If Aziz Ansari is reading all the thinkpieces about him, he must feel most ill-served by his allies. “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader” wrote Bari Weiss for the New York Times, exonerating Ansari in a singularly insulting way. It’s unreasonable, Weiss and others write, to expect Ansari and other men to… Read More
Category: Articles
Asking Catholic Women About Vocations, Prayer, Confession, and NFP
I partnered with America to do a series of sidebars, looking through the data in the survey of 1500 Catholic women in America that the magazine produced in partnership with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Here are links to my four short pieces: The Prayer Lives of Catholic Women We asked women about… Read More
The couple that writes Star Wars takes together…
My husband and I enjoyed seeing The Last Jedi, and we both wrote up appreciations of the film. At Aleteia, I wrote "Kylo Ren: The Star Wars not-quite-villain whose temptations are familiar" The combination of great power and great irresponsibility would be enough to make for a challenging antagonist, but Kylo Ren is more than just… Read More
Consent isn’t the Opposite of Louis C.K.
Consent, as the primary criterion for sexual ethics, thinks too small. The careful, consent-seeking lover seeks to use his own strength correctly and responsibly. If a lover of this type finds that his strength is a little too daunting, a little too hard to wield cautiously, the solution is to find ways to limit his… Read More
The Dangers of Keeping Sorrow Secret
Douthat’s column suggest that it’s a mistake to assume that misery is always an imposition, something that can’t be “anything but terrifying.” If nothing else, he writes, sharing misery is a kind of truth-telling. The more pressure we feel to keep it private, the more warped our view of the world becomes. [...] Sharing sorrow… Read More
How Vulgarity Normalizes Predators
"In the office, vulgarity similarly functions as near-harassment, even when a raunchy joke is genuinely appreciated by its hearers. Every moment of crudity normalizes sex-as-assault, if only at the level of making someone else uncomfortable. C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, distinguishes between raunchiness as a sin against chastity (when it is “in order to excite… Read More
The Limits of ‘Common Sense’ Gun Control
I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, drawing on my experience at FiveThirtyEight researching gun deaths in America. By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want… Read More
Losing My Child at Easter
My husband and I lost our first child at 6 weeks at Easter in 2017. I wrote this essay to thank the women who cared for me in extraordinary ways while we grieved. "One week after we lost our baby, the Gospel reading was the story of the apostle Thomas poking his finger into the… Read More
Farewell to the small graces of Great Comet
"Natasha and Pierre’s marriage is hundreds of pages away (and Andrey will reconcile with Natasha and die before that comes to pass). The change in Natasha is simply this, as she describes it, “For the first time in many days, I weep tears of gratitude, tears of tenderness, tears of thanks.” Nothing has been solved… Read More
Don’t Dox the Alt-Right
"For many of the rally attendees, Charlottesville may be the first time they gathered with the people they’d spoken to online, their first chance to see the movement they’d joined in the flesh. For some of them, that first encounter, and the violence that they were a part of, may have left them with a… Read More