Category Archives: Culture and Counterculture

Culture stuff

By Headmistress | Published: October 11, 2018

Asked Korean friends to define pittakkage- 삐딱하게- which is most often translated as crooked but via context means something much different than the usage in ‘there was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile.’ So they tried to demonstrate with a series of charades. They showed somebody sitting in church and crossing their legs. […]

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Chesterton on social maladies

By Headmistress | Published: June 17, 2018

Chesterton on curing social diseases, said we go about it backward. We focus on the problem first and then go after a cure, which is the proper course for physical health, but not really the right approach (he says) for spiritual or social maladies” it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social […]

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The Competition for your Reading Time

By Headmistress | Published: June 1, 2018

“If modern literature has any competition to dread, it is not that of the old classical writers, but of the daily, weekly, or monthly periodicals,  which fall as thickly round us as the leaves in Vallombrosa [‘autumnal leaves that strow the brooks, in Vallombrosa’ from Milton’s Paradise Lost], and go near to suffocate the poor victim […]

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Improving Ourselves to Death

By Headmistress | Published: April 17, 2018

New YOrker offers a series of quickie overviews of books on self-improvement, periodically spiced with sharp observations on the trends in self-improvement. Here’s one of the reviews: “In a consumerist society, we are not meant to buy one pair of jeans and then be satisfied,” Cederström and Spicer write, and the same, they think, is […]

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The Flaws in Wrinkle in Time Movie Are Deliberate

By Headmistress | Published: March 19, 2018

REad here. “In an interview with Screen Rant, writer Jennifer Lee explained why she took out the Christian themes and Bible references from the book. “It wasn’t removed, it was just opened up in language that wasn’t exclusive, guardian angels versus stars, are they the same thing? Maybe,” Lee said. She emphasized “inclusivity,” saying, “Since we’re […]

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