The Turn of the Screw

You may have had a sense lately that something is just not right in your domestic life, not calamitously bad but just bad enough to be annoying on a daily basis and in seemingly unpredictable ways. You are not alone. In fact, a huge variety of personal and social problems trace to a single source.

Stupid Vogue

The gym has Fox television on, and perhaps I should be grateful, because otherwise it would not have dawned on me just how popular and widely embraced stupid is.

Teacher for a Day

The chance to sit down with them during a real school day and supervise the process of learning in a homeschool setting was a rare treat, and something I would wish on every homeschool dad, who often feels that professional responsibilities shut him out of the schooling process, writes Jeff Tucker.

Didn’t make the front page

And you have to read pretty deeply to find that the new home-sales report from the Census Bureau “fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 355,000 in November, an 11.3 percent drop from October and its lowest rate since April. The numbers were much lower than analysts had predicted and seemed to belie trends in other housing data that gave hope the industry was stabilizing.”

Thanks for the Tax Cut, Sort Of

Every good libertarian should favor tax cuts. The money belongs to us in the first place, and it should be an occasion to celebrate when Washington wises up and gives some back. We’ve been promised a tax cut as long as memory serves, but it never seems to arrive. At last, here it is, thanks to Bush having pushed so hard for this as an economic stimulus measure.

Sticking to the Official Narrative

In a politicized society, it seems to me that the true believers really don’t have conversations as much as they deliver monologues of talking points. For example, a colleague of mine recently told me that “global warming” has become such a crisis that “new hurricanes are being created every 13 seconds.” This would mean that more than a million hurricanes appear in the Atlantic every year — a claim that is preposterous on its face — but this does not seem to faze her.