Ross Douthat

Yglesias wonders, in the context of the Georgian Patriarch's pro-natalist baptism policy:Less clear to me is why so many people seem concerned by the specter of low birth rates. Historically, low levels of population are associated with high average living standards. That should be less true in the modern world where we're not as dependent on agriculture for our economic activity. But the logic hasn't completely vanished. If there were dramatically fewer people in… More »

My comments on the question of Pope Benedict's culpability for mass suffering and death in Africa has generated quite a lot of reader email, as you might expect. Here's a representative note, from a reader who works for a "leading global health organization":... while I probably wouldn't accuse the Pope directly of causing "massive death and suffering," here are some facts: many, if not most, Catholic hospitals and dispensaries in Africa refuse to give out condoms.… More »

A little while ago, Shelby Steele wrote an op-ed discussing the problems that conservatives have appealing to minorities, and especially African-Americans. As long as the black experience is shaped by a sense of grievance and alienation, Steele suggested, there will always be an essentially "anti-conservative orientation" to minority politics, and liberals will always be able to outbid the Right for their votes. There's no way, in the end, for a conservative party… More »

If for some unfathomable reason this engaging Times profile - which focuses on his late-in-life career as a global warming skeptic - is your first sustained encounter with the mind of Freeman Dyson, I highly recommend browsing at length in the NYRB's archive, or else buying the essay collection drawn from its pages, and from earlier publications. (I haven't read it, but I should note that a friend swears by The Starship and the Canoe, a dual biography of the… More »

Well, this should be interesting, at the very least ... More »

I was going to let the latest round of outrage about the Pope, condoms and AIDS pass without throwing in my two cents, but then Jeff Goldberg went and linked to David Rothkopf's list of the world's "biggest losers," which includes Benedict XVI ("a creepy old ex-Hitler Youth member," in Rothkopf's words) for his supposed contribution to "massive death and suffering" in Africa. It's almost as if Jeff's trying to get a rise out of me! So: I could respond to Rothkopf's… More »

Isaac Chotiner, on that Atul Gawande piece I just mentioned:Gawande makes the case that [solitary confinement] can plausibly be called torture. He mentions that few if any other countries keep their prisoners in such conditions, and regrets this unfortunate example of American exceptionalism. However, he leaves one important point out of his otherwise exhaustive case ... Gawande never considers the idea of punishment as an end in itself, and it is here, I think,… More »

Atul Gawande's New Yorker piece on solitary confinement deserves to be read in tandem with Cato Unbound's symposium on American incarceration rates. The former looks at a particular issue in prison policy, and the latter at the general trend toward ever-greater imprisonment, but both invite the reader to ponder the ways in which one of the biggest policy successes of the past twenty-five years - the large-scale reduction in the crime rate - has enmeshed us in a net… More »

An interesting, largely fair-minded look at a much-too-short-lived experiment. More »

Via Alex Massie, a life story that no contemporary novelist could invent - and that no future historian of the reality-TV era will be able to resist. More »

Andrew Stuttaford's big Standard piece on Europe and the economic crisis offers a lot to chew on, but the essential argument is this: Having created a continent-wide government (and governing class) whose responsibilities far outstrip its democratic legitimacy, the nations of Europe risk reaping a populist whirlwind - which "threatens to push already alienated electorates in the direction of the extremist politics of left or right" - as they attempt to navigate… More »

Tyler Cowen calls this piece, on Rawls' relationship to Christianity, "one of the best mid-length essays I've read in some time." I concur. Here's a passage from Rawls' senior thesis, entitled " A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith" (and written, as the title suggests, when he was still a believer), that gives you a taste of the Christian thinker he might have been: We reject mysticism because it seeks a union which excludes all particularity, and… More »

Reihan does a good job of exploring what you might call the "sociology of political journalism" angle to the liberal list-serv story, which to my mind is the main thing that makes it worth remarking on. More »

Michael Kinsley was kind enough to respond to this post, in which I objected to his suggestion that pro-lifers who oppose embryo-destructive research don't mean what they say, because if they did they'd want to forbid embryo destruction in fertility clinics as well. He writes: Douthat's reply was that (a) opponents of stem-cell research do indeed oppose the creation and destruction of all embryos in fertility clinics, and not just the ones that are used for… More »

Here's an interesting go-round between Jay Cost and Ruy Teixeira, pivoting off the latter's recent report on "A New Progressive America." I'm on Teixeira's side insofar as it's possible to make predictions about the political future; I'm on Cost's insofar as it isn't. Put another way, I think it would be very difficult to put together a similarly-persuasive report making the case that there's a "New Conservative America" aborning: To the extent that current trends… More »

It's awfully hard to say anything that constructive about the infamous JournoList without having access to the kind of discussions that take place on it. When I first heard about it, a while back, it seemed like it might be an example of the movement-ification of American liberalism, in which left-of-center types (especially people in the press) who once would have airily dismissed the idea that they belonged to a partisan "team" began attempting to imitate the… More »

Via John Schwenkler and Commonweal, it's nice to see somebody in the Vatican finally saying the right things - the Christian things, if you will - about the horrible case of the nine-year-old Brazilian girl who had an abortion after being impregnated by her stepfather, and whose mother and doctor were publicly excommunicated by the local archbishop shortly thereafter. It was also a pleasure, in a related vein, to read the Pope's impressive letter offering… More »

Michael Brendan Dougherty's profile of Mark Sanford makes for interesting reading; so do the follow-ups from Reihan (here and here) and Larison. You can imagine a very ideologically interesting Republican primary in which a figure like Sanford came on strong as a more mainstream version of Ron Paul (small-government rigor plus foreign-policy noninterventionism, minus the nutty-uncle factor), while someone like, say, Jon Huntsman ended up representing the party's… More »

These are ugly, ugly numbers no matter how you slice them. But those who slice with outlandish coup scenarios in the back of their minds will note the American military now earns a "great deal" of trust from a larger swathe of the American public than the White House, Congress, the media, and organized religion combined. More »

I don't really have any commentary to offer here, but it's been striking to read Amy Welborn's reflections (start here, then go here and here and here and keep going to the present) following the untimely death of her husband alongside Meghan O'Rourke's ongoing meditation on mourning (here's the first entry; here's the latest) in the wake of her mother's passing. There are continuities, but the counterpoints are what's most remarkable: O'Rourke is secular and… More »