I was appalled, but not surprised, when on Saturday, September 24, the Dean of Students at Wellesley College, where I am a student, buried at the end of an email to the student body that all students at Wellesley would be required to receive a shot of the new bivalent Covid-19 booster. Then on October
READ MOREIt is easy to dismiss adult toy-buying as a craze of little significance. But the appearance of the “kidult” is troubling from several perspectives, for it speaks of the state of a decadent culture that embraces childish and immature things. The kidult idea also participates in the postmodern desire to be what one is not.
READ MOREIn the middle of my senior year in college, a dear friend and mentor approached me one evening and mentioned a startup organization called Intellectual Takeout that was looking for college students to do research and writing internships. “You should apply!” he said. I smiled externally but rolled my eyes internally. “You don’t know me
READ MOREPresident Joe Biden used his home state of Delaware on Friday to promote his “forgiveness” of student loan debt, which he did through executive action in August rather than through Congress. Some of Biden’s assertions during 24 minutes of remarks at Delaware State University in Dover were factual, and some less so. Biden spoke at
READ MOREA teacher who was also a poet once explained to me the meaning of a “found poem.” It’s a poem that takes its words and lines from sources outside the poet: newspaper headlines, advertisements, the outdoor message boards found in front of churches, an overheard conversation, even graffiti. Just this morning, I came across a
READ MOREIn the dog days of summer, as President Joe Biden’s average approval rating plummeted to historic lows amid an intense flurry of national setbacks, policy blunders and rhetorical “gaffes” (otherwise known as palpable senility), most in the punditry class began to predict an imminent “red wave” of Republican electoral dominance in November’s midterm elections. The
READ MOREAdmittedly, I’ve never been a huge poetry fan. But in recent years, I’ve come to appreciate it, especially when the poems speak to the very things I’m dealing with. In these cases, poetry gives me strength and courage to walk the difficult road. One of the poems that has hit me in the gut this
READ MOREOn a mid-October visit with my daughter and her family, my son-in-law began recounting stories from a former construction job. He spoke of end-of-day contests—monkey-bar style races, for example, in which construction workers would race across the trusses of a building using hammers instead of the hands, which lasted until one guy slipped and concussed
READ MOREThe deeper you dig in the dark warrens of adolescent transgender medicine, the more convinced you become that the doctors who operate on young girls are criminal or insane or both. I know that sounds extreme. But how can a decent person read the bare statistics in a recent article in one of the world’s
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