Reviews and News:
Gender is not a spectrum. “Once we assert that the problem with gender is that we currently recognise only two of them, the obvious question to ask is: how many genders would we have to recognise in order not to be oppressive? Just how many possible gender identities are there? The only consistent answer to this is: 7 billion, give or take.”
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Matthew Franck on the origins of religious liberty. Responses from James Hitchcock and S. M. Hutchens.
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Advice on growing old.
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The great Sparrow Wars of the 1870s: “‘It was widely believed that sparrows could rid the urban centers of caterpillars, cankerworms and other pestiferous insects.’ Additionally, recent immigrants from Europe, where the House Sparrow is native, ‘prized the birds as reminders of the homeland.’ Unfortunately, like many such introductions, the House Sparrow didn’t conform to human plans.”
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Missouri pulls its “inclusive” speech guide for being insufficiently inclusive.
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Essay of the Day:
Alan Jacobs considers the future of the university in the summer issue of National Affairs:
“For the past several years, American universities have been buzzing with protests and counter-protests, charges and counter-charges. These have centered on a rather small cluster of concepts: safe spaces, the campus as home, microaggressions, and trigger warnings. As I write these words, the fighting seems to have subsided, though I suspect only for a season, as the combatants assess their positions. Perhaps, then, this is a good time to perform our own assessments: to explore the moral network within which these concepts operate, to see what consequences their deployment has had, and to suggest what might be required to restore to campus intellectual life some of the energy that has been sapped by this controversy.
“For, whomever or whatever you might blame for the current state of affairs, the recent hostilities have been distinctly unfriendly to the creating and sustaining of intellectual energy. Universities need to get beyond these disputes, at least to some degree, if they are going to retain any meaningful chance to fulfill their social missions.”
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Image of the Day: Supercell
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Poem: Michael Spence, “Undertow”
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