Unca Darrell

MARCH 16, 2017 / Jim Webb on what it means to be a redneck, and . . .

. . . why redneck culture matters.

In 2004 Jim Webb wrote Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. Though the 2016 presidential election was well over the horizon, Mr. Webb's book is a useful primer on what kept Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton out of the White House and what put Donald John Trump in.

Rednecks, says Mr. Webb, "are . . .

MARCH 3, 2017 -- Goodbye, and thanks, to Thomas Sowell

THOMAS SOWELL, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and one of America's most important public intellectuals, retired from column-writing at the end of 2016. Here are snips from his last piece, "Random Thoughts, Looking Back: Avoiding the fatal mistake of disregarding the record of the past," nationalreview.com, December 27, 2016.

Not everything about the past was admirable. Poet W.H. Auden . . . 

March 2, 2017 / The poem our teachers got wrong

TWO ROADS diverged in a wood, and I --

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Generations of commencement speakers . . .