Robert says we used to make laws regulating sex by looking to the public good, and Cheryl says she doesn’t know what marriage is anymore, and I’ve been thinking about John Stuart Mill.   That ought to cover enough ground, even without any confusion caused by this post’s title. As to what marriage means, I’m in…

I’m calling this post Sex Redux because I think I’ve already got a post back there somewhere called Sex, but I can’t find it this morning, which is not surprising.  I’m writing from a really bang up new computer at school, because we’re having classes this Saturday morning, in spite of the fact that we…

So.  Yesterday I had nothing to do, and the way that works,  I got absolutely nothing done. Except this:  I went to the grocery store.  That may seem like a small thing, and it may seem even smaller when you realize that I did not have any big shop to do.  I was just picking…

Well, okay, it was coming eventually.  But before I get started on this particular rant, let me sort of agree with both Cheryl and Robert. Yes, of course, I’d have hated being a proper Victorian lady, and yes, of course, no society is stable in the sense that Robert means it.  We’re always at some…

I was going to write about students today.  It’s exam week, and I’m being inundated by people who cannot tell time, and who all seem to have computers that malfunction at a drop of a hat, and in the same way, too.  And, of course, they’re sure that if I just let them hand in…

So between comments and e-mail I got a lot of feedback on that last one that amounted to, “well, MY kind of writer is nice.  It’s that other kind that isn’t.” As a matter of fact, thatisn’t true.  Among “storytellers,”for instance, there have been some notable pricks, including both Maugham and Hawthorne, neither of whom…

Aristophanes famously made Socrates a character in one of his most successful plays, The Clouds, and not a very nice character, either–petty, spiteful, conniving, foolish, dishonest, destructive, arrogant and what can only be called slatternly, although that’s a word usually applied only to women. I reread The Clouds this summer, along with a long list…

Every once in a while, I think I know what I’m going to write here.  I walk around with opening sentences in my head all day, and then I read through the comments from the day before, and everything goes to hell. That is sort of what has happened this morning.   I was going to…

One of the reasons  I always think it’s a good idea to teach intellectual history and not just history–to teach the history of ideas–is because it keeps us from inventing mythologies that have little to do with reality and everything to do with what we want to be true.  And the problem about what we…

So, here’s the thing.  I know I was in the middle of talking about something else, but this keeps coming up, and I find that it bugs me more as I get older than it did when I was very young.  Consider the following passage: >>>In some old magazine or newspaper, I recollect a story, told…