Culture

The Euro-American Roots of Pumpkin Spice 14
- Culture, Featured, History, MomThink
- October 28, 2024
Pumpkin spice and everything nice, that’s what basic white girls are made of! She’s wearing plaid, cute boots, and walking through autumn leaves to a pumpkin patch or apple orchard. And most importantly, come mid-October, she’s unabashedly carrying the unmistakable takeout coffee cup filled with pumpkin spice latte. She is also hailed as laughable, ditzy,
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What is Modern Malaise? Exploring Binx’s Search in ‘The Moviegoer’1
- Culture, Featured, Literature
- October 25, 2024
In Walker Percy’s National Book Award–winning novel The Moviegoer, the protagonist, a restless and dislocated stock broker, Binx Bolling, sets out on a search. It’s the eve of his 30th birthday, and his trips to the movies and flings with his various secretaries have failed to satisfy him. Adrift in a world where tradition is
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Ignoring Young Male Voters Courts Catastrophe 1
- Culture, Politics
- October 25, 2024
Cries of “Trump is Hitler!” and attempted assassinations have dominated coverage of the upcoming presidential elections. This deprives an intriguing issue of attention. An August 24th New York Times article by culture columnist Claire Cain Miller states the issue: “In some ways, this presidential election has become a referendum on gender roles.” Gender gaps between how men and
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Keeping Courage, Resisting Groupthink: The Great Escape of Mary Queen of Scots 2
- History, Culture, Featured
- October 24, 2024
For a teenage boy like Willy Douglas, there was bound to be something appealing about the tall, beautiful, spirited, and forsaken 24-year-old queen imprisoned in Lochleven Castle, which lay on an island in the middle of a gray lake in lowland Scotland. Is it any wonder that 16-year-old Willy and his 18-year-old cousin George set
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We Should Heed What This Ex-Soviet Spy Says About Beauty … And Terror 14
- Culture, Featured, Philosophy
- October 23, 2024
In the end, the only memorable stories, like the only memorable experiences, are religious and moral. They give men the heart to suffer the ordeal of a life that perpetually rends them between its beauty and its terror. These two sentences, written by Whittaker Chambers, quite literally stopped me in my tracks when I first
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Of Foot Binding and Modern Childhood 8
- Culture, Family
- October 23, 2024
We no longer live in an era of foot binding, writes my Let Grow cofounder Peter Gray, a psychologist who studies the importance of mixed-age, unsupervised play. But for about a thousand years, as he notes in a recent Substack post, girls in China would have their feet broken and bound to stop them from
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