The Darwin debate, 1872

The debate over evolution and ID invariably brings to my mind a charming Russian poem by Alexei Tolstoy (novelist Leo’s less talented but much saner and smarter, and unjustly forgotten, relative), “Epistle to M.N. Longinov on Darwinism” (1872). Tolstoy, a poet, writer and dramatist, was widely regarded as a retrograde in his day; in fact, [...]

With Enlightenment champions like these…

From the website of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an announcement of an upcoming event:
Saturday, October 8:”Rethinking Secularism in an Age of Belief”
A Symposium featuring Dwight McBride (African American Studies, Northwestern), Saba Mahmood (Anthropology, UC Berkeley), Gauri Viswanathan (English, Columbia University), and Michael Warner (English, Rutgers). Co-organized with the IPRH.
This event will address some [...]

The evolution wars are here again

The controversy over evolution and intelligent design is back in the news because of the Pennsylvania trial over a school board’s decision to add critiques of evolution and the “alternative” theory of Intelligent Design to the curriculum.
Good posts on the subject by Roger Simon and Richard Bennett. See also this piece by William Saletan in [...]

Partying with the Reasonoids

The Reason staff in Washington, DC gathered at Mackey’s Pub tonight to celebrate the Reason blog, Hit & Run, being named one of the five winning political blogs in Playboy. I went down to DC for the event, held at Mackey’s Pub. My only quibble: Why are so many events where you go for the [...]

Religious intolerance: the real thing

Lately, a lot of people on the right have been awfully quick to cry religious bigotry for no good reason. I’m at the point where I reach for the remote every time Bill O’Reilly fulminates against “secularists.” So tonight when I heard him announce an upcoming segment about “religion under attack,” I was [...]

Poverty, race, Katrina, and demagoguery

The other day, speaking to the Congressional Black Caucus, New York congressman Charles Rangel referred to George Bush as “our Bull Connor.”
Appearing on various talk shows (including Bill O’Reilly tonight), Rangel has claimed that he never meant to imply that Bush was a racist; he was simply saying that just as Bull Connor’s brutality against [...]

What about the men? (2)

Amidst all these discussions of Future Desperate Housewives of the Ivy League, there’s another story that’s finally getting some notice: while some women are mommy-tracking themselves while still in college, many men aren’t in college, period.
USA Today reports:
Currently, 135 women receive bachelor’s degrees for every 100 men. That gender imbalance will widen in the coming [...]

What about the men? (1)

As a follow-up to its controversial front-page story on Ivy Leaguers opting for the “mommy track,” the New York Times ran this editorial notebook item by Nicholas Kulish, a young man who is worried that the women of his generation may be taking a “U-Turn” toward more traditional roles, forcing men into a more narrow [...]

Ivy League mommy wars

My Boston Globe column today deals with those female Ivy League students who, the New York Times tells us, are already planning at the tender age of 20 to someday ditch their careers and become full-time moms.
The flaws in the article and the study on which it was based have been detailed by Slate.com’s Jack [...]

Scholarship and pederasty: an update

The other day, I wrote about a controversy surrounding Haworth Press’s decision to drop a book, Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, after the far-right website WorldNetDaily raised a ruckus about an essay in the book which argued that sexual relationships between adult men and adolescent [...]