I talk with host Mary Kissel at the WSJ about my new book, why men are boycotting marriage and why men can’t speak out.

****

Crossposted from Dr. Helen’s Blog

My first visit to Conrad Black’s house should’ve been my second.

Back in the previous century, my gang of Toronto anarcho-peacniks had talked about trekking up to his Bridle Path manse and pouring blood (or something like it) on his front steps.

I don’t recall the reason why. (It was 20+ years ago and I was drunk.)

No doubt one of the newspaper baron’s dailies in the Hollinger chain had printed something “offensive” again.

With his aristocratic bearing, conspicuous wealth, hollow point vocabulary and equally imposing wife – glamorous, fiery journalist Barbara Amiel – Black was an easy, all-purpose target.

Thanks to years of lazy misuse, his name had become a meaningless shorthand curse word for Canadian leftists.

Anyhow, I don’t think that nasty plan was ever carried out.

I do know that it was all I could think of many years later — 2006, to be exact — as I tottered up Lord Black’s long, dark driveway in my painfully new, too-high shoes, headed toward a party in honor of Mark Steyn and his then most recent book, America Alone.

I’d been sober for five years, I mused; did that mean I owed Black an “amends” for something I’d only half-thought about doing?

Was it too late to turn around and go back home?

It was. My husband had already driven off into the creepy, silent darkness that is “Millionaires’ Row” after sundown, with orders to rescue me three hours later.

As my heels clicked loudly along the asphalt, I tried to keep my pace steady by humming along to their taps:

The Beholden State: California’s Lost Promise and How to Recapture It is now officially published and available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the rest. This is a collection of writings on California’s troubles from my friends at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and includes excellent essays by the great Victor Davis Hanson, Steven Malanga, Joel Kotkin, Heather Mac Donald and others. Among those others is me, (or I), with my essay on the movies, “The Lost Art of War.”

But while I’m delighted to be included in the book, the thing I really love about City Journal is that the writers and thinkers there are not concerned with party politics, but only with what works. They’ll support Democrats or Republicans, as long as they come up with real solutions to problems — and solutions that don’t compromise American principles of freedom. Also, they’re really good writers and thinkers.

Take a look at the book — and take a look at the journal itself too. Both provide unique takes on issues that are too often obscured by emotion and rhetoric.

*****

Cross-posted from Klavan on the Culture

image courtesy shutterstock / Nicku

So you’re paging through your calendar and you realize it’s Friday.  Yes, almost the end of the week! You decide to flip through your weekend and THERE IT IS: “Father’s Day” scrolled sweetly across Sunday, June 16. Panic sets in. Whoops.

But, have no fear, there is still some times left and a multitude of awesome things to buy, or do, with your dad. Is he a car lover, a history buff, or a connoisseur of speed? Well, then I’ve gotcha covered.

Here are some great ideas to give Dad this weekend that he’s sure to love. Even Enzo would want these gifts on his bookshelf!

For the IndyCar Dad:

Does your dad still talk about the “good ole’ days of racing” with Mario Andretti, AJ Foyt, or Al Unser? If he’s a fan of the Indy 500 and/or biographies, I have just the book for him: Janet Guthrie: A Life At Full Throttle.

Janet Guthrie’s account of her breakthrough into both Indy and NASCAR is a gripping read. I found myself white-knuckling my book whenever she described her experiences in the cock-pit. The book is filled with funny inside stories with some of racing’s biggest stars.  Your dad is sure to be impressed by Janet Guthrie, a pioneer in racing for women, and enjoy this little foray into history.  Expect intermittent chuckles — Janet is a very witty writer.

There is still time to head over to Amazon to place an order in time for Father’s Day delivery! I’ve linked the images below to help you out.

La Place de la Concorde Suisse

by John McPhee

“The Swiss Army has served as a model for less languid nations. The Israeli Army is a copy of the Swiss Army. … They are a civilian army, a trained and practiced militia, ever ready to mobilize. They serve for thirty years. All six hundred and fifty thousand are prepared to be present at mobilization points and battle stations in considerably less than forty-eight hours.”

This book, written at the end of the Cold War, gives a compelling view of the Swiss military system. The pastoral views in the Alps don’t reveal that beneath those mountains are bunkers stocked with munitions caches and that the winding roads all have bridges that can be blown to pieces at a moment’s notice to thwart an attack.

The book might provoke some intriguing thoughts and conversations about forced conscription, responsibility as citizens, what some like to call “military adventurism,” and the implications of heavily armed neutrality.

At age 19 in 1962 Howard Bloom discovered the depth of Islamic antisemitism after reading a series of Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the Arab League:

The conclusion of chapter 2 of Robert Spencer’s newest book on the question of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as three “Abrahamic” faiths:

How can I get organized to read and understand all these books? Here are 6 new rules added to the revised first four in version 1.23 of the Radical Reading Regimen.

On April 10 I published the next step in my developing self-improvement program, an application of Charlie Martin’s 13 Weeks method to my problem of better organizing my research. I looked forward to diving back into a deep reading routine filled with novels and culture while blogging my results here at PJ Lifestyle so all the wiser, more enlightened souls who make it their business to fill the comments section with their manifestos could tell me what an idiot I was for not seeing the world exactly the way they did.

But then on April 15 — Patriot’s Day — bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, resulting in 3 deaths and 264 injuries. The real world had intruded on the Wonderland of Books I’d constructed for myself. As Charlie has pointed out from time to time in his 13 Weeks series, life has a way of throwing off our plans.

For days the country sat in nervous panic as police searched for the killers. Partisans of every persuasion speculated about the motives of the evil monsters who would load pressure cooker bombs with shrapnel to mutilate the bodies of innocent human beings they had never met. David Sirota of Salon longed for the murderous act to serve as fodder for his goal of demonizing his political opponents. I liked the way PJ columnist Roger Kimball put it on on the morning of April 18:

One of the curious, but also most predictable, responses to the Boston Marathon bombings from the Left has been the fervent expression — amounting nearly to a prayer — that the perpetrator or perpetrators of this act of mass murder be “homegrown,” preferably white, male, Christian, and conservative.

Why? Why does the Left prefer to have its terrorism served up by Timothy McVeigh rather than Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad? It’s an interesting question. That the Left exhibits this prejudice is, like Falstaff’s dishonesty, “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.”

David Sirota, writing at Salon, gives almost comic expression to the genre in an essay with the really special title “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” Why does Mr. Sirota wish that the Boston murderer of 8-year-old boys be a white American? Because a spectral quality called “white male privilege” operates insidiously behind the scenes. If Timmy McVeigh blows up a government building, says Mr. Sirota, only he is blamed. If Mohammed does it, Muslims are likely to be “collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse).”

What do you think of that argument? I think it’s hooey.

But how can intellectual and cultural warriors do battle with hooey level arguments? PJ Media Legal Editor J. Christian Adams offered advice to the Benghazi whistleblowers that is just as applicable to every American striving to fight for these issues in their own way:

I know a thing or two about being a whistleblower. I appeared on the Huckabee show this weekend (see video below) and explained how simply telling the truth is the way to shield yourself from the sinister deceptions from places like the Huffington Post and the George Soros-funded Media Matters. They can try to smear you, but the truth of your testimony will rise above their smears.

All we can do is present the truth about the nature of the enemy. If that doesn’t work, then what else is left?

The stuff we gravitate towards as our personal means of “getting fit” is often as pointless as rallying around other faulty belief systems — like Scientology, or “the Cubs.” Lost in the fray of strength training, lifestyle coaches, and Zumba! — and essentially lost since the development of agriculture changed our lifestyles — was the obvious regarding fitness: namely, that you are a human. Before you focus on anything extraneous like your golf swing, you should make sure you can do what a human is made to do.

Otherwise, you are a time bomb for injury and preventable surgery, and for difficult golden years.

My three-year-old son loves the Bronx Zoo, but not so much the stroller. So I carry him a lot, either on my shoulders or in my arms. Any parent knows what a day of that can be like — note how many are clutching their lower backs or rubbing their necks after packing up the car to leave, even the ones who are just worn out from a day pushing the stroller.

As a contrast, note that while at the zoo, you never saw, say, a lemur clutching its hammy, or yelling the lemur equivalent of: “F***! Cramp!” while trying to extend his toes.

Kelly Starrett’s Becoming a Supple Leopard – he’s a Northern California dude, the title and tone of the book is best understood if familiar with his video clip site, MobilityWOD.com — fills a huge void in fitness publications. Starrett focuses on the universal need, capability for, and benefit of proper human movement, and provides tips, tests, and benchmarks for reaching your full range of motion, and thus your physical potential.

I’ll call it the most useful fitness book ever written, and endorse it without reservation. (Full disclosure: I once interviewed Starrett for a Men’s Journal piece, and I am otherwise inclined to say nice things about him, since a tip he gave me a couple years ago allowed me to serve a tennis ball again without pain. But that tip is included on page 266 of the book — presumably I’d find it in there if I did not previously know him. And frankly, I’d recommend the book on that tip alone, as it provided instant relief and allowed me to stay on the court.)

This is not a manual written for either beginners or experienced athletes; it should be useful for most everyone, as few at any level of athletic ability have this base of knowledge. As primary as this topic is to general health and wellness, the dearth of information is just as conspicuous. Leopard could improve great-grandma’s quality of life as readily as it could have lessened the chances of Kobe’s Achilles tear, or Derek Rose’s shredded ACL. Further, Kobe might have been jumping a couple inches higher, defending the ball a split-second faster all these years, and as a result of the more efficient movement, might have kept his knees and ankles younger.

The heart of the book — useful to anyone who participates in the activities of walking, standing, or even sitting — is Chapter 2: Midline Stabilization and Organization. Everyone knows “keep your back straight,” and “squeeze your abs,” and commitment to those simple tips will save you a bit of pain and trouble. But you can do significantly better, and you will notice immediate results while doing something no more complicated than not lying down.

Related:

10 Secret Reasons Why The Avengers Is the Best Superhero Film

Robert Spencer: No More Music for Muslims: The Spiritual Journey of Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Theodore Shoebat and Walid Shoebat: The Tsarnaev Brothers and the Coming Savage Empire of Islam

images courtesy shutterstock /  Alexander Chaikin / Dirk Ercken

• Version 1.0 of my 2013 Self-Improvement Program: 7 New Year’s Resolutions I Invite Others to Steal
• Version 1.5, published a month later after my 29th birthday: The Plan So I Don’t Waste the Last Year of My 20s

Today I am joining Charlie Martin and Sarah Hoyt in attempting a 13 Weeks Blogging Self-Improvement Program. I invite others to join me and assist in the continued development of what we should call The Charlie Martin 13 Weeks Method. (Has a nice alliterative ring to it, methinks.) Back in February Charlie laid out his approach:

By accident, however, I’d noticed a process, or pattern.

1. Decide there’s something you want to change.
2. Find ways to measure your progress.
3. Decide on some small unthreatening things you can do that should affect those measures.
4. Track the results for 13 weeks and see what happens. It helps to pick appropriate tools and techniques for that tracking, but something as simple as a Seinfeld calendar, where you just draw an X on a calendar for every day you do something can be very powerful.

So here’s my 1-2-3-4 for The 13 Weeks Radical Reading Regimen:

1. The problem that I’d like to change is the one that Sarah identified in her PJ Lifestyle article yesterday: being buried in books for research. Over the past year I’ve tried to figure out how to organize the various subjects that I want to study in order to best make sense of them and find the connections across the disciplines. I want to read more books and do a better job of staying organized with the ideas and research that I find in them for my future writing and editing projects. I want to continue to explore connections across disciplines, reading both novels and a wide variety of nonfiction, both very serious philosophy and absurd satire.

2. I will continue to share the most interesting nuggets of my research in one daily PJ Lifestyle Bookshelf post that features an excerpt. Additional snapshots from my research will appear at my Instagram and Twitter accounts which can be followed here and here.

3. I will only create seven piles of books, one for each day, and then base each day’s reading on the titles from that pile. I won’t have to think about which books I’ll read each day. I’ll just draw from each pile. Each day will be based on 1-3 authors and 1-4 related subjects that I want to juxtapose together. This will not be a hard rule that I can only read from that day’s pile. If a book on another subject has caught my enthusiasm then I can still read it after dong the day’s necessary reading.

But I need to find at least two excerpts worth Instagramming and at least one of them should appear as a PJ Lifestyle Bookshelf selection to inspire debate and discussion. (That’s the purpose of those posts — for the regular readers who have complained, asking why I don’t take a few paragraphs to spell out my opinion of each excerpt offered. They appear because I am more interested in hearing reader feedback on them than pontificating my own ideas.) These seven piles will then flow into the six categories that I created in my original Counterculture Conservative book list from back in October. The seventh (and last) category I plan to add will be based on my list of the The 15 Best Books for Understanding Barack Obama’s Mysterious Political Theology. (This will be the basis for Friday’s  systematic exploration of evil ideas.)

4. I will create a calendar on a page of my journal broken up into 13 weeks and at the beginning of each day I will notate which page I am on in the books that I am reading associated with that day. I will photograph this calendar and blog about it each week, noting and analyzing my results on Tuesdays (the PJ Lifestyle day focused on writing, media, and technology). At the end of the 13 weeks I will see the progress I made on each author and subject. Then I will decide how to adjust each day’s reading focus, maybe taking a break from an author for a bit or adding another writer whose ideas are worth juxtaposing with the other thinkers of the day.

So what will the reading subjects be for the seven days of this “first season,” as Charlie calls it, of the The 13 Weeks Radical Reading Regimen? I’m doubling down on the authors and subjects of previous self-improvement plans, but focusing some plans and expanding others. As always, your recommendations for additional books and authors that I need to read are sincerely appreciated. Please leave suggestions in the comments or email me.

And publishers, authors and publicists: any and all paperback/hardback books received by mail will be photographed and blogged about. (And e-books that are especially interesting may also be featured. But actual books are of course more photogenic.)

For years now, Disney has taken great care of its classic films. The company pulls beloved videos in and out of the “Disney Vault,” both as a clever marketing strategy and as a way to share the best of the best (along with the occasional Eisner-era cheapquel) with new generations of enthusiasts. The advent of new technology — from DVD to Blu-Ray to whatever a Platinum Edition is — means that the classics will remain in fans’ collections for years to come.

That is, except for one film. Believe it or not, one Disney classic has not seen the light of day since 1986. The company has kept it under wraps for over a quarter century in spite of two Oscars and a revolutionary blend of live action and animation — not to mention the fact that the film inspired a popular attraction that appears in three Disney theme parks. To this day, collectors scramble for bootleg copies — my brother owns two DVDs along with a VHS copy with Japanese subtitles — and at the shareholders’ meeting every year, someone inevitably asks CEO Bob Iger when the movie will finally make its way out of the Disney Vault.

The film? Song of the South. For years critics have derided the picture as an example of the racism of the first half of the 20th century, while fans of the Uncle Remus tales have long pleaded for Disney to rerelease this beloved classic.

The great Leonard Maltin has gone on record advocating Song of the South‘s release as recently as December 2012, in an article which:

…discusses the Walt Disney Treasures series. On these DVDs, Maltin himself introduces the cartoons which might now be considered “politically incorrect,” explaining how times have since changed. The article mentions possibly using this same approach for Song of the South:

“I very much hope that the folks at Disney will release ‘Song of the South’ sometime soon,” Maltin said, “and use this same approach — to be responsible in explaining the times it depicts and the attitudes of the period in which it was made.”