Well, it’s the new year, and I’m feeling a lot cheerier, so I’m half obsessed with murder and mayhem, or something.  Not really.  Yesterday, for some reason, I spent a lot of time thinking about Lizzie Borden.  The Borden case continues to fascinate a good solid swath of the American public, and for all I…

For those of you too old, too young, or too sensible, the title of this post is a line from the theme song to a movie called Beach Party, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.  It came out in the early 1960s, after Kennedy and the pill but before middle class college students started rioting in…

A couple of nights ago, in the middle of an e-mail about something else entirely, I made the offhand comment that I should suggest, on this blog, that anybody reading this who wants to should post the list of his or her ten favorite novels.  I said it, was asked to make that twenty-five, and…

Sometimes I find this project absolutely fascinating.  I appreciate the efforts of so many of you, in comments and e-mail both, to assure me that if I will just look off the beaten track, I can find many examples of the kind of alternatives I’m talking about.  But I’m aware of that, really.   For one…

Oh, ack.  I’m having one of those days when I wonder if I shouldn’t be in some other business, because I don’t seem to be having such a good time getting my point across. To answer Robert–I said nothing at all about whether or not Christianity was “dying,” although, given other comments here, it might…

Every once in a while the comments actually point to someplace I’m trying to go, and that’s incredibly helpful.  In this case, John wonders how so much could have changed so thoroughly in less than fifty years, and my answer would be:  it changed less and less thoroughly than he thinks. As to the reaction…

For years now, it’s been my custom to spend a fair chunk of my Christmas Day reading about atheism.   For many years it meant reading one particular book about atheism, called The Final Superstition, by Joseph L. Daleidan, which I found in a Barnes and Noble in Pasadena, Florida one Christmas we spent at my…

And I don’t even know if I’ve spelled “conundrum” right. Okay, here’s the problem. Earlier this morning, I posted a LONG page, called Bah! Humbug! It’s a separate page, and it contains the entire 100 item multiple choice “literacy quiz” I give to my students once a term, partially as an extra credit exercise and…

Let me give you a statistic here, the kind of statistic that sums up everything that bothers me about the time I’m living in. In 1950, Lionel Trilling, an English professor at  Columbia University and one of the leading literary critics of his era, published a book called The Liberal Imagination.  This was a book…

So, at the moment I’m sitting in the new Tech building, which has the most wonderful computers I’ve ever been able to play with, and I’m waiting for my very last section to come in and get their final grades.  And I’ve been thinking that it was odd that John Oliver mentioned John Stuart Mill,…