Give Monogamy a Chance
The hit HBO series Girls, which is wildly popular with twenty-something audiences, is also notorious for its frank portrayals of the dark side of the casual-sex culture reigning among America’s young...
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You’re Not the Horrible Man I Married Anymore!
In the first installment of this series on great novels about marriage we looked at a thousand-plus-page epic novel about life and death in medieval Norway: early death, mutilation, miserable weddings,...
View ArticleC. S. Lewis’s Narnia: Mouthwash for the Imagination
When a former Archbishop of Canterbury sits down to write a book that delves into the theology of your literary career, one would not expect the primary texts analyzed to be the series of children’s...
View ArticleRod Dreher’s The Little Way of Ruthie Leming and Cultivating Your Own Community
Rod Dreher has written an amazing portrait of his beloved sister and his own journey of maturation in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town and the Secret of a Good Life....
View Article“For Those Who Find Faith, the World Becomes a Magnificent Kaleidoscope”
On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family and the Church in the 21st Century, the new book by Pope Francis, is a wonderful read. It’s only a couple hundred pages, but overflows with spiritual...
View ArticleLove, Marriage, and Redemption
This is the halfway point for my series of posts on great novels about marriage, and with this third installment I think I see some intertwined themes emerging. All three of the books so far—Kristin...
View ArticleFinding Joy at Work and Maximizing Your Time
Spring cleaning usually brings up images of bleach and dust rags, but this spring, I’m cleaning up how I spend my time with the help of time-management author Laura Vanderkam. A few years back,...
View ArticleThe Things Men Do With a Broken Heart
There are only two musicals that I will openly admit to liking: the film versions of The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. For those who don’t already know, the plotline of My Fair Lady is fairly simple...
View ArticlePost of the Week
Did you miss R. J. Moeller’s post about Wendy Moore’s new book, How to Create the Perfect Wife? It’s this week’s Post of the Week. The post Post of the Week appeared first on Acculturated.
View ArticleThe Last Men on Top
Journalist and author Susan Jacoby has written an important and illuminating book. The Last Men on Top, a Kindle single, makes an argument that is long overdue. The thesis: the generations of American...
View ArticleAll-Weather Friends
All three novels of marriage I’ve looked at so far have a certain sense of the privacy of marriage, which can become isolation. In fact, the focus has narrowed with each novel: Extended family and...
View ArticleKylie Bisutti: From Victoria’s Secret Stunner to Church Lady Scold
It’s possible to be too religious. To get to a point where you’re so pious that you think even God can’t forgive your sins. That partly describes former Victoria’s Secret model Kylie Bisutti, who has...
View ArticlePost of the Week
Mark Judge gets post of the week honors again this week, for the second time in a row. This time it’s for his excellent post on ex-Victoria’s Secret “angel” Kylie Bisutti, in which he takes down both...
View ArticleWhat Women Don’t Want
A new book, What Do Women Want: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire, apparently makes the shocking revelation that women are actually carnal, wild beasts who have been socially re-conditioned...
View ArticleJonah Lehrer’s Journey to Redemption
Writer Jonah Lehrer, who resigned in disgrace last year from The New Yorker after he was caught plagiarizing from himself and others as well as fabricating quotes, is back. By the age of 31, the...
View ArticleHappy Money
Money can buy happiness, apparently—and it actually doesn’t cost all that much. Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton’s new book Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending is a nerdy but fun beach-read...
View ArticleA Return to Feminism’s Lost Roots
Why do so many women answer the question “Are you a feminist” in the negative? To read Christina Hoff Sommers’s new study of the history of “freedom feminism” is to understand that the current fad for...
View ArticleBooks, Bookstores, and Libraries
Recently some friends and I were talking about a new women’s magazine. I told one friend who was looking to get a copy, “Barnes and Noble plans to carry it so you can get it …oh…actually, sorry all the...
View ArticleHome Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head
From Gothic novels to indie-rock lyrics, the house is a mirror of the troubled family within it. V.S. Naipaul’s 1961 novel A House for Mr Biswas is another one of these broken-home narratives; the...
View ArticleAn Ode to Dandies
“Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform, and don’t kid yourself.” The musician Frank Zappa said that at a concert in the 1960s. He was responding to a hippie in the audience who had cried out to...
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