The Balsamic Is Straight from Italy!

I talk a big game about remaining “unspotted from the world” by cutting oneself off from popular culture. And I stand by that… at least in theory. But the other day, my wife and I watched Logan (2017), the last installment of the Wolverine trilogy. I grew up reading Marvel comics, and I’ll always love

Concerning Them Which Are Asleep

I just got back from the funeral of a friend, Father T., who was a priest of the Eastern Catholic Church. I call him a friend even though I think we only met once. But I’d like to think we were friends. When the missus and I moved back to New Hampshire from our brief

Meditation and Water

I read Moby-Dick for the first time as a senior in high school, and I hated it. (I hated everything I was forced to read, as a matter of principle.) But I’ve decided to give it another chance. So last night I cracked the spine of a brand-new copy. And I like it a whole

The Bull Moose Sutra

As the blurb for my book The Reactionary Mind says, the reactionary “alone is free to imagine a new and better world.” I like to imagine a world where the Progressive movement in this country remained true to its roots, which were laid down in the 1910s. The true reactionary can’t help but love those

Let Boys Be Men

Like just about every child born in the Nineties, I grew up on a standard diet of cartoons and video games. I loved to read as a tyke, and my parents spared no expense making sure I had every book that caught my fancy. But once I hit the magical age of six years old,

The Great Misgiving

As I’ve mentioned before, Robert Frost is the patron saint of this blog. You know who that is, don’t you? Sure you do. Everyone’s read “The Road Not Taken,” whether they wanted to or not. That poem’s a staple of middle-school English classes since Frost’s own lifetime. I always liked pomes growing up. I might’ve

Chicken Shit and Gin

Strong winds knocked the power out, as they often do, and my wife has taken the baby shopping with her sisters.  So, I’ve given up on trying to do any work today and settled down in my armchair with a copy of Chicken, Gin, and Maine Friendship: The Correspondence of E.B. White and Edmund Ware

Welcome to Lovecraft Country

Most folks who know him will say that my father-in-law is a fairly well-read guy. He’s the president of a small Great Books college here in New Hampshire. He went to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, which my sources tell me is a pretty good school, before earning his Ph.D from the Catholic

Confessions of a Catholic Puritan

If I’d been alive in the 17th century, I probably would’ve been a Jansenist. Not that I’m bragging or anything. That’s just the way it is; I’m at peace with the fact. My thinking naturally tends toward a kind of anti-rationalism that borders on irrationalism. I’m a convert to Catholicism, but mine was a conversion

On Yankees and Damn Yankees

Welcome to North of Boston. Glad you could join us. For those of you who are from away, I thought I’d put together this little primer to answer the question, “What makes a Yankee a damn Yankee?” A Yankee is someone who lives north of the Old South and east of the Midwest. But those