At first glance the answer must be yes, and commentators generally agree. From Slate to the New Yorker, educated persons feel slightly embarrassed to be drawn into the show, and describe it as a soap opera with better scenery, better dialogue, and better acting. There is something to this shame-faced fandom: Downton relies upon a cascade [...]
Archive for the ‘Europe’ Category
Is Downton Abbey a Soap Opera? (Or What Texas Football and English Country Houses have in Common)
Posted in culture, Europe, ideas, Uncategorized, tagged Downton Abbey, forgiveness, Friday Night Lights, soap operas. on February 14, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Fish on French Theory
Posted in culture, Europe, ideas, politics, tagged Derrida, Fish, Foucault, political correctness, postmodernism, theory on April 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Stanley’s Fish’s New York Times post on the history of French theory is well worth reading, and in very nearly equal parts right and wrong. He’s perfectly right that by forsaking all foundations or teleological destinations for language in relation to truth or to “the world as it really is,” French postmodernism neither offered nor [...]
Christian Converts (from Islam) in France
Posted in culture, Europe, faith, tagged Christians, conversion, France, Muslims on April 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
A fascinating article in Le Monde discusses the situation of Muslims who convert to Christianity in France. The numbers are small but not negligible (i.e., some Catholic dioceses report about a dozen a year, and there are evangelical converts as well). The initial reasons for exploring conversion are interesting– often the living example of a [...]
Freakapologists
Posted in Europe, Free Market Apologists, politics, tagged Europe, Free Market Apologists, New York on March 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Over the last several days, sharp writers like Reihan Salam, Megan McArdle and others have raised their voices to denounce those foolish New Yorkers who admit to experiencing a certain schadenfreude at the parlous state of Wall Street fortunes, openly rooting for the possibility that New York will become more livable and affordable once this [...]
Squares and Circles
Posted in culture, Europe on February 20, 2008 | 1 Comment »
With a new film soon to be released about a coming “demographic winter” based on extremely low birth-rates in the developed world, Rod Dreher and others have praised the film for its blunt critique of anti-natalism. The real work that needs to be done, however, involves finding a way to bring [...]
Sarkozy and Europe’s Past
Posted in Europe on February 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Today’s New York Times piece on President Sarkozy’s proposal to have French fifth-graders follow the life of an individual child victim of the Holocaust gives a good sense of the debate in France, especially its religious dimension. But the article misses one important quasi-religious point raised in yesterday’s Le Monde: one historian [...]
