Authors, Non-fiction

Andrew Klavan To Write Kermit Gosnell Movie Script

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The movie project about America’s worst serial killer is moving forward with the announcement that Andrew Klavan will write the script. He says the challenge will be writing a movie that people will want to see, because the base story is almost too repulsive. He tells NRO what’s most important about the Gosnell story:

I’m a crime writer. It’s a great crime story. But you know, I notice I’ve gone through this whole interview without saying the words “abortion” or “abortionist.” But that’s a part of it too, a central part. I’m in a sort of — I won’t say “unique” but certainly strange position on this. I’m a natural-born libertarian. With every fiber of my being, I want people to live the lives they want to live, whether it suits me or not. You want to be gay? Have a good time. You want to condemn gays? Knock yourself out. You want to dress up as Beyonce and get a tattoo of Louisiana on your forehead? I’m the guy who’ll buy you a drink and say, “Nice tat, Yonce.” I know a lot of women who’ve had abortions — people I like and love. I know a lot of people who are pro-abortion, likewise. But moral logic has convinced me that this is wrong — more than wrong – as wrong as a thing can be. It’s not about your feelings versus mine. It’s not about social conservatism. It’s not about libertarianism. And it’s not about feminism either or “women’s health care.” What nonsense that is. It’s an actual question of good versus evil. And listen, in the end, that’s what all great stories are about.

(via ISI)

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Challenges in Higher Education

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Many families and individuals are weighed down with graduate or under-grad debt while national theorists continue to recommend higher education as the solution to boosting the economy. These growing concerns have lead two authors to ask whether students are expecting too much from a college degree. One of two story trends that emerge from the research is seen in this student called Nathan.

His sputtering progress after college was foreshadowed by his choices during it, Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa write. Nathan coasted, focusing more on socializing than on academics. He studied mostly with his friends, doing so alone for just five hours a week. When asked to name a significant academic experience, he at first couldn’t think of one. Still, Nathan graduated with a 3.9 grade-point average.

If he had received a 2.1 grade-point average, would he have changed his trajectory and tried to raise it, or would his final record simply reflect his work accurately? (He was given a Business degree, by the way.) Is it the college’s fault in even a small way that he has trouble finding a good job within a few years of graduating?

On another topic in higher education, Gregory Thornbury of The King’s College in New York City, says we must continue to cast a vision for the next generation to run with.

I think we’re guilty of assuming that young people have signed up for the evangelical project or that they’ve signed up for democratic capitalism. We definitely get students who have signed up for that, who come from homeschooling backgrounds and so forth. They’re all charged up and ready to go. But there are also many who have never heard the case for the truthfulness of Christianity, for the things that caused flourishing in Western civilization. When people ask me, “What’s your personal mission?” I often say to them, it’s to re-enchant this generation with the animating ideals that made Western civilization in general and America in particular great. We are legatees of a great intellectual inheritance, and we have to make that case again.

Non-fiction, Publishing

No, the Vikings weren’t gender-neutral

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Had to post about this, before there’s further confusion.

This article from Tor. com has been making the rounds.

Researchers at the University of Western Australia decided to revamp the way they studied Viking remains. Previously, researchers had misidentified skeletons as male simply because they were buried with their swords and shields. (Female remains were identified by their oval brooches, and not much else.) By studying osteological signs of gender within the bones themselves, researchers discovered that approximately half of the remains were actually female warriors, given a proper burial with their weapons

It didn’t take long for a rebuttal to come from what looks like a somewhat more credible source, Stuff You Missed in History.

But, this paper essentially uses the presence of six female migrants and seven male as evidence that women and children most likely accompanied the Norse armies with the intent of settling the land once it was conquered, rather than migrating in a second wave once the fighting was over. It is, sadly, not at all about female Viking warriors, and not some Earth-shattering evidence that Norse armies were evenly split among women and men.

They’ll still have to prove to me that there were any female Viking warriors at all, but the point is made. The Tor article drew unwarranted and exaggerated conclusions from a study that examined a mere 13 graves.

Hey, Tor Books rejected my novel Wolf Time (soon to be re-released in e-book form) with disparaging comments, about 30 years ago. That should tell you all you need to know about them.

Authors, Fiction

Reviewing ‘Herzog’ after 50 Years

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Jack Hanson writes about Saul Bellow and his 50-year-old novel, Herzog, a story about a professor who can’t handle his life after losing his wife to divorce. Bellow, who died in 2005, said the story is something of a joke about how education can ruin you, but many are not convinced that’s all there is to his National Book Award winner.

“It may be hard to imagine what the neurosis of a restless, mid-century academic have to do with Ferguson, militant jihad, or any of our other woes,” Hanson states. “But if the book has a single theme, it is that we are dominated more than anything else by ideas, and it is only when we confront ideas and our allegiance to them that we might be able to set our house back in order. Life will never be an easy affair, but it may become, at times, manageable. Herzog is not a morality tale, in the sense of being didactic, but it is highly moral, while being forward-looking.”

Religion

Tribalism, Corporation, and Reading the Bible

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Politics...Anthony Bradley argues that most Christians today simply defend their political tribe using biblical language or proof-texts. They don’t hold to any confession of faith, but they believe their view of the Bible is right and other views are wrong or dangerous. “Progressive evangelicals, like their liberal mainline cousins, have simply traded off, in many cases, the tools in the Christian social thought tradition for the analytical tools of the social sciences and the humanities (critical race theory, feminist theory, etc.). For progressive evangelicals, the social sciences are authoritative and are often above critique.”

If we would fall back on sound theological confessions or a biblically developed history of Christian social consciousness, we could discuss issues like believers should and find common ground aren’t finding now. As Dr. Bradley concludes, “A lively discourse about the right application of Christian principles within the Christian tradition is far more fruitful and interesting to me than engaging in a tribal war that tries to prove whose tribe best represents Jesus.”

Speaking of a topic on which progressive Christians fail to think, Andy Crouch writes about the shrinking legal window on corporate identity: “In her dissent, Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited approvingly the idea that for-profit groups ‘use labor to make a profit, rather than to perpetuate a religious-values-based mission. The words rather than are key. In Justice Ginsburg’s view, it seems, corporations cannot serve—or at least the law cannot recognize that they serve—any god other than Mammon.”

Continue reading Tribalism, Corporation, and Reading the Bible →

Bookselling

Rite of fall

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It just occurred to me that Autumn/Fall is the only season with two names. Perhaps because it’s so depressing they figured they’d divide it up into two bundles to make it easier to carry.

Oh yes, buy my book: Death’s Doors.

So. Fall. This means that my blog posting, never regular even during summer break, will diminish materially. It’s back-to-school time. I’m in my second year of graduate school already. How time does fly!

No it doesn’t. I feel like I’ve been at this for a decade, and have about 30 years left to go.

I had a gratifying moment on Saturday. It’s my ancient custom to go out for lunch somewhere on Saturday noon, and then go to the local Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar.

As I approached the window, the manager said, “I always like to see you coming. You remind me of better times.” Continue reading Rite of fall →

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Do You Drink Coffee to Avoid Naps? Try Both.

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Researchers in multiple studies are finding that drinking coffee just before a short nap is better for your alertness than napping or coffee-drinking alone. The idea is that caffeine takes about 20 minutes to digest, so if you drink a cup quickly then snooze off for about 20 minutes, you will use up the sleepiness in your brain before you receive the perkiness you just consumed. For a more scientific explanation, see the article.

sleepy

Uncategorized

Astor: ‘Churchill, If I Were Your Wife…’

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Perhaps you’ve heard this story about Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Nancy Astor, who apparently had a famous rivalry. Astor was the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons (1919). Her Wikipedia page notes her quick wit and, though they are poorly documented, her trading of insults with Churchill. One rumored exchange says Churchill disliked her being in parliament, saying that having a woman there was like being intruded upon in the bathroom. Astor replied, “You’re not handsome enough to have such fears.”

A familiar anecdote has the viscountess in a disdainful state of her prime minister. She says, “If I were your wife, I’d poison your coffee.” Churchill replies, “If I were your husband, I’d drink it.”

Astor’s Wikipedia scholars attribute this quote, not to Churchill, but to his marvelously funny friend, Lord Birkenhead. I can’t suggest Birkenhead did not have this exchange, but I’m fascinated to learn that the insult is much older than he, Churchill, or Astor. The Quote Investigator, my new favorite website, reports the earliest recording of this joke comes from an 1899 Oswego, New York, newspaper. It was completely anonymous, being passed off as something the reporter overheard on the subway. The account was picked up by many newspapers, so by the time Birkenhead and Astor may have conversed, it would have been an old joke.

What’s more amusing is many people have claimed credit for it or given it to others. When Groucho Marx told the joke in 1962, he told it of George B. Shaw insulting a woman in his audience. In 1900, a comic named Pinckney claimed to have invented the dialogue a short time before the interview and that it had already worn itself out by flying around the world.

So if Lady Astor actually told Churchill or Birkenhead that she would poison them if they were married, she had plenty of opportunity to know she was setting herself up for a great joke.

Religion

Who is my neighbor? A terrorist, apparently.

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Little did I know, when I moved to Robbinsdale, Minnesota, that I was relocating to a seedbed of treason. But so it appears. Not one but two jihadist casualties overseas have been identified as former students at Robbinsdale Cooper High School. And it gets closer than that, as I’ll explain.

First, a little orientation. Robbinsdale Cooper High School is not in fact located in Robbinsdale. The historical reasons are convoluted (I don’t actually know them), but enough to say that the school district includes several inner ring suburbs. In any case, it’s close to me.

More than that, early reports (the information seems to have been redacted now; perhaps it was in error) stated that the latest casualty, Douglas McAuthor (sic) McCain, dead in Syria, lived on Oregon Avenue in New Hope.

Before I bought my house, I lived in an apartment building on Oregon Avenue in New Hope. New Hope isn’t that big. Oregon Avenue isn’t that long. We were neighbors. I very likely rubbed shoulders with him at some point.

Even so, I find it hard to generate a lot of sympathy for the young man. He was born in America, and New Hope isn’t a ghetto. He had ample opportunities to respond to the gospel. Instead he joined a death cult to murder infidels and rape women.

Still, after some consideration, I can think of a couple reasons to pity him. Continue reading Who is my neighbor? A terrorist, apparently. →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Russian Roulette’ and ‘Mr. Swirlee,’ by Mike Faricy

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I’m inclined to support my local mystery writers, as you know, so when I got a Kindle deal on one of Mike Faricy’s Dev Haskell mysteries, I thought I’d try it out. Glad I did. These are not highbrow mysteries, nor are they world-weary meditations on existential dilemmas. They’re just fun private eye stories that poke gentle fun at the form. I liked them.

Dev Haskell is a private eye in St. Paul. He has no office, but does a marginal business out of a string of scruffy bars. At the beginning of Russian Roulette he’s approached in one of those bars by a drop dead gorgeous woman with an accent (she says it’s French and he goes along with it) who asks him to look for her missing sister. Thinking more with a lower organ than with his higher functions, he follows her into a plot involving prostitution and sex trafficking.

The big joke in Russian Roulette is the way Dev overworks the traditional private eye pastime of getting injured and not letting it stop him. Not only does he suffer the liturgical beatings and a bullet wound that any literary private eye expects, but he also gets poisoned and car bombed. It stretches credibility that he’s able to function at all, let alone defend himself, by the end of the story, but that’s all part of the joke. Continue reading ‘Russian Roulette’ and ‘Mr. Swirlee,’ by Mike Faricy →