A little bit of After Effects can be a dangerous thing… Or a funny thing.

Brian Boyd, in an interesting article, argues that scholars of literature need to retreat from the shopworn ‘deconstructionist’ approach to texts, and consider anew what science has to offer the discipline: Patterns in fiction, as in life, may proliferate and obscure other patterns. They can yield rich but sometimes far-from-evident implications. They may be open-ended:… Continue reading

Richard Widmark has passed away at age 93. One of his best performances, in my opinion, was as the creepy Doctor Emmet Taulbee in the under-rated adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s The Moonshine War (1970), which also starred Alan Alda in an excellent offbeat role before he got stuck in Hawkeye mode.

Maverick P has a look at more of the “deep thoughts” of Sam Harris. In Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), in the section Are Atheists Evil?, Sam Harris writes: If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers.… Continue reading

Former Boston Globe columnist David Wilson has passed away. My father worked with him during the 1980s (they were both regulars on the op-ed page). In fact, as I recall it, he also worked at the Herald under Hal Clancy, and took the offer from the Globe on my dad’s advice (I think they both… Continue reading