Today's conservatives

Atrios: Libertopia Not all conservatives identify fully as libertarians, but except for the theocons they all sort of do. Freedum, liberty, small state, keep your law enforcement away from the public land I'm illegally squatting on, etc. The 2nd amendment is all about the right not just to combat acts of "tyranny" but of revolution itself. But, somehow, as long as that tyranny...

The new Avengers movie: How your studies in Late Antiquity helped you understand Joss Whedon's plight

This is wonderful, wonderful. Thanks, Salon and Mr. O'Hehir: It might be accurate to say instead that superhero cinema has reached a decadent plateau, a long-term steady state of self-nourishing bigness and reverberant meaninglessness. Whedon moves on from the Marvel empire not as its Augustus or its Spartacus, but more like one of the later, non-terrible Christian emperors who...

Antoine de la Sale, Jean de Saintré. My review of a new translation

From The Medieval Review De la Sale, Antoine. Jean de Saintré: A Late Medieval Education in Love and Chivalry. Trans. Roberta L. Krueger and Jane H. M. Taylor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 264. $59.95. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4586-8. Reviewed by Steven Muhlberger Nipissing University stevem@nipissingu.ca Translations are sometimes seen...

"Progress"?

A good piece from Michela Wrong in Foreign Policy: When Migrants Flee Progress Each migrant trying to cross the Mediterranean in a rickety boat has his or her own reason for risking the journey. But for people who study Africa, one overall lesson quietly emerges from this mass movement: Man cannot live by MDGs alone. I’m talking about the Millennium Development Goals, the eight...

Medieval versus enlightened

Thanks to the anonymous medievalist who wrote this to Dan Savage:I've been reading your column for years (19 years?), and I love it. "Savage Love" has been a major part of my coming to terms with my sexuality after a very religious upbringing. And I hate to complain about something that probably seems pretty minor, but hopefully my reasons will be compelling. You recently...

Some of the best music ever

Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells live, 1...

"The gleaming cities of Earth...

...Where peace reigns, and hatred has no home."These are the last lines of the episode "Muse" from the series "Star Trek: Voyager." The episode is characteristic of the series as a whole.Voyager is not the most popular series in the Star Trek franchise. Like some of the other series – maybe all of them – it started out rather weak, and with characters that were not particularly...

The Children of ISIS

This article in Rolling Stone is a real thought-provoker.  The children of unremarkable Muslim immigrants to the United States end up embracing the extremist message.Mariyam's attorney, Marlo Cadeddu, believes that if the Khan kids are guilty of anything, it's a form of magical thinking. "They were naive, and they were sheltered, and they bought into a fantasy of a Muslim...