Meghan Cox Gurdon

Meghan Cox Gurdon: What a child could teach Democrats

We cut our candy tax in the suburbs this Halloween, and productivity shot up. In past years, in an attempt to limit gluttony, we imposed strict controls on the proportion of the Halloween haul they were permitted to keep. Over time the amounts varied, like the tax code, but the children always had to surrender most of the candy they brought home in their pillowcases. As a result, trick-or-treating became an exciting but very brief annual episode. We'd go to a dozen houses; the children would shrug good-naturedly and say they had enough. Deluded nanny statist that I was, I thought they were willing to quit because they understood that they didn't "need" more candy than they...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Dunce corner for Baby Einstein

It is surely coincidence that within days of the Food and Drug Administration banning flavored cigarettes on the grounds that they are dangerously attractive to children, the Disney Corporation should begin offering refunds to parents disgruntled that "Baby Einstein" videos will not, in fact, make their infants smarter. Well, of course it's a coincidence; the two events have almost nothing in common. Nothing, that is, apart from the way each speaks to opposing aspects of America's double-think about dealing with the vulnerabilities of children. On the one hand, our society insists that children must be hyper-protected at all times. Safety first! Six-year olds are threatened with...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Silence of the lambs

It's proving harder than I expected to shake off the image of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Mao Zedong at a commencement speech last June. The videotape of her evoking one of her "favorite political philosophers" before an audience of graduating teenagers and their parents has a blandly sinister quality that's all the more gripping for its echoing, tinny sound, a consequence of the soaring architecture of the National Cathedral, where Dunn gave the speech. The discovery that a member of the Obama administration expressed admiration for the thinking of a collectivist tyrant is, while disappointing, not so surprising. Dunn is hardly the first acolyte of the...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Dancing with the swine flu dilemma

It's an anxious time for many parents, as we wait for delivery of the H1N1 vaccine. In the last week or so, 19 more children have died of the swine flu virus, bringing the national total up to 81 children. The calm among us, and I like to think I'm one of them, recognize that in a country of 300 million people, a small number like that is just a blip, not even one day's worth of traffic fatalities. Yet, it is also true that two children have already died in Maryland. And, as we're hearing, nearly half of all victims do not have any underlying medical conditions that might make them more vulnerable to attack. We can't help but worry, even when we know that statistically there is...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Thank you, Wolf Blitzer

This is very exciting. Since the advent of the Internet, everyone has been wondering: "Whither journalism?" Now we know! As in the past, journalism will bestride the land in order to rake muck, speak truth to power and act as a kind of external conscience for those in power. By "those in power," I obviously don't mean the politicians and bureaucrats who man the great levers of government. Bo-ring. The National Endowment for the Arts wants grant-receiving "artists" to promote Obamacare and push other aspects of the White House's agenda? Yawnsville. Eric Holder sets up a neat little propaganda shop in the Department of Justice, from which operatives...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: "It's practically Halloween, already"

Years ago a friend advised me that I should think through well in advance what family rules I'd expect my teenagers, once I had them, to follow. I remember looking down fondly at the pack of little children around my ankles and thinking, yadda yadda, whatever, I've got ages - ages! - before I need to establish a grand system of Rules for Adolescents. At that point, the emphasis was on getting the children to say please, to shake hands ("look the grownup in the eye"), and to refrain from grimacing when presented with a plate of unfamiliar food. Weirdly enough, a decade later, the teenager and almost-teen still haven't required any special lawgiving. But my friend was right in a way...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Please, not the school pictures torture again

It's that time of year when millions of mothers open their children's school backpacks and wince. We do not recoil because the child's books are crusted with the accrued crumbs of a hundred lunchtime cookies (that comes later). We do not cringe at appallingly written essays marked "See me" (not yet, anyway). No, we flinch because there, inescapably, are fresh sheets of colorful paper stapled together bearing the headline: "Picture Day is Coming!" One glimpse of that paperwork and twang go the guilt strings. "Capture the Moment," we are urged, in curly, persuasive writing. "Don't let this time pass by. Share your pride in their accomplishments....

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Kids see the darndest things

Having a small child in the house can be rather like living in a place wired with closed-circuit television. After a while you forget that the machine is recording, constantly watching and noting what everyone is doing. But then comes the day when the tapes are played back, and - ouch! -- everyone sees what he looks like to the small, unwinking camera's eye. This has come up again in our household now that the youngest member is approaching the age of 4. Last fall she was still inventing babyish words; this fall she's speaking in subordinate clauses. Last September she toddled around obliviously while the older children packed lunchboxes and backpacks. This September she's taken to...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: What we remember from 9/11

We all know where we were. We can remember that morning with near-exactitude, if we make the effort. It was a day when the weather feels like a happy cliché, the sky that particular shade of rich blue that only ever seems to come in September, the air just cooling as autumn gently pushed summer aside. My family happened to be living at the time in Toronto. I had a newborn and a toddler at home; my husband had just left to take the older two to school. That lovely morning I was puttering around the kitchen, half-listening to the voice of the American draft dodger who hosted the CBC's big morning news show. Just after 8:30 am, the station began airing a pre-taped interview with some...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Moms breathing September's sigh of relief

And so it begins: The great cycle of washing, dressing, feeding, dropping-off, picking-up, haranguing, feeding, washing, and putting to bed of children that constitutes the resumption of school. These are the bittersweet days when small, apprehensive persons first encounter "circle time" and learn to line up for "library," while their mothers sit weeping in the parking lot. These are the nail-biting days when new kids sidle into class, hoping to fit into an alien roomful of staring strangers. These are glory days when sophomore swans return to campus in place of the freshman ducklings they were back in June, a thousand years ago. In some households, these are tear-streaked days as...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: These are good times for terrorists

How gratifying recent events must appear when seen through enemy eyes. Scotland has released the only man ever convicted in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet, flaming pieces of which fell into the village of Lockerbie. After only eight years in prison, Libyan secret service agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was flown back to a triumphant reception in Tripoli. al-Megrahi is mortally sick, of course; the not-exactly-ironclad case against him was up for appeal, of course; Britain wants Libyan oil, of course. Still: Terrorists took down a jet filled mostly with Americans, and two decades later the putatively guilty party has got away Scot-free. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the harder the...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: The everyday privations of health care rationing

"Rationing" is a word justifiably wreathed with alarm in the United States. With the looming prospect of Obamacare, horror stories are pouring in from Britain and Canada about nationalized medicine: The callous administrators, the long waiting lists for routine treatments, the scandalously high death rates for ailments that are, within our borders, swiftly cured. But rationing isn't always as extreme as it sounds, as I discovered 12 years ago when I lived in London. I had just climbed out of a black cab and entered the hospital where I was about to have our second child. I was experiencing the fierce urgency of now, and if you've ever had a baby you will know exactly how...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Spare us the outrage; politics is always shocking

Marie Antoinette's beheading during the French Revolution was prefigured by a campaign against her, which included the dissemination of unflattering rumors and a drawing that showed the queen's head grafted on to the body of a Harpy. In those days, that was daring political satire. It had grievous consequences. Now, in the age of Photoshop, every crank with a computer can be his own little Robespierre. Even children, cutting and pasting in the glow of the blue screen, can quickly learn how to lop off the heads of the famous and paste them insultingly on to the bodies of others. Fortunately for modern-day victims, e-mockery isn't fatal (as it was under the actual Robespierre, with his...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Burma's heroine shows true grit

It takes no courage to praise one of the bravest and most determined women in Asia. It takes a great deal of courage – and unbelievable grit – to be her. Tomorrow, Aung San Suu Kyi, the elegant face of suppressed Burmese democracy, will hear whether she faces five more years of detention. Suu Kyi’s resilience is, in a way, her principal crime: As the daughter of independence hero Aung San, she rose to international prominence in the late 1980’s, as head of Burma’s opposition National League of Democracy. Clapped under house arrest as part of a cruel military crackdown in 1988, she watched from behind guarded walls as the NLD surged to what should...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Europe pleads with America to come back

European intellectuals and pro-American continental politicians are increasingly anxious that the United States is withdrawing from decades of trans-Atlantic comity -- just as Russia is swaggering with renewed aggression. From tourism to diplomacy, there is, to many Europeans, an ominous shift taking place. American tourists have long been the butt of European exasperation, but we've also been the boon of the European tourism industry. Alas, the shriveling U.S. dollar has made travel to Europe prohibitively expensive for most Americans. American accents have apparently almost vanished from Europe's cafes, cathedrals and public squares. This puts both sides in a bad situation: American...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Summer is already half over

"What? That is totally not fair!" yelped the almost-eight-year-old. "Yes it is," her nine-year-old sister said encouragingly, "It means we still have half the summer left--" "No, it means it's half over, and we haven't even done anything!" "But we have, we've been to the beach, and we've gone to Maine, and we get to swim at the pool and eat ice cream and--" 'Well, I'm calling a taxi and I'm going to tell it to take me to the airport and I'm going somewhere like Williamsburg or Italy or China because I do not want summer to be half over and that's final." That little exchange, which was accompanied by furious Gallic gestures of...

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Who needs a dog?

“Bowwowow! Rararararraggh!” “We’re home!” “There you are! Good dogs! Hi Archie! Hi Annie! Hi Bill!” “C’mon, guys, c’mere—“ “Wait, look out!” “Oh, yuck. Oh, who did that? Bad dogs!” “What? What?” “Don’t step in it, silly!” “Step in what?” For years, I’ve been standing athwart the prospect of dog ownership yelling, “Stop!” Until this week, I could wave at my family only the usual ignorant non-dog-owning list of objections: That dogs are expensive; that they require feeding and walking and grooming and...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon on a hamster is cheaper than sushi

"Did you hear? We're getting a hamster!" "I know, except it's not a hamster, it's a guinea pig. Two of them! They're half price so it's like you only pay for one!" "Mummy, did you really say the girls can get two guinea pigs?" "I did not! I said I'd consider it. But I said I consider it unlikely." "Hah, she did not say so, girls." "Well, I--" "You did, too, you said Unlikely which means Maybe and that means Probably which means--Yay!" One girl turned to the other, and they both resumed clapping and bouncing in place. "Two guinea pigs! And maybe a hamster!" The smallest girl joined them, jigging about in...

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Never let your kids forget that freedom, education are priceless

For parents of school-age children, this is a particularly trying time of year. Not because of the innumerable events we’re obliged, and of course mostly happy, to attend – the plays, picnics, awards dinners, poetry readings, class parties, and graduation ceremonies – but because it has become so fantastically difficult for us to pry our children out of bed in the morning. Somehow the nearness of the end of the academic calendar, plus all the soothing sunshine and birdsong outside, makes it that much harder to make children heed duty’s call. “But school’s almost over…” someone will groan, as we shake his shoulder to induce...

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Why does happiness elude modern women?

Over the last four decades, American women have got almost everything the feminist movement promised. Lucky us! Are we happy now? No, we are not. All across the industrialized world, wherever egalitarian feminism has sprinkled its fairy dust, women report that they are considerably less happy and satisfied with life then were their benighted, patriarchy-oppressed, apron-wearing sisters of yore. “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a new study conducted by Wharton academics Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, finds that the happiness of Western women has been steadily declining over the exact period during which egalitarian feminism has supposedly been...

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What was it all about, Velupillai?

This week, Sri Lankans woke up to an amazing new reality. Their long national nightmare seems to have ended, suddenly and violently, with the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran. Never heard of him? Perhaps the phrase “Tamil Tigers” is familiar. Prabhakaran commanded the militant group known in Sri Lanka by its acronym LTTE, for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. For 25 years, the Tigers fought state forces in battles and massacres ranging all across the teardrop-shaped island in the Indian Ocean. The suffering has been staggering, with upwards of 80,000 people displaced, assassinated, mutilated, and slaughtered. Children and women, farmers and politicians, bus...

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A penitent Pope maligned in the Middle East

It is pretty unedifying to see how quick non-Catholics are to demand infallibility from the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church. It's frankly appalling how quickly non-Catholics become acid critics when the Pope deviates from whatever script some outsider wants him to follow. The prominent Israelis who seized on Benedict XVI's supposed inadequacies when the he spoke on Monday at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, should be ashamed of themselves. And they might, now that their ugly words have reverberated across the world and back again, want to reflect on the shortsightedness of their intemperance. When the Holy Father arrived in Israel, he immediately deplored the persistence of...

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A flu apocalypse but not just now

Back when swine flu was a gathering menace, I did what seemed a clever thing. I went straight to the supermarket, and spent two weeks’ worth of grocery money on food that, in a pinch, could last our family of seven for a month. As I pushed a cart loaded with dried beans, rice, and frugal canned victuals through the aisles, it seemed odd that one else appeared worried. Every other customer was cheerfully buying perishables, not stockpiling for the apocalypse. When I stopped to ask a supermarket employee about UHT milk, the European stuff that comes in tetra-pak boxes and has longer life than a sea turtle, the fellow pointed helpfully. “And it’s even on...

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Now they are almost 60

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently revealed that during the 2008 campaign he was so wowed by a speech Barack Obama gave that he went up to him and told him so. “With what I would describe as deep humility,” Reid recounts, the then-candidate replied quietly, “I have a gift, Harry.” By “gift,” the future president was of course referring to his own vast amazingness, in particular his capacity to move great crowds with the power of his oratory. Those Americans who remain unenthralled by the president’s mode of ponderous, self-important, prompter-driven delivery may dispute the idea that this constitutes a gift, but even the crankiest...

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Hang them from the yardarm

It is disappointing and somewhat anticlimactic to see what a real pirate looks like. A skinny African teenager in handcuffs is not a “pirate,” he’s a tragic human interest story waiting to be written. A proper pirate should be a dead pirate, preferably a majestic villain in corpse form hanging in a gibbet, as a lesson to other malefactors. The spectacle of Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse -- all sixteen- or eighteen-years’s worth of him, depending on whether you believe his mother or his father -- being hauled off to FBI headquarters in Manhattan doesn’t fit any satisfying buccaneer narrative. The kid was all swaggering menace when he had an AK-47 tucked under his...

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Taking in the recession, Down East style

If you have driven up the coast of Maine, chances are you have passed through a very pretty harbor town called Camden. It’s where Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote poetry. It’s the homeport of famed three-masted schooners. It’s where, as the town slogan goes, “the mountains meet the sea.” In winter you can ski within sight of the bay; in summer you can sail in the lee of the hills. And soon, to the horror of many locals, you will also be able to stroll into a clean, brightly lit, signature pink-and-orange Dunkin’ Donuts, right in the middle of Camden’s gilt-edged, salt-scented downtown. “People don’t travel here, or move here to...

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A nation of scatter-bra .... Uh, what did you say, I was distracted

A lot of things go through a person’s mind when she’s in the dentist’s chair with her mouth open and wads of cotton stuffed between lips and teeth. Her thoughts – ok, my thoughts, but I’ll bet yours are similar – skitter about haphazardly. If there is a scary whining sound coming from the dentist’s machinery, she might think of mosquitoes, and summer evenings, and a cottage by the lake and – ow! – with the twinge of a nerve suddenly she’s remembering the horrific scene from “Marathon Man” where Dustin Hoffman is strapped down and the evil Nazi dentist is— “Relax,” soothes the real-life dentist....

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Britain means nothing to him

One of the most remarkable aspects of Barack Obama – yet curiously, during the campaign, one of the least remarked – is that he’s the first American president to have no apparent affinity for Europe. For three centuries, Americans have understood that our principal geographical roots lie in Europe – specifically in Great Britain. That’s not to disparage important cultural contributions from anywhere else, but to recognize what’s true. Our institutions, literature, language and law all come from the U.K. Politically, we’ve stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain for nearly a century, through hot and cold war: Against Nazi aggression, against...

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Turn it on! Turn them all on!

On our kitchen bulletin board we used to have a dog-eared Mercator-style photograph of the world taken in, I think, 2001. The image was shot from space at night, and at a glance it showed where on earth people could use artificial light when the sun goes down. You could see the shape of the oceans by the glimmering of electric light along their edges. Large parts of Europe and the United States were lit up like, well, Los Angeles. The entire length of Japan blazed in the darkness. Africa, partly because of poverty and partly because it’s just so big, had only pinpoints showing areas of concentrated population. And it was obvious where the border lay between North Korea and South...

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A day on the road from boy to man

“No, you may not buy a razor-sharp, seven-inch serrated knife suitable for skinning large animals.” Now, that’s a sentence most parents won’t have to say very often. But I had to say it several times, firmly, before finally leaning down towards the 12-year-old boy and narrowing my eyes. “Actually, I don’t need to tell you why. You just can’t.” “What about an airsoft gun that looks like a machine gun?’’ “Argh!” I recoiled, laughing and putting my hands over my face. “Anyway, you already have an airsoft gun.” “Well, what can I get?” It was a reasonable question. My...

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Two sides on Chas Freeman

Chas Freeman Jr. has withdrawn his name from consideration. He will now not take the office he’d been offered in the Obama Administration, that of Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. “Phew!” goes up the cry amongst those who think the retired civil servant is a coddler of tyrants in Beijing and a dangerous equivocator when it comes to Israel. Freeman is “the worst of the worst,” I was told by a think tank scholar who closely follows the Middle East. The epithets used in fervid on-line conversations to describe the old China hand and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia are unprintable in a family newspaper. Yet “what a...

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Death to cricketeers

The War on Terror may be in disrepute, and in George W. Bush we may have lost its principal advocate, but terror is decidedly still with us. On Tuesday, militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, and small arms ambushed a bus carrying the Sri Lankan national cricket team as it made its way across Lahore for a match with the Pakistani home team. The cricketers had a police escort, and were traveling through an affluent neighborhood of Pakistan’s second-largest city. Eyewitnesses said the dozen or so attackers, some of whom arrived at the scene in motorized rickshaws, fired with the cool efficiency of trained commandoes. Seven members of the...

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Solid gold advice for tough times

The phone rang as I was writing this column. On the other end of the line was a friend whose husband makes a lot of money. “Are you doing any grocery shopping today?” she asked. “Because if you are, go to Safeway. They’re taking $10 off every purchase, but only if you pick up a paper coupon at the door.” “Wow,” I said, “I never pegged you for a coupon-grabber.” “Sign of the times, baby,” she replied, and rang off. Boy, is it. Not only are suburban Washingtonians now clipping coupons, they’re melting down their gold jewelry for money, the way Chinese peasants melted down scrap metal during the Great Leap...

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Freedom dies as radical Islam advances

Halfway through “Fitna,” the short film about radical Islam made by Dutch MP Geert Wilders, we see an angry imam, speaking Arabic and telling how it will be. “We have ruled the world before, and by Allah the day will come when we rule the entire world again!” the translation scrolls, “The day will come when we will rule America! The day will come when we rule Britain and the entire world!” Score one for the Islamists, where Britain is concerned. The cringing bureaucrats of Gordon Brown’s Labour government barred Wilders from entering the country last week to attend a screening of “Fitna” at, of all places, Britain’s Houses of...

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Mucking out the Augean playrooms

It’s amazing how often the great affairs of state play out in miniature in the domestic sphere. For instance, here is Congress cobbling together a gargantuan stimulus bill that is as packed with government pork as a casing is with meat. Urging this grotesque sausage along the production line is a president who in October told Americans he would “go through the federal budget line by line, page by page, [and] programs that don’t work, we should cut.” Sure we should. We should cut those programs! We should cut them right away! But we won’t. Certainly President Obama won’t, because when the time comes to cut there is always too much accreted...

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Too many what ifs in the tax code

Tom Dashche is out, and so is Nancy Killefer, but all through the talk this week of which Democrat had not paid what taxes I have not been able to get out of my head something I once saw late at night in my father's small house in New England. A light was still on in an upstairs room, so I poked my head in. My dad was sitting at his desk, which was strewn with paperwork. Some of the papers were yellow lined sheets, with columns of figures in his neat handwriting. Some were stacks of receipts and stray bits of information. Other papers were from the Internal Revenue Service. Diligently, in a process that took hours of record-keeping and figuring, my father was staying up late to make...

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It's a snow day!

“Yaaaaaaaay!” The cry was so faint that for a moment I took it for a distant siren. But then came thundering on the stairs of the sort baboons make, thumping across the veldt, and the bedroom door burst open. “There’s-snow-all-over-the-place-it’s-actually-settling-there’s-no-school-it’s-awesome-and-I’m-going-outside-now-ok-bye!” a boy yelled into the room, and then the door clattered shut again. The doorbell rang. From downstairs, I heard the boy shout, “I know! I’m coming!” Is there anything lovelier than a snow day in Washington? Down from the sky comes the pretty white stuff, out goes word that school is...

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Obama indoctrination in the schools

On Inauguration day, it was clear that some sort of disagreement was taking place, just ahead of where I stood in line at my local Safeway. “…And all the streets are closed,” an elderly customer was complaining, as her items were rung up. “That’s because this is history,” the cashier said irritably. “It’s always history when we get a new president,” the customer said mildly, loading her purchases into her cart. “It happens every four years.” “Well, this time it’s Barack Obama,” snapped the cashier. She turned her body away from the customer as if she couldn’t bear to have the woman in her...

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I miss our partisan Washington

Washington dinner parties used to be a lot of fun. If the gathering was stuffed with Democrats, everyone could enjoy deploring the depredations of the GOP. If it was a Republican crowd, guests tittered at Democratic expense. And in a mixed group, there’d be jovial trans-aisle ribbing, with admittedly the occasional irate flare-up. But now? It’s a weird time; an uneasy, earnest time. And the good-natured partisanship that used to enliven Washington gatherings seems to have vanished. In a mixed group, it’s become hard to know where to find points of conversational commonality apart from the painfully dull, such as number of children, schools attended, and the...

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A change is (almost) as good as a rest

These mornings back to work and school after a holiday break are gruesome affairs. No one seems able properly to wake up, even when finally dressed, and the household is essentially strewn with backpack-trailing, coffee-cup-clutching zombies until the awful moment, five minutes after everyone should have hustled out the door, when we all realize that we’re five minutes late and— “I forgot to pack my lunch!” a former zombie will cry, now rather alert. “Too late!” snaps a parent from the doorway. “But the child has to eat!” returns the other parent. Then everyone lurches belatedly to life. And while a lunchbox is hastily packed, various...

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Redemption of the Most Despised Comes in 2009

Care for a prediction for 2009? Here’s mine: This will be the year that Suburbia is redeemed. Not any particular suburb, not MacLean or Bethesda or Silver Spring, but the whole idea of suburbia, with its lawns and barbeques and basketball hoops, with its regularity and gentility and convenient access to the city. I predict, in short, a rethink of the merits of the suburban life, a life that has been showered with scorn for nearly forty years. You might say the derision began raining down 47 years ago, when Richard Yates published “Revolutionary Road,” now freshly made into an ennui-filled cinema experience starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. This coming...

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More 'Stuff' Does Not a Merry Christmas Make

Giving gifts to children at Christmas – or at Hannukah, or for birthdays, for that matter – is a nice idea. We get the pleasure of choosing a present we think they’ll like; they have the glee of receiving something we chose with them in mind. The whole exercise is meant to give delight and reinforce bonds of affection. So why has holiday gift giving become such a bummer and a chore? Perhaps I sound churlish, asking such a thing on Christmas Day. After all, this morning millions of American children will have dashed downstairs to find excitement beneath the tree: Mysterious and promising parcels packed by loving hands. One by one, with enforced pauses followed by...

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When Mothers Flip Out

A few months ago, our eight-year old began complaining that she couldn’t see properly. Purple blotches were floating in front of her eyes, she said, that disappeared only when she squinted. Then a couple of days ago, she began blinking hard, squeezing her eyes shut and then widening them dramatically whenever she was trying to read or concentrate. Some mothers are alert to every twinge their children experience, and have the pediatrician on speed-dial. Others pay almost no attention in the vague belief that most complaints don’t amount to much. These last (ahem) only begin paying attention when the symptoms have mounted, and then they panic, usually on a Friday...

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Don't Like Reading? Buy a Book Anyway

Every year when the mistletoe goes up, the plea goes out from America’s dwindling band of independent booksellers: Please, people, keep us alive! Buy our books, give them as gifts! For decades, small bookshops have battled the twin menaces of massive, price-cutting chains and the vast, easily browsed shelves of on-line retailers. Many have failed. Not a month seems to go by without the lights winking out at yet another small store. Washington’s own Olsson’s closed in September after 36 years in the business. Now, it’s a shame when any company folds, but the bleating from independent bookstores has often seemed rather tiresome. Why should readers conspire to...

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Notes on the Diet of Worms

It turns out that if you live long enough, you really do turn into your parents. I spent decades in full flight from certain practices that prevailed in my childhood homes. Never would I impale avocado pits on toothpicks and suspend them in a glass of water by the sink in the hopes that they’d germinate, as my mother did. Never ever would I save eggshells and peelings in a countertop receptacle in order to tip them later into some repulsive decomposing heap, as was my father’s custom. Mine would be a home free of plant-based ickiness. The fact that gift-houseplants died with unusual swiftness when they came to live with me confirmed my belief that the general muck of...

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Cool and codependent on Black Friday

I suppose I ought to be happy that I'm finally so popular, but, I don't know, I guess I'm just not that into them any more. “Enjoy 15% off! It's not too late to save! Early bird special! Free shipping! 5 days only! Special savings! Extra savings! Cashmere event! Mattress event! Teak event! Save BIG! Hurry!” There was a time when those words would have thrilled me -- would have put a sparkle in my eye and sent a tingle down to that little spot at the tips of my fingers where they grip the credit cards. Now I feel detached. The opposite of love really is not hate, but indifference. My retail suitors offer me 30-40% off, and the cynical thought forms: Come back when...

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Can We Get to the Last First, Please?

If I had a dollar for every time the media have pointed out that Barack Obama is the nation’s “first African-American President-Elect” this past week, I’d be able to bail out AIG single-handedly. Since election night, it feels as though there’s been non-stop, wall-to-wall, absolutely breathless reporting of the amazing firstness of it all. “The nation’s first African-American President Elect has given his first press conference!” “The nation’s first African-American President-Elect has made his first visit to the Oval Office!” “The nation’s first African-American President-Elect is digesting his first...

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Obama's Tax Hikes Haunt America's 'Rich'

There is a specter haunting the suburbs. Actually, there are hundreds of them, mostly made of plastic, and they’re hanging from trees and porches and front door lintels in expectation of the great candy-grab coming on Friday. At our house, we do not go in for Halloween decorations, apart from the one-pumpkin-per-child that somehow I get talked into buying every year. Nonetheless, we, too, have a specter haunting our house that is visible even to small children, as I discovered when I stepped outside yesterday to find the seven-year-old diligently sticking up Halloween posters of her own design. “Come on peopel! Macane is grat!” said one, which was stuck to a...

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Obama and the Softening of America

When the Princess of Wales died beside her Egyptian lover in a car crash in Paris 11 years ago, Britain erupted with demonstrations of bizarre and desperate grief. Huge mawkish heaps of teddy bears suffocated the gates of Buckingham Palace; floral bouquets smothered the surface of a little island at the princess’s family home. Stiff upper lips wobbled as, with a great bawling the British populace collapsed in orgiastic mourning for the beautiful, lost “people’s princess.” Not everyone joined in. The more contained, traditionally stoic types walked bewildered amongst their ululating countrymen. The Royal Family was denounced for its unfeeling continence, its...

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Respectable Republican Cloth Coasts for the Kids

“Brrr,” remarked our teenager. “It’s a cold morning.” “It is,” I agreed. “Which reminds me,” she said in the careless, airy tones that generally signal the onslaught of a campaign, “I’m probably going to need some winter clothes.” I put a newspaper with a “Dow Plunges” headline down on top of another that asked, “Recession…or Depression?” and observed that she seemed to have plenty of warm clothes in her closet, and that she might enjoy wearing those. “Yes, but—“ she tried, then changed her mind and laughed. “Ok, fine, what about a coat? You couldn’t...

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GOPers Queasy About Obama Nobody Knows

Lately, an awful lot of Republicans have been greeting each other like seasick passengers on a lurching vessel. The debate this week alas did nothing to quell the queasiness. “How’re you holding up?” one will ask. “Agh,” another will reply, “I can’t even look at the papers any more.” “Did you watch the debate?” And then there’s an exchange of winces, and maybe even a stomach-grab, as commiserating friends feel the stab at their vitals that comes from seeing drifting poll numbers for the War Hero and rising ones for Senator Cipher. It is normal for people who follow politics to feel a bit of vertigo now and then....

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"Obama's Gonna Lead'em"

Unless Barack Obama really does believe that he’s a secular messiah, it has got to be a little disconcerting to see the lengths to which his devotees are going to show their belief in him and his – his—what? Honestly, what is it? What do they believe this long, cool drink of water will do, if he wins in November? Will there be magic? Will the Pelosi lie down with the Boehner, the God-fearing with the god-denying, and will there be rainbows? And if there isn’t -- or aren’t – what then? “We’re gonna spread happiness! We’re gonna spread freedom! Obama’s gonna change it….Obama’s gonna lead ‘em.”...

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We are all Wall Streeters now

It’s irksome to hear politicians talking about Wall Street and Main Street as if they were two different places. Please: The same people walk down both streets (though some are undoubtedly better dressed) and we are those people. We don’t walk in a literal sense, obviously. Even most of the firms that operate under the banner of “Wall Street” aren’t actually located on that little stretch of asphalt in downtown Manhattan. Similarly, the “Main Street” that is used rhetorically to evoke nostalgia for cozy small-town America does not begin to encompass the strip malls, office blocks, car dealerships and department stores that it actually denotes....

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Gov. Palin exposes several Democratic hypocrisies

Every parent who has ever sought earnestly to show children the great exciting world will know what it is to become inadvertently the most tedious person in the group. I started to bore them when we were still on the train. “Look, girls,” I yelped, as we trundled through New Jersey. “There in the distance! That’s Manhattan!” Of course the moment I said it the train passed a block of ugly warehouses, and the view was cut off. Out the window, all the girls saw were slabs of rusting metal and puddles of brackish water. “That’s Manhattan?” one said in dismay. “No, no, not that, it’s – there!” But they had...

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Palin is showing our girls a new feminist model

Will Sarah Palin show American girls a way out of the grim, cramped, resentful world of gender feminism? I think she’s doing it already. Palin’s eruption on the national scene is giving American girls a picture of can-do womanhood that probably hasn’t been seen since the Beecher daughters were stirring up trouble in the 19th century. Such moxie, such political gusto, and with an apparently happy marriage and large family, besides! When I was a girl in the late sixties and early seventies, there were no women like Palin. For sure they existed – more on that later – but for us the avatars were supposed to be women like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan....

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On the ‘Mao-Maoing’ of Gov. Sarah Palin

When the news came that Sarah Palin was John McCain’s pick as his running mate, a shout of jubilation rang through our house. I was just as surprised as the people around me, and immediately clapped my hand to my mouth. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I was hoping this smart, daring, conservative woman would be on the GOP ticket. And what a dame! She’s beautiful, accomplished, decisive, a proven scourge of corrupt insiders — better yet, she’s a dynamic American who clearly loves life and knows how to live it. No wonder people immediately began making comparisons to Teddy Roosevelt: A hunter with a passel of children, a zest for life, and a gift...

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Conventions are fun, but reality is back to school

When you are a stay-at-home mother, certain weeks of the year bring home with extra poignancy both your intense proximity to the quotidian things and your echoing distance from the grander scheme. I am thinking, naturally, of the fact that the political conventions take place over the very same two weeks that we are all getting our children fitted with new shoes and notebooks and slotted back into school. Only a short flight away, where half of Washington has decamped, all sorts of cool things are happening. Delegates are waving signs, party operatives are threatening each other and rumors are winging. Everyone’s feet hurt from standing or milling or striding around all day in an...

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A summer full of ‘poshens’ and profits

If the U.S. economy is running into trouble, you can’t blame our family. This summer, the cup of entrepreneurialism hath been running over to such a degree that cash is now absolutely sluicing around the household. I keep coming across little piles of coins, and wadded up dollar bills stuffed into small handbags, and damp, folded-up currency stuck to the insides of the washing machine. There’s money jingling in sundress pockets and cargo-pant pockets and coin purses and in the bottom of the bag we use to carry towels to the swimming pool. The place, as I say, is awash in legal tender — and none of it is mine. It all belongs to our children, four out of five of whom have...

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A glorious spectacle built on government repression

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was a stunner, wasn’t it? Dazzling images of gorgeously dressed synchronized masses, all dancing and drumming and spinning and dangling from wires. It was amazing, and beautiful. Congratulations, Chinese Communist Party! You’ve given the world a glorious spectacle that no feeble democracy will likely ever match. How could we equal it? No democratic government could evict a million urbanites and bulldoze their dwellings to make way for glittering new Olympic structures, the way the Chinese have. In no free society could bureaucrats mandate the mass closure of factories to provide clean-ish air to the world’s athletes, the way...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: We should never have given China the games

I can’t remember the last time I opened a newspaper or magazine and didn’t see a photograph of some brilliant, gleaming new monument to the extraordinary rise of China. It’s the eve of the 2008 Olympic Games: Time to show the rubes what a new superpower looks like! Here is the Egg, the astonishing, curvilinear structure that is Beijing’s new performing-arts center. Here is the Bird’s Nest, another staggeringly elegant feat of engineering in which the world's athletes will compete. Here, too, is the stunning, assembled-overnight marvel of modern Shanghai, laid out in miniature for the wonderment of all. They’re thinking big, these Chinese, and, as...

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Who died and made him president?

R e-entry after a longish vacation is always a disorienting time.  You turn the key and have to push the door hard to get past the drifts of unopened mail. Most of the mail is bills, of course, and that brings on its own sense of delirium.  But for me what’s made the past few days especially bizarre is to find that, after two weeks of avoiding the news cycle, I return to discover that Barack Obama has become my president, prophet and anointed philosopher king — all without an......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Children should be seen and must be heard

W e’d been toiling for what felt like ages across remote stretches of roasting sand, with beach chairs banging against our legs and heavy bags digging into our shoulders, when at last the beautiful blue ocean slid into view. Curiously enough, this being the Delaware shore, we weren’t the only family that had made the trip.  The seaside, what we could see of it through a haze of heat and sunscreen fumes, was a churning mass of sunburned flesh, gaudy umbrellas, colorful towels and cheap plastic buckets.   The whine of......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: When the baby hates the beach

I  think we can all agree that the point of a family vacation is for everyone in the family to have a happy time together in a place equally pleasing to exuberant children and weary parents.This is nearly impossible, of course; something almost invariably gives, whether it is the "happy" part, the "together" element, or the bit about "equally pleasing."Yet there’s always that tantalizing statistical possibility that perhaps this year, this time, this particular family will have the yearned-for memorable and defining experience.  Huge industries cater to this universal family......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Tell the children the world is their oyster

A  friend of mine gave his 11-year-old daughter a pair of sneakers the other day, thinking she’d be pleased. She was not. She became agitated when she saw the label and told him, "I can’t wear these, because of child labor!" It took half an hour of Internet research for him to persuade the girl that her anxieties were unfounded, and that Nike did not enslave small children in remote foreign places.What’s a pre-pubescent child doing, panicking about the industrial origins......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: iPod, youPod, but must theyPod, too?

A s we sat around the dinner table last night, the children and I, a conversation took place that was for everyone else innocently cheerful — avariciously cheerful, even — and for me, fraught with tension, remorse, and anxiety. And I found myself wondering: Am I alone in this?"I’m just asking," said the 6 1/2-year-old," wiping her mouth with a napkin and putting her hand up to ward off premature objections. "When do you think I will get an iPod?"The other......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: ‘The View’ women throw Michelle Obama puffballs

Weeeeeeoooooh!" shrieked the studio audience as Michelle Obama came on the set of ABC’s "The View" yesterday in her role as guest co-host.  Aggrieved? Not this time. Controversial? Heavens, no. Here was Mrs. Obama as the Ideal Candidate’s Ideal Wife: radiant, chic in a floral sun dress, uniting not dividing, confiding "it’s fun to look pretty."Her charming blandness was, of course, deliberate. Mrs. Obama’s appearance on the televised kaffee klatsch is part of what appears to be a calculated effort to......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: The games people try to play on gasoline

I’m not sure when I began dabbling in the game, but ever since gas hit $4 a gallon I’ve been playing like a fanatic — albeit in a fanatically slow, idling, dream-sequency way.The object of the Gas Game is to drive apparently normally, while deploying innumerable cunning tricks that allow you to exult secretly that you are using less gasoline than everyone else. There are so many ways to win! You win every time you cut the gas and coast toward a stoplight using only your car’s momentum. If you time......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Bye-bye, Mr. Unity Guy

It was sweet, this fantasy that an American longing for unity could somehow be fulfilled single-handedly by a handsome, plausible young senator from Chicago.But it was always going to be sweet the way artificial sugar is sweet: without any caloric content, and leaving a weird aftertaste that keeps reminding you that what you just swallowed wasn’t real.How could it ever have been real, anyway?  Barack Obama is a very liberal fellow. In his......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: What a difference eight years make

The irony would be delicious if it weren’t so shameful. Eight years ago, Democrats worked themselves into a fury over the supposed "disenfranchisement" of Florida voters. There was near-hysteria over the need to count every single Florida vote — and indeed, to recount every single Florida vote in counties where it suited the party. Democrats questioned the "fundamental fairness" of our political system when the party’s insistence on selective recounting went before a coterie of enigmatic power brokers in Continued...

 

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Washington’s Ostragoths sack the dinner table

Etiquette columnist Miss Manners printed a letter the other day from a woman hoping to introduce a new item of cutlery, the "cheese scissors."This device would be handy, the woman wrote, in cutting (rather than tearing, T-Rex-like) those embarrassing lengths of cheese that can stretch between mouth and slice when one is eating pizza, pasta or onion soup.Isn’t it heart-warming? That anyone would propose adding a new element of formality to the genial barbarism of the American table seems to me completely charming — and touchingly optimistic. Western societies have......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Oh, the agony of parenthood

If, on a sunny day, your small children open a lemonade stand, do you charge them for the lemons pilfered from your kitchen? Of course not? What kind of a scrooge do I take you for? OK. Fair enough. So you clean up their sugary mess, having paid for the ingredients, while the children dance around chortling about all the money they’ve made.It’s a taste of entrepreneurialism, you think. Who knows where it may lead? Perhaps Bill Gates once sold homemade......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: My beautiful cut-n-pasted mommy

Even as you read this, sweet little children across the country are carefully finishing the last, dear festive bits of the card, collage or tiny, clumsy sculpture that they have made to give to the temporary love of their young lives on Mother’s Day. Children delight in this annual offering of potted violets or hand-decorated framed photos to "the best Mom" or "the world’s most beautiful mother." It’s one of the perks of our job: However haggard we feel, our young children think we’re ravishing.Alas, children’s adoring acceptance seems completely......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: The delicate dance of the seven evasions

To a degree, polite society requires all of us to conceal our true feelings. We smile appreciatively when our hostess presents us with a plate of something we really don’t feel like eating.We express unfelt rapture when we receive gifts we don’t particularly want. We downplay some bit of personal good news in the presence of an unhappy friend.And when someone asks, "What do you truly think?" we are often very, very careful not to say quite all that goes through our minds.So it’s not dishonesty in the darkest sense......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: She’s awful but at least Hillary is not a snob

I did not think it possible that I could ever find myself rooting for That Awful Woman. Indeed, I can’t believe it really is possible.The person with my face who sat at my desk gazinghappily at the results scrolling across the screen from Pennsylvania late Tuesday night clearly cannot be me, and I hope that whoever she is will go away and let me back into my house.But never, either, could I have imagined that conservative women could fall under the thrall......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Looking for hope in the wrong face

There’s always been something faintly comical in the messianic media coverage of Barack Obama, but with the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI in Washington this week, the treatment of the junior senator from Illinois looks sillier than ever.Both men come bearing a message of hope. Yet only one of them has any real prospect of......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Are members of U.S. media mostly of pacifist bent?

If you are inclined to see the presence of an American flag pin on an anchorman’s lapel as a mark of jingoism, or if you really think a craven establishment media colluded with a dark-hearted White House to beat the drums of war, etc., in the months preceding the Iraq invasion, you’ll probably scoff at the idea of a pacifist media. Surely the American media are the corporate handmaiden of......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Into the great, unplugged silence

If you’re a Washington news junkie in search of a genuinely restorative holiday, may I recommend that you skip the spa, forego the tropical surf, and instead follow a few simple steps? First, pile your children into the car and drive to northern Maine. Somewhere along the way, manage to lose your cellphone charger, and then take up temporary residence in a small rented condo with no Internet connection and......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Pastor’s hate-America politics is Obama’s problem

Now it makes sense that Barack Obama is so willing to meet for a nice chat with America’s enemies, should he win the White House. Now it’s clear why this plausible, even-tempered fellow might think it fruitful to have coffee with frothing anti-Semites such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, raving anti-Americans such as Continued...

 

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Homeschool parents breathing easier, for now

Homeschoolers are a varied bunch, yet there is about them, unfairly, too often a whiff of the dubiously unconventional. Just recently, here in D.C. and in California, homeschooling families have come under alarming pressure from the forces of bureaucratic orthodoxy.That’s not so surprising, given the irritated suspicion with which homeschooling is still broadly regarded. (Speaking as a one-time at-home educator, believe me, I know about this.) What is surprising, and refreshing, is that a spirit of compromise seems so far to......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: POTUS ’08 is a game for all ages

"But I don’t get it," the 11-year-old asks over cinnamon toast. "How many points exactly do you need to win?" "More than the other guy," I say, pouring coffee. "That, plus a mess of superdelegates — though not necessarily — and you get the nomination."No points for guessing our topic. It’s the morning after Mrs. Clinton’s resuscitation, and the children are trying once again to puzzle out the workings of the absorbing and mysterious national game that has all the adults around them talking politics like monomaniacs. Children in the......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Slumping towards cultural illiteracy

There I was, feeling rather smug after reading through a new report about the woeful ignorance of teenagers. Large numbers of 17-year-olds, it appears, are clueless about important historical dates and utterly innocent of basic cultural references such as to Oedipus and Big Brother.Children whose parents went to college tend to do better in such surveys, so I assumed that our own family’s teenager, a 13-year-old honors student, would do comparatively well.So, naturally, right after school I ambushed the poor child. Who were Continued...

 

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Bon voyage overdue for the handsome devil

If he hadn’t been so tall and dashing, could the cult of Fidel Castro ever have lasted this long? For that matter, had Che Guevara been fat and bald, would college students bother wearing his picture on their T-shirts? I doubt it. Perhaps this sounds absurdly reductive, but there’s no exaggerating the dazzling effect that good looks can have upon the unwary. And fairly or not, people instinctively associate......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Family entertainment at Kennedy Center: ‘It sucks!’

"Good afternoon, young ladies," said a beaming elderly woman wearing the red tunic of a Kennedy Center ticket taker. "Hope you enjoy the program!" Three little girls smiled back at her and dashed eagerly through the door into the Family Theatre, where productions "for young audiences" are held.What fun! Here we were, two mothers and some daughters, out for a Sunday matinee musical based on a "beloved children’s story" from Continued...

 

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Al Qaeda’s new children’s crusade

It’s become a truism that the world was able to take the full measure of Germany’s wartime crimes because the Nazis kept such meticulous records of whom they killed, and where.It was the nature of that murderous bureaucratic state to punctiliously dot its umlauts and cross its T’s. Thus by the banality of its paperwork was the full monstrousness of its acts revealed.Denying what the Nazis themselves documented marks one as either an intellectual outlier or a total nut bar (see:......

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MeghanCox Gurdon: Moving on schedule to minivan martyrdom

Jump in, or we’ll be late!" Three girls fling in their school backpacks and we zoom off to another school. Two girls leap out, calling for their brother. The toddler, strapped in her car seat, keeps repeating "Whacka Bamba," which is the hard-to-pronounce name of some fellow she keeps hearing about on the car radio.Three children climb into the minivan, reach for bagels, and we head for the highway. A few minutes and much asphalt later, we pause to drop the second-youngest girl at her art class.The rest of......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: We’ve become the camo nation

At Whitetail Ski Resort last weekend, the first one who caught my eye was a snowboarder cutting down the slopes in neck-to-boot gray camouflage.A few minutes later, a skier passed overhead in a chair lift; he was wearing trousers of a dark woodland camouflage. But the final straw came in the form of a small girl not more than 3 who was stumping through the lodge clad in a snowsuit of pink-and-gray camouflage. That’s when it struck me: Just when did we become a camo nation? And why, in a......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Chilling climate for journalists in our neighbor to the north

Come with me to a bland room in a law office where a painting of a road with grass growing beside it hangs on the wall, a nod toward the human instinct for beauty. One one side of a long table placed beneath the artwork is a middle-aged blonde wearing a navy-blue cardigan whose eyes betray fatigue but whose manner conveys sly authority. She is the powerful person in this tableau, but she’s not making a show of it. Her elbows rest on the mahogany-colored tabletop. Facing her is a......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Must conservatives change or die?

In this election cycle, we’ve long since gone past the point of preposterousness in the use of the word "change." The people have gone mad for it. The political classes are obsessed with it. The presidential candidates bleat constantly about being the agent of it. Indeed, however comical the White House aspirants must know they’re beginning to sound, the poor things daren’t stop invoking change for fear some rival will continue using it and thereby succeed in establishing him-......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Calm is out of style on the hustings

A little over 16 years ago, in the week before my wedding, I began to notice a certain gloom settling over my husband-to-be. It was disconcerting. Wasn’t this supposed to be the giddiest time of our lives? If he couldn’t be enthusiastic now, on the very threshold of married life, did he really want to cross it?My fiance sought to explain. He wanted the outcome, but hated the process. He wanted us to be married, not to get married. In political terms, he was an excellent candidate ideally suited to......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Heretics for tea and other good news

The old English comedy troupe, Beyond the Fringe, had a routine mocking BBC reporting during World War II that always began with a rich, plummy voice intoning: "And now, with news of fresh disasters ..." As with the wartime BBC, so with modern media. Everyone dwells on the darkest, the saddest and the gloomiest, and it’s not only on local TV that it has to bleed to lead.For our troops in Continued...

 

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Uncommon death in the suburbs

Every week, it seems, we hear of some horror from the distant Islamic world, some ghastliness bound up with alien concepts of honor and insult.A woman gets 200 lashes for enduring violent rape and having the temerity to complain about it. Another woman is jailed and threatened with death for letting schoolchildren name a stuffed toy after the prophet of Islam. A man throttles his teenage daughter for her refusal to wear a headscarf — oh. Wait. That wasn’t news from the Continued...

 

Meghan Cox Gurdon: ’Tis the (open) season on believers

Ah, the holidays, when all across the land atheists and anti-Christians are able to enjoy fresh bursts of indignation at the sight of their countrymen celebrating those old retrograde tidings of comfort and joy. The Enlightenment has come and gone, Nietzsche has spoken, and still people persist in singing carols, hanging wreaths and going to midnight Mass as if it meant something.Even menorahs are beginning to goad the unbelieving. Fresh from a nationwide book tour for "God Is Not Great:......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: The danger of angry, alienated young men

As you read this, libraries, beauty salons and gutted cars are still smoking in the streets of France. Once again, French "youths," as American news organizations delicately call them, have been "rioting." Two years ago, turbulent young men across France torched hundreds of vehicles and fought pitched battles with police for three weeks. Then, as now, the rioting erupted after the accidental death of two teenagers in an encounter with police.We are told that the rioters are expressing their alienation from society, their frustration with a lack of opportunity and......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Don’t read it and weep: The flickering candle of sub-literate America

Chances are by late this afternoon, you’ll be full of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and pie, and the easy chair will beckon. If you’re in an educated minority, you’ll pick up a book. If you’re in the educated minority’s educated minority, it may even be a novel.Who reads when most others have moved to televised Thanksgiving football? They are the dwindling few Americans for whom books are still a daily part of life, according to a new study from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, for the first time......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: It’s not easy peeling green

Last night, I was tidying up the kitchen after the depredation of my children when I caught myself behaving like a member of the dust-bowl Joad family — or like some other quaint remnant from that long-ago time when Americans husbanded their resources, hoarded their scraps and sought to make a use of every discarded thing. There I was, scooping sheaves of graded homework across the countertop and into the garbage without a qualm. Handfuls of free-range, hormone-free eggshells went in with them, plus rice and sauce scraped from innumerable......

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Meghan Cox Gurdon: Don’t forget the barbarism and savagery of our enemy

L istening to the news this week, it would be easy to conclude that American security forces are roaming the Middle East on a campaign of torture, trickery and indiscriminate murder. This week, we returned to the debate over whether waterboarding is a nasty method of information gathering or outright, indefensible torture.Listeners to NPR on Tuesday could be forgiven for not knowing there even is a debate: In an afternoon news update, NPR said proposed Attorney General Michael Mukasey had angered legislators by not repudiating "a form of torture known......

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