Buy Your Children Basic Toys

“A little girl with a good imagination can make one cheap, stuffed doll do all the things that a dull-witted girl needs an army of expensive, mechanical dolls to accomplish. A mechanical doll will say, “Play with me,” and suck its thumb. A cheap, stuffed doll will deliver Pericles’ funeral oration while cooking pretend chicken Provençal for seven stuffed guests.”

-from one of a dozen lectures I’m giving this summer

On Christian Cults

You’d think that people would catch on to the fact that churches with night club names (“Dwell,” “Lift,” “Sponge”), pastors in jeans, and killer Instagram accounts go hand-in-hand with news stories like this one.

If you want a church that’s not going to get hit with corruption charges, you want a place with a name like “St. Thomas Lutheran” or “Second Baptist.” These tend to be churches that have had 80 members for the last 80 years, do not talk about changing the world or “engaging the culture,” do not have in-house graphic design teams, do not have social media accounts, and do not die.

“Dwell,” though? If you go to a church called “Dwell,” you’re asking to be interviewed on a sad podcast nine years from now.

A Better Way To Anti-Consumer

I’m enjoying this one immensely. I far prefer the anti-consumerism of the 80s and early 90s to the sort of shrill pap that passes as edgy these days. DeLillo is satirical, but he doesn’t believe that satirizing consumerism is brave. He doesn’t believe it is a metaphysics or a creed. It’s not a dogma. These days, people make as though anti-consumerism is genuinely interesting, daring, the sort of thing you can preach. It’s not. It’s fair, but it’s really nothing more than a cultural accoutrement.

The Plight Of The Modern Writing Teacher

Parent: My child has too much writing homework.

Teacher: How much time is your child spending on their writing homework?

Parent: My son went up to his room last night at 5:30 to start working on his writing homework and when I checked on him at 11:30, he was still going. Six hours—that’s unacceptable. No child should have six hours of homework.

Teacher: Was your son working on a laptop with internet access?

Parent: Yeah, so?

-from my latest for CIRCE