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Fredösphere's Posts
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Amazon is creating a new series based on Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It will be set in the Second Age, the age dominated by the long-lived men of the island of Númenor. Here are the latest (but not so recent) rumors about the production. The Tolkien estate has announced the constraints it has placed on Amazon’s […]
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My browser likes to tempt me with clickbait and I couldn’t say no to this review of Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s new book on the psychological effects of our built environments. You should read it too. We are embodied minds, the author believes, and the interdependence of mind and body is something architects should work with, […]
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This is a weird one. I’m creating a bunch of plots to post to Twitter so my feed can imitate the bot behavior of Man Plots: Preview Open
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God’s Little Smuggler
“Brother Andrew” is the pseudonym of Andrew van der Bijl, a Christian missionary who smuggled Bibles into communist countries during the height of the Cold War. His story was well known in Evangelical circles; they even made a comic book about him. He told of crossing through border checkpoints, his ancient Volkswagen stuffed with Bibles. It was like a spy thriller. He was never caught. The blindness of the crossing guards seemed miraculous.
Brother Andrew was the perfect hero for a young, deeply conservative, deeply religious boy — which is to say, my 13-year-old self. I longed to be like him. To face danger, to engage in intrigue, to take the battle to an implacable, prodigious foe — that would be glory.
Out of the blue, my shot at glory appeared.
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I know it seems inexcusable now, but 1977 was another era. I deeply regret any pain I may have caused. I fully acknowledge my ignorance of other people’s truth. I will redouble my efforts to restore broken trust. Okay, now here’s what really happened. As a teen caught up in a frenzy of inspiration, I […]
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Go to the New Yorker to read “Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City,” and then ask yourself: if a journalist described the construction of four mosques in Dayton or Dubuque as feeling like an “infiltration,” how sympathetic would the editors of the New Yorker be to that story? Preview Open
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Science fiction author Ursule K. Le Guin has died. I want to talk about one of her obituaries–but a search of the site shows no one has commented on her death. So first, a quick summary of her life: Le Guin was a remarkable writer. She was also a member of the far left. Both […]
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I have the strangest of problems. My daughter is a bright, bookish 16-year-old, and therefore ought to be the bullseye of the target demographic for fans of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. She hates it; she hates it passionately, aggressively, and evangelistically. I’ve tried to explain its greatness: the heartbreak of the ending, the symphonic music […]
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Three guesses to identify the U.S. college where this (unretouched) photo was taken. (The first two don’t count.) Preview Open
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The “Calexit” referendum campaign has died in infancy after its leader decided to become a Russian citizen. The terminology is confusing. This proposed 2018 state ballot referendum, which Nigel Farage supported, would divide California along cultural lines into two smaller states. There is a separate campaign for California to leave the U.S. altogether called Yes […]
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Back in October, I asked for help in inspiring my son to apply to Hillsdale College. After a campus visit, his enthusiasm increased markedly and he applied. Last week, the college gave him the thumbs-up: Preview Open
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Guys, Cory Doctorow has Neil Gorsuch in his sights and that means THE NOMINATION IS DOOMED! Neil Gorsuch, Trump's pick for the Supreme Court, was founder of "Fascism Forever Club" at his prep schoolhttps://t.co/kMtQ2NCH6x pic.twitter.com/RP5IbKFpcQ — Masque of the Red Death (@doctorow) February 2, 2017 Preview Open
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Free to the deer, that is. The city of Ann Arbor is really going to use taxpayer dollars to perform ovariectomies on female deer (and, presumably, deer who identify as male who happen to have ovaries) as part of an effort to reduce the deer population in the city. The original plan was to continue […]
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Ann Arborites do love to wear their beliefs on their bumpers. I saw a sticker the other day that was bizarre, even by local standards: Preview Open
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…because he accidentally spelled “hijab” as “hajib” in an email denouncing post-election hate crimes. President Schlissel was denounced by student Vikrant Garg (whose name is an anagram for Raging Ark TV; make of that what you will) who wrote — no joke — “It was literally a hate crime and people feel unsafe on campus […]
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…except this is a co-founder of the Onion. So I guess this is sort of the Onion: If your family is from a red part of the country & voted Trump, don't go home for T-giving. Make them come here to see how humans behave. — Tim Keck (@timothykeck) November 11, 2016 Preview Open
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My son, a high school senior, is mulling his college choices. It’s really come down to two schools: Hillsdale and the University of Michigan. The former is my choice; the latter is his choice. (He can likely get admitted to either place.) He doesn’t object to Hillsdale, exactly. Politically and culturally, he’d fit right in. […]
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After soliciting suggested readings in philosophy from Ricochet members, I constructed a reading list. I’m happy to announce I’ve completed the first book in the list, Roger Scruton’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy. My (sparse and hasty) review can be found on Goodreads. Plato is next up, but I’m concluding more and more that […]
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Item: three months ago, my teen son announced he was converting to Catholicism. (We’re Lutheran.) We let him attend Sunday mass once and the issue seems to have died down. Item: one of my favorite podcasts is the Sci-Fi Christian. Co-host Ben De Bono is an Evangelical convert to Catholicism. Ben’s recent defense of the […]
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I’m putting this in my too-good-to-be-true file: kids of post-millennial “Generation Z” are the most conservative generation in decades. They’re financially prudent and they’re even socially conservative. Okay, I can think of a few caveats: Preview Open
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