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Are We All Therapists Now?

This spring saw the publication of two books arguing forcefully that our children are struggling and the adults are to blame. One of the books met with nodding heads all around and generated real enthusiasm for curbing the pernicious effects of technology on adolescent mental health. The other, Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, met with a much chillier reception, but it confronts parents and teachers of adolescents with questions that are both challenging and important. To understand the controversy regarding Bad Therapy, it is helpful…

Reading in Summer: The Prisoner, The Count, and The Princess

For many, summer brings respite from the grind. We may take a trip to the beach, visit relatives, go camping, or have a “staycation” where we sleep in and have a second (or third) cup of coffee at breakfast. We may also find a chance for some reading. But it’s summer, and that means—to me—a different kind of reading.  Summer reading should be, first and foremost, enjoyable. You read a book now, not because you have to, not because you “should,” not because it will “improve you,” but simply because…

Camping and the Rite of Passage

During the summer before my own seventh grade year, my father and I made a canoe trek up the Oswegatchie River in the western Adirondacks of northern New York. My dad grew up on the banks of the river, learning from his father how to fish for trout, and then, with his own children, made regular visits to teach us and to share the area’s profound beauty and peace. This particular trip, however, coming shortly after my twelfth birthday, was special. Like my brother before me, I would be paddling…

Eleven Common Questions for an Art Teacher

God is the perfect artist. He creates beauty at every scale and in every context we’re willing to find it. Our job as cooperators in his creation is to represent that beauty to the world… and that’s hard. Every earthly artist is going to struggle—that’s the nature of attempting anything good. What a joy it is, therefore, having the job of helping our sons push through that struggle and find the satisfaction of co-creating through art. This has been a passion of mine which unites the various steps in my…

Living the Sermon: A Review of 42

Jackie Robinson’s Story When Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey cooks up a plan to add a black man to the roster, he knows there will be pushback. “You break a law and get away with it,” says an advisor, “and some people will think you’re smart. You break an unwritten law; you’ll be an outcast.” “So be it,” says Rickey. The year is 1945, and the man for the job is Jackie Robinson. Starring the late Chadwick Boseman (of Marvel fame) and Harrison Ford, 42 chronicles Jackie’s rise and the…

Turbulent Seas: Lessons from a Dog on Confidence

On a chilly evening in the suburban sprawl of Northern Virginia, I set about my usual nighttime ritual of taking our middle-aged field-bred Red Setter, Rosie, out for her postprandial perambulation. This more lithe version of the Irish Setter popularized in the mid-twentieth century by Jim Kjelgaard’s Big Red books and Richard Nixon’s King Timahoe, is a tidy, but excitable, thirty-five pounds, the ideal size for road trips, backpacking, and an overpriced DC-suburb apartment filled with, what will soon be, three girls under the age of three. In addition to…

Terrible Purpose: Beauty and Contradiction at the Heart of Dune

In Dune, Part One and Part Two, Denis Villeneuve has adapted the unadaptable. These two impressive films, though they simplify and sometimes alter their source material, manage to distill the heart and soul of Frank Herbert’s original novel (1965). Given the influence of the ideas embodied in the text and now popularized in the films, it seems a good moment to appraise these adaptations, and to reflect on the ideas they promote. Like the films, this essay is divided into two parts, the first being a traditional film review (of…

Classroom Ambience

Joe Bissex shares some ways we can make our classrooms feel less institutional and more personal to foster the best atmosphere for learning.

From Pickles to Peacock Brains: The Friendship of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell

Tuesday, 24 May 1763: The rain had stopped before sunrise, but the sooty-film it left on the cobblestones off Inner-Temple-Lane made Boswell nearly slip into the mire twice. A third time, and the thought of sliding into horse-dung and God knows what else might have warned him off, ill-omened, to be sure. But Boswell wasn’t so easily put off today, so he watched his footing, while the sounds of carriages and whipped horses and carts and jouncing coaches filled his ears with something like a medley, a humming tune of…