At The American Conservative, I'm talking about why visual representations of exploitation are almost always pulled into a kind of exploitation themselves. The initial advertising for Cuties presented the hypersexualization without any hint of critique. It showed the young actresses in provocative poses, and made it appear that the intended audience for the film was… Read More
Category: Articles
Bad Art Warps Our Vision
At First Things, I take a crack at explaining why smutty art is bad in the way airbrushing and CGI Yoda are bad. It’s the same reason we should object to airbrushed skin and photoshopped waists. It’s the same reason we should object to sending barely pubescent girls or anorexic teens down the catwalks to model clothes ostensibly being… Read More
Keeping Vaclav Benda’s Door Open
At Mere Orthodoxy, I laid out my problems with some of Rod Dreher's recent writing on race and soft totalitarianism, drawing on his own Live Not By Lies for an alternate model of witness. The most serious danger Woke Capital poses isn’t to the people forced to adopt nonsensical cant or take implicit bias tests… Read More
Will the Real Mrs. America Please Stand Up
I reviewed Hulu/FX's Mrs. America for The American Interest. The show turns on one question: Who gets to claim the mantle of a women’s movement? In episode four, Schlafly and Friedan square off in a debate. Both women relish the fight—Friedan more obviously, exclaiming “God, I’d like to burn you at the stake,” just as… Read More
All the Screen’s a Stage
When the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA had to close its playhouse due to the pandemic, I audited their online classes as a reporter for The American Interest. During a discussion of alliteration, one smaller girl, attending the class with her big sister, stumbles on Bottom’s tongue-twister of a line, “I trust to take of truest… Read More
Discernment in Plague-Times
I wrote at First Things on Kristen Lavransdatter as a primer for living a life of Christian service and witness in a pandemic. It was intended, among other things, as a rejoinder to the idea that sheltering in place was cowardice. Someday when our children ask us “What did you do during the coronavirus pandemic?,” it won’t… Read More
Children Are a Rebuke to Our Schedules
After our baby, Beatrice, was born, I wrote a piece for the Institute for Family Studies on children as natural born interruptors, including of some of our culture's mistaken expectations about time. We can deceive ourselves (at least for a little while) about our limits and our control—by staying up too late to finish something… Read More
The Fourth Turning and America’s Demons
Will Arbery's play Heroes of the Fourth Turning was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (and oddly reminiscent of late nights with my college friends—though the protagonists hang out in a backyard, not on a roof). I reviewed it for The American Interest. The praise for the show has frequently taken Teresa’s world-historical perspective—the show is remarkable because these… Read More
Your Roots Shall Make Ye Free
I reviewed Michael Brennan Dougherty's epistolary memoir, My Father Left Me Ireland, for The American Interest. Dougherty's rage is directed at the eunuchizing modern mindset that sees us as most free when we can be stripped of all the ties we have to others. A father can leave his children, provided the financial pain is assuaged by child support or governmental… Read More
Locating Our Invisible Wounds
At Comment I wrote about how the coronavirus links us in a solidarity of suffering. But we'll have to work to retain that solidarity with the more everyday kinds of suffering when the pandemic passes. This piece was published in partnership with the Breaking Ground project, which asks how we can use this time of disruption… Read More
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