I thrived on the hymns of my Baptist church when I was small.  My family was musical, and it seemed natural to listen to the counterpoint and sing in harmony.  Thinking that I would love it, my mother put me in the children’s choir.  To her great dismay, I rebelled and dropped out.  It was unspeakably humiliating to me.

** Spoiler Alert **

I recently read Upgrade, a Michael Crichton-style technothriller by Blake Crouch, in which humanity almost comes to an end because someone decides to play God, trying to implement an involuntary, virally transmitted polygenetic hack in order to make the whole human race smarter.  What could go wrong?

This is about being mean.  Let me explain.

Roe may have been overturned, but abortion is still with us, and language is endlessly manipulable.  In homage to George Orwell, here are a few more words, phrases, and idioms for the Newspeak Dictionary.  The long-delayed Eleventh Edition is still in preparation.

Though I appreciate responses to the blog, I don’t usually post them.  Here, though, are just a few especially intriguing ones to “Sympathy for Stanford.”  The first:

Hilaire Belloc’s occasional dourness conceals an underlying cheerfulness – for he believed in the chastening grace of God.  This is from his reflection “On New Years and New Moons”:

Some political theorists think we own ourselves.  The idea is especially prominent among libertarians, who often claim to find it in John Locke, the English social contract thinker who so powerfully influenced the American founders.  Just for these reasons, some readers might be interested in the following after-the-bell conversation.