Okay, here I am doing my best. Brushing the sweat out of my eyes, swatting at mosquitoes, worrying about frostbite, avoiding hidden cravasses, catching bullets in my teeth, eating old bread with maggots and weevils and turnip crumbs in it, being charged by cranky lions and rhinos and people who sell insurance. Here’s one item I was thinking about before the virus pounced and turned my computer into an evil demon. Mark Bauerlein has an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed – but even though it’s interesting I have some disagreements with it. It’s about the familiar subject of lefty groupthink in (US) universities. One problem is that he says campuses, colleges, academics, rather than specifying ‘certain branches’ … Read the rest

Well perhaps not as bad as I thought.

I can’t just delete now because of the RSS feed.

And look what I just found! What a lovely surprise. I can pretend I’m still there.… Read the rest

It’s beautiful here today, in an odd, subdued sort of way. I went for a walk and gazed out over the Sound an hour or so ago. Everything is grey – the sky, the water – but it’s a bright, translucent grey in places. The clouds are shapey and various as opposed to being a single pewter-coloured blanket, and there are places where the sun almost shines through them, so in the distance the water is quite silvery. I’ve been back for a week (plus a bit). Things have shaken down as they do after a trip (that’s one of the fun things about trips: the sense of strangeness when you get back), and I’ve had time to think it … Read the rest

A bit of old business I’ve been meaning to get to for several days. This question of religion and the focus of its public rhetoric and exhortation on a narrow view of sexual morality with a comparable neglect of social justice – of, if you prefer, poverty, oppression, exploitation, bad working conditions, injustice, and the like. One of our readers took issue with that view of the matter, and I thought I would offer one or two more places where I’d seen the idea discussed.

One is this piece by Ishtiaq Ahmed in the ‘Daily Times’ of Pakistan.

The Islamic position on life on earth was that Muslims should enjoy the good things of life within limits prescribed by Sharia…What

The comments by Juan Golblado on the ‘Paying Too Much Attention’ Comment have prompted me to hurry up and do what I’ve been meaning to do, which is to say a word or two about this bizarre article at Index on Censorship. It is, as Mr Golblado says, a striking case of the fox being invited into the henhouse. Unless of course the Index on Censorship is supposed to be an organization that sings the virtues of censorship, but I kind of thought it wasn’t supposed to be that kind of organization.

Van Gogh’s juvenile shock-horror art finally led him to build an exploitative working relationship with Somalia-born Dutch MP Ayann Hirsi Ali, whose terrible personal experience of abuse