From one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers. Excerpt: There’s one other factor in rural drug use. There’s nothing to do in small towns. Growing up in New Mexico, we were bored. When you’re a teenager, you can only watch so much TV. My best friend and I would get high on meth and drive around all…

Sharon Astyk ponders why devotion to church and community organizations has declined so much in the last couple of generations, taking as her examples her shul and her grandmother’s experience in Eastern Star, the ladies auxiliary of the Freemasons. Sharon considers the usual explanations — e.g., that women are working more outside the home today,…

When we stopped at an Arby’s in northern Tennessee, I asked for a medium diet Coke. The worker behind the counter handed me a tub. This didn’t surprise me, actually, because I’d seen the documentary “Supersize Me,” which tells of how American soft drink sizes have ballooned in recent decades. Coincidentally, on the roadtrip I’d…

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the book I’ve been listening to on the long drive to PA is Niall Ferguson’s “The Ascent of Money,” a history of finance. It can be tough going for someone like me, but it’s mostly an excellent example of explanatory history — that is, of explaining how we…

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