He gets it. Stephen Catanzarite has written arguably the most important book about rock music of the young 21st century. U2’s Achtung Baby: Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall is a small volume — more like a thick pamphlet than a book — but each line is a mini-dissertation on the … Read more
My grandfather was responsible for the career of Frank Rich. In the orthodox Catholic circles I travel in, this is like being the baseball manager who rejected young Fidel Castro because he couldn’t hit a curve ball, thus leaving the Cuban no other option but to start a communist dictatorship. Rich, whose column appears every … Read more
It’s very rare that I praise a socialist, but we’re approaching a time when Robert Blatchford should be feted. Blatchford was a British reformer who was active from 1890 to 1920. He converted to socialism after witnessing the misery in the slums of Manchester and started his own paper, the Clarion, in 1891. Yet Blatchford … Read more
It’s the last place on earth you’d expect to get the creeps, but the Memorial Hall of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the enormous 6,000-seat Catholic church in Washington, D.C., always gives me a shiver. Or at least a small part of it does. The walls and pillars of the … Read more
A few months ago in the pages of the Washington Post, Michael Kinsley wrote a piece about the dominance of conservative authors on best-seller lists. He rejected all the usual excuses that liberals give for the success of conservatives in the marketplace—that liberals read more broadly and don’t care about “tawdry best-sellers,” that conservative networks … Read more