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Chicago Native Explains Why He’s ‘Leaving and Never Coming Back’0
- Culture
- January 12, 2017
Brandon Vezmar grew up in Chicago. As a teen from Hammond, he’d escape to the city “every chance I could get,” he said. He later attended college there. But the last eight months have spoiled the city for Vezmar, he writes in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune. The caustic combination of corrupt politicians with
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Americans are Charitable without the Government’s Help 0
- Culture
- January 12, 2017
By now, we’ve all heard of the little free libraries proliferating across America. In all likelihood, one has even popped up in your own neighborhood, driven by a love of reading and an eagerness to give unwanted materials a second life. But the little free library idea has spawned more than a love of reading.
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Gun Shop Creates World’s Best-Ever Receipt 1
- Economics
- January 12, 2017
I don’t often use the literary tactic of referring to something as the “best-ever.” Indeed, the only time that phrase appeared in the title of a column was back in 2014 when I smugly wrote about the collapse of government-run single-payer healthcare in Vermont. Recalling what Justice Brandeis wrote about states being the “laboratories of
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Nobody Knows Where the Word ‘Religion’ Comes From 0
- History
- January 12, 2017
In English, “religion” is the most common, catch-all term to refer to any organized group that worships a higher power. It is at the center of some of modernity’s most-heated controversies on the subjects of freedom, reason, morality, culture, and violence, and is a word that often inspires polar reactions of both respect and scorn.
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The Problem With Defining Certain Speech and Crimes as ‘Hate’0
- Culture
- January 12, 2017
We would all like to live in a world without hate. Indeed, most of us would like to live in a life without hate. But I would like to make another, and more modest, proposal regarding “Hate-“. By this, I mean the use of the word “hate” to add extra zing to some public policy
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Yearning for Good, Old-Fashioned Paganism 0
- Culture
- January 12, 2017
Although I confess that I’m a Christian, I pine sometimes for some good old fashioned paganism. Not the nonsense of the neo-pagans who have about as much in common with the real McCoy as a divorcee has with a virgin (to employ C. S. Lewis’ slap-in-the-face analogy), or, to move from the shockingly sublime to
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