On The Front Line
Like mosquitoes dive-bombing a rock, a swarm of writers are waging a spirited, ineffectual, attack on human free will. One observer of the spate of recent books arguing that people are biological automatons, James...
Author: Avi Shafran
Dear Mr. Rahimi
Item: Iran’s vice president, Mohammad-Reza Rahimi, took the occasion of an International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking conference in Tehran to tell the assembled that the Talmud and “Zionists” dedicated to it...
A Fish Story for The Fourth
The other night I noticed something strange about one of the two “oscars” (Astronotus ocellatus) in my aquarium. I bought the fish years ago and it has grown from less than an inch in...
Korach@ blogspot.com
Sneering cynicism. Self-glorification in the guise of advocacy. Ostentatious observance cloaking rank jealousy. “Democracy” in the pursuit of evil ends. Haughtiness pretending to the selfless pursuit of justice and truth. What do all those...
The Camp Culture
Clocks are turned back in the fall, but only the positions of their hands (or their digits) change. Time’s arrow remains, at least for us mortals, resolutely one-directional. Still, most of us have occasionally...
The Write Stuff
Sometimes—usually after the New York Times deigns to publish a letter of mine on behalf of Agudath Israel of America—I’m asked how one “gets a letter” published in a (rightly or wrongly) respected periodical....
The Meat of the Matter
A number of weeks ago, I became aware of an essay contest conceived by The New York Times Magazine’s resident “ethicist”—a columnist, that is, who entertains readers’ questions about moral or ethical quandaries they...
Etiquette and Ethics
This year, the first day of Shavuos fell on a Sunday. Were there any Tzadukim and Baitusim still around today, they would have been happy. Because those rejecters of the mesorah contended that Shavuos...
A Priest Walks into a Shul…
Have you ever been to a church service? Me neither. Still, I (and perhaps you) have an image of what one is like. And that image, strange as it might seem, is an important...
Global Worrying
I think I’ve discovered what makes me so uncomfortable about the assertion that global warming is a real and urgent problem. A front-page New York Times story on May 1 concerned (thanks, Mr. Rumsfeld,...
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