Click here to listen to this week’s episode of The Mockingcast, which features an interview with author/theologian John Newton. 1. Let’s start with this weird and beautiful story from The Washington Post: “The key to these ancient riddles may lie in a father’s love for his dead son.” For a hundred years, archaeologists have been trying […]
The Difference Between Christmas and Easter
A few paragraphs from James Martin’s remarkable article in this past Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, “The Challenge of Easter”: The Christmas story is largely nonthreatening to nonbelievers: Jesus in the manger, surrounded by Mary and Joseph and the adoring shepherds, is easy to take. As the Gospels of Matthew and Luke recount, there was no […]
Another Week Ends: Un-Free Shoppers, Artists, Procrastinators, Middle Class Ambitions, Celebrity Spectacles, Keanu Talks Bill and Ted Three
1. Good news for the procrastinators out there. The Wall Street Journal published “How To Be A Better Procrastinator” this week, which analyzes when and why procrastinators procrastinate–and, surprise suprise–it has a lot to do with judgment and perfectionism. Normalizing its symptoms, the article gives some gracious comfort to those who have always looked at […]
Little Lies and Not-So-Little Lies (We Can't Disguise)
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely hit an anthropological home run in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend with “Why We Lie,” a preview of his ridiculously well-titled upcoming book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves. (You can watch the Predicatably Irrational author’s wonderful TED talk here). What Ariely and his […]
The Crazy-Making IPO: Facebook Madness and the Compulsive iDisorder
Add one more to the tally, after Franzen, after Marche, after Turkle. The Wall Street Journal‘s “Smart Money” blog, Pay Dirt, which does a lot of interesting behavioral economics writing, performed a quick psychoanalytic survey of the madness of Facebook “liking,” in wake of the IPO attention the company is getting. Its findings were telling […]
Another Week Ends: John Carter, Obesity FAILs, Mary Karr on Suffering, Winning!, Friends with Kids, Springsteen's Wrecking Ball and Community Returns
1. “I am not Jesus, but I have the same initials.” Thus sang Jarvis Cocker on the classic Pulp track “Dishes” (at bottom), and it now looks like he has a new contender to the throne, Tim Riggins himself, Mr. John Carter of Mars. That’s right: Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton’s first live-action feature is […]
Another Week Ends: Inner Machiavellians, Lutheran Insults, Whisky Priests, Monkees, Mets, Parenthood, Veep, Viola Davis and Frankenweenie
1. I’ll admit it: I’ve been trying to lay off the David Brooks, at least in the Weekend columns. As insightful as he frequently is, there are plenty of fish in the digital sea, are there not? Well, to paraphrase a Pacino, every time I think I’m out, he pulls me back in. That is […]
Another Week Ends: Joseph Mills, Commitment Devices, Anxiety Rights, Bible Rescue, Imposter Syndrome, Hitch on Chesterton, Elmer Bernstein and Liz Lemon
1. One of the many things to adore about David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is the cover (of the US edition). The collage manages to capture the torrential intellect at the heart of that wonderful collection without losing the humor. But it wasn’t until this past week that I […]
We (Don't) Need To Talk About Pierre: The Benefits of French Parenting?
Judging from the amount of forwards to my inbox, Pamela Druckerman’s “Why French Parents Are Superior” has some relevant things to say. The article is another in a line of Wall Street Journal humdingers about parenting, and also the first time I’ve come across the brilliant new term, ‘kindergarchy.’ The gist of Druckerman’s argument is […]
Another Week Ends: Immortal Smartphones, Jefferson Bethke, Adolescent Rewards, Profound Comedy, Therapeutic Irony, more George Lucas, Pixar and Hunger Games
1. In last weekend’s NY Times Magazine, Carina Chocano explained “The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg” – AKA what our current obsession with “data” has to say about our humanity – dropping her usual allotment of insight bombs along the way. Not only does she point out the increasingly prevailing illusion that if something wasn’t […]
Unaccompanied Minors and the War Against the Goonies
A fitting follow-up to the recent post on the tragic decline of unstructured play in the lives of children, not to mention yesterday’s one on insomnia, this time in a Wall Street Journal editorial by Lenore Skenazy, “The War on Childhood.” She uses Amtrak’s recent decision to bump their unaccompanied minor age from 8 to […]
Another Week Ends: Zombied Church, The Hill and Wood, Full Eyes, Soda Bans, (The Paradox of) Dysfunctional Families, Joe Pa and Scandal Love
1) Something’s in the water at The Atlantic lately, because inspired after inspired article seems to be finding its way into the proverbial stream, including an intriguing article about tv show The Walking Dead‘s “Come-to-Jesus Moment.” As the review is aware (and mind you, if you’re not caught up on the show, spoilers), it’s certainly […]
