My wife was straightening up in the bedroom this morning, and said to me, “You can tell a lot about someone’s character by the books on their bedside table. With her permission, I photographed her bedside table: Henry James, nuns, chickens: that’s Julie. Here are the books at my bedside table. It would be hard…

Ross Douthat calls him “the man who saved American Catholicism,” and in this inspiring story, you can see why David R. Spotanski, a middle-aged Catholic father of three from the Midwest, may well have earned that accolade. Spotanski, a layman, was chancellor of the Diocese of Belleville, Ill., whose bishop, Wilton Gregory, was head of…

David Brooks writes about a favorite theme of mine: This is not to say that policy choices are meaningless. But we should be realistic about them. The influence of politics and policy is usually swamped by the influence of culture, ethnicity, psychology and a dozen other factors. More: When you try to account for life…

I don’t have cable TV, so I haven’t seen “The Pacific.” But I did read one of the books upon which it’s based, E.B. Sledge’s “With the Old Breed,” and I am glad to read in this appreciative Atlantic essay that “The Pacific” is not another one of those overly reverent takes on World War…

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