the story of a female friend who recently graduated from a top university with a degree in Latin American studies. Leaving aside the issue of what this degree has done to her intellectual development, David explains that she is already considering defaulting on her $75,000 in loans, with her parents’ approval.

David writes:

I’m 26 years old. My friend is a few years younger than me and graduated recently from a prestigious university with a degree in Latin American studies. Total cost: $75,000… almost totally financed by student loans, one of which has, I believe she’s told me, an 11 percent interest rate. She is currently unemployed and is certainly having difficulty finding work in her field. The most realistic opportunity she has found so far is work as an au pair for a family in Spain, which she may be able to do next year. Read More »

GENO AURIEMMA, the prominent women’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut, has an idea for getting more people to watch the women’s games. He wants the standard height of the rim to be lowered about seven inches. That way the ball will get in the basket more often (or at least I think that’s how it works.)

According to CBS News, Auriemma said:

What makes fans not want to watch women’s basketball is that some of the players can’t shoot and they miss layups, and that forces the game to slow down.

This would be very, very funny if it weren’t for all the money and high-priced careers riding on women’s college basketball at a time when men’s college sports teams are curtailed to comply with Title IX, the coercive scheme for equality in sports.

Auriemma is actually hoping that women’s basketball will become as popular as women’s volleyball even though the aesthetics, so to speak, of the two sports are vastly different. Women basketball players are warriors in shorts. Women’s volleyball players are pert girls in underwear. One is machismo and the other soft porn.

I don't get it. Why don't people want to watch women's basketball?

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ONE WOULD think that women chief executives were flooding American corporations, judging from the constant press about the needs, desires, whims, career advice and amazing, totally breathtaking and awesome accomplishments of female CEO’s, such as the darling of the business world, Marissa Mayer, above, who recently returned to work as CEO of Yahoo just two weeks after giving birth to her first child at the age of 37. One would even think, given the press, that women make better top executives than men. A recent issue of Fortune magazine actually made this claim and it has been repeated elsewhere, most notably by EU bureaucrats who want to mandate that 40 percent of all directors of European corporate boards be women. There is a pervasive myth that female-headed companies are more stable and better-performing, a conclusion that not only flies in the face of the documented history of free enterprise but cannot possibly be proven given the low numbers of women at the top. For despite decades of celebration of women in business and decades of pressure to discriminate in favor of women, they still occupy less than four percent of CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies. This year, the total is 18 out of 500. According to the research firm Catalyst, women occupy about 14 percent of executive officer positions in all companies and the figures in general for women in corporate leadership have not risen in six years. Six years! Six years of glowing encomia to women executives.

The truth is, it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the comparative performance of women executives except the obvious one: There aren’t many women at the top. All the profiles of glamorous CEO’s such as Ginni Rometty, of IBM; all the breathless stories about whether Marissa should have left her son so soon and all the aggressive affirmative action in favor of women haven’t made that much difference. Women are still interesting novelties in the chief executive suite, and everyone wants to know how they do it because everyone knows, though no one will say it, that women will aways be anomalies at the top. Barring some dramatic and overwhelming revolution in human nature, women are not as competitive, or as comfortable in positions of authority, as men. They do not wish to make the grueling climb to the top. Everyone knows this, except, of course, feminists, who claim that women are still discriminated against or lack “sponsorship” or “on ramps and off ramps.” Many millions in consulting fees have gone into various forms of flexibility and “on ramps and off ramps” for women in business but these efforts have not changed much at the top. What they have done is keep the tantalizing dream alive that women can have everything. What they have done is create positive discrimination against men and a stifling fear of offending feminist groupthink. What they also have done is create a culture in which fewer and fewer women can find men to support them so that they can do what they want to do most.

By the way, in case you were wondering, Mayers has named her son, Macallister. She asked for suggestions for a name on social media after he was born. One wonders how Macallister will feel years from now when he digs into the archives and finds that his mother bragged that she would only be taking a week or so off from work after he was born and that the above cover photo appeared when she was nine months pregnant.

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This is a bed rug completed by Mary Foote (1752-1837), in Colchester, Connecticut in 1778. According to The Magazine Antiques, it was made in preparation for her wedding:

This is one of four spectacular bed rugs made to commemorate the weddings on November 5, 1778, of three siblings of the Foote and Otis families, prosperous farmers and landowners in the Connecticut River valley. The women likely spent the prior year spinning, dyeing, and sewing the rugs, all of which contain a center of stylized flowers enclosed within a reverse-curved border. The outlines are sewn with a running stitch and the designs are filled in with a darning stitch, requiring careful planning.

This beautiful rug is now in the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Given that poor Mary was obviously very oppressed, I wonder why this rug conveys such a sense of happiness and delight in the floral world.

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DANIEL S. writes:

I was reading several essays by the late philosopher Josef Pieper (perhaps my favorite philosopher of the twentieth century) about art and music tonight, which can be found in his book Only the Lovers Sing: Art and Contemplation. His observations are ever timely, and I thought I would summarize a few of his ideas and observations that stood out to me. Read More »