Unca Darrell

JULY 2 / Teachout on the dumbing down of literary study

IT'S CERTAINLY NO SECRET that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is too much.

MARCH 11 / My father was a dairy farmer with a high school education

HE WAS a conventional FDR-style liberal Democrat. Other than that, nothing would have recommended him to intellectual elite of his time. They would have seen him -- to borrow from the essay quoted below --  as a member of "the hapless 'herd,' the 'booboisie,' all of whom [Mencken] deemed the 'peasantry' that blighted American cultural life."

Yet one night each week, while we lived on the farm, he . . .

SEPTEMBER 12 / If you haven't yet read . . .

. . . Theodore Dalyrymple (Anthony Daniels to his mother), hie thee to amazon.com and order In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas. It is a good gateway read for the British doctor, psychiatrist, and essayist. Statutory warning: The book may lead to sleepness nights and possibly even addiction for readers with a pre-disposition toward common sense.

Sample quotation:

JULY 9 / Teachout on art and truth

EXCERPTS FROM "Wall Street Journal" drama crtic Terry Teachout's remarks as he accepted the $250,000 Bradley Prize back in June, for distinguished contributions to American institutions:

Not long ago I was introduced . . . as an "intellectual." To me, an intellectual is . . .

JULY 6 / "Miss Peggy and Mr. John"

A NEW BOOK by Unca D and friend Lynn Murphy. It honors two good and faithful servants of the Lord. Click here. 

APRIL 10 / Bill White gets a good ride . . .

. . . in the Wall Street Journal today for . . . 

JUNE 25 / Melloan on Ferguson on declinism

DOOMSAYERS are never popular, but sometimes they're right. . . .

That maxim applies to the writings of . . .

MAY 2 / A new book about Texas by someone who . . .

. . . gets Texas.

Erica Greider supplies a fresh view of the nation's second most populous sate in "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn From the Strange Genius of Texas." An editor at Texas Monthly, the author explains the state's much-heralded record of economic growth and does her best to strip away some of . . .

MARCH 2 / The power of heavy-handed rhetorical legerdemain

TO THOSE younger than 35, communism must seem like some ridiculous hoax. How could so many Western intellectuals have defended an ideology -- and defended it into the late 1980s -- that had never produced anything but . . .

FEBRUARY 2 / Updated: Declinism 2.1

FROM AN EXCELLENT essay in America's most excellent popular journal of ideas, the Wall Street Journal's saturday "Review":

For two generations we've been lectured on the dangers of overpopulation. But the conventional wisdom on this issue is wrong, twice. First . . .