1. Ross Douthat and his incisive articles on abortion and
Planned Parenthood (see below). There are lots of good things being written now
on these topics. I like how Douthat’s cuts through rhetoric and the dissembling
from the pro-choice side to reveal the hard truth, that abortion is “an institution at the heart of respectable liberal
society…dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.”
2. Ta-Nehesi Coates and his article on the historical reasons why the South seceded from the
North to start the Civil War.
I find that people often make
definitive “well this is of course 100% true” type statements about past
events. These statements often don’t hold up, however, mostly because we don’t
pay enough attention to what people actually said back then about what they were doing or why they were doing
certain things.
The Civil War and all that
followed in its wake is one big and frequent example of present day myopia and
inaccurate analysis. Coates does a good job giving primary source quotes that I
can only hope improve our understanding of this very influential part of our
history.
No comments:
Post a Comment