Month: November 2021
Burnout, According to Solomon
I’ve made huge lists of everything I’ve done in my short life. I’ve accomplished so much, and I can show you my work, says Solomon. It’s too familiar. Lists have been a lifeline for me as a working mom, a...
Portraits of Anxiety in Dostoevsky and Dickens
E.M. Forster wrote, “it is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source.” In Aspects of the Novel, Forester explains that while it is the work of the historian to deal with the external details...
In Memoriam: Gerald Russello
Gerald Russello (July 27, 1971-November 7, 2021) graduated from Georgetown in 1992, and got his JD from New York University Law School in 1996. He served as a managing director in the legal department of Bear, Stearns & Co., and...
The Book of Revelation is for the Church
Timothy Beal. The Book of Revelation: A Biography. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. $26.95, 288 pp. First things first: Let me state my disagreement with two premises of Timothy Beal’s “biography” of the Book of...
The American Style in Traditionalist Parenting
Paula S. Fass. The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. $19.95, 352 pp. Perhaps more than anything else, Paula S. Fass’s learned and engaging...
Boredom in a World Without Windows
James Dankert and John D. Eastwood. Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. $27.95, 282 pp. In a study where participants were instructed to sit in a room with nothing to do for only...
Atheist Nones and the Problem of Soviet Atheism
Victoria Smolkin. A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. $32.95, 360 pp. It is perhaps too easily forgotten that Soviet Communism began as a vibrant ideology, full of optimism for the...
The Prophet of Re-Alignment: Reading Michael Lind in the Ruins of the Old Republic
It has become a tired cliché to lament the polarization of American politics, yet after a year that witnessed a post-election assault on the US Capitol, and in which even epidemiology became a partisan issue, few would contest the truth...
Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall: Love and Citizenship
WELCOME TO UNALASKA. FREE COFFEE DONUTS. John Honan’s in the school bus next to the bridge again, its black on white on yellow greeting lit up in the fog lamps of the ramshackle cars blearily gazing through the dim mist...
Suffer the Little Children
It is a hard thing not to love one’s children. It is not hard to resent them, to see them as miscreants or burdens, to think them selfish and base, to find their concupiscence by turns infuriating and repugnant. Neither...