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Jun 10, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Peter Hitchens |Carino Hodder |J. Vance |Stanley Fish
Next year I shall be teaching a course in film noir for the first time, and I thought it might be useful to set down my thoughts about the genre. Definitions and lists of characteristics are not hard to come by.
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Jun 7, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Stanley Fish
Whenever I teach “Law at the Movies,” my code name for the course, which I only reveal to the students late in the semester, is “Jurisprudence in Disguise.” By that I mean two things. First, film is the Trojan horse that allows me to introduce jurisprudential questions students might find off-putting were they to be posed directly. Second, those questions are the real content of the movies we study, questions such as these: What is law? How is law established? What is the source of legal authority?
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Jun 7, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Peter Hitchens |Carino Hodder |Stanley Fish |J. Vance
Over the past few years British feminists have developed some interesting views on sex and sexuality, and I am not using the word “interesting” in its authentic British sense, as a euphemism for “utterly deranged.” Among the reactionary feminists—a term coined by the journalist Mary Harrington—is Louise Perry, who writes in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution that changes in sexual mores since the 1960s have brought with them a raft of negative consequences, downplayed if not...
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Jun 6, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Peter Hitchens |Carino Hodder |Stanley Fish |J. Vance
I cut my beard recently, and I am forced to admit that I am significantly uglier than I had remembered. The lower-third situation, while less dire than the chinless standard prevalent among the male species of the fourth estate, is not so hot, and is aggravated by the fact that I am running to fat. The resulting mandible-dewlap combination vaguely suggests portraits of the Renaissance popes, and gives me an unsavory air of wicked babyishness.
I have also been reminded how much I hate shaving.
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May 28, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Peter Hitchens |Carino Hodder |J. Vance |Stanley Fish
I sometimes complain that the people of my country pay far too little attention to the glories of their own land and culture. They slog for thousands of miles on planes to view the Taj Mahal or the Temples of Angkor Wat, but it never crosses their minds to visit the Cathedrals of Durham or Lincoln. They bore you to death about the beauties of the French countryside, and they have never visited the Malvern Hills or the North York Moors.
But here I make a wider criticism of the modern world.
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May 24, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Stanley Fish |Peter Hitchens |Dan Hitchens |Carino Hodder
The Spectator of yore had an amusing device: the High Life/Low Life columns. What you got was exactly what it said on the tins. The irrepressible and apparently immortal Taki Theodoracopoulos (a founder of my own publication) would float on a cloud of champagne bubbles around Europe’s regattas, Grand Prix races, and balls—cool marble interiors and glittering gowns, a happy memory of a happy memory, to be sure, but still better than whatever passes for Society with a capital S now.
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May 13, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Stanley Fish |Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Timothy Carney
The smell of hot canvas, now rare in my life, can set off an explosion of memories so powerful that I wish I could work out what other aromas I might seek out to pierce the veil of the lost past. There was a lot of camping in tents in my childhood, almost all of it mixed up with school rather than home. And in most cases those tents were the heavy old sort, as used by the children in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons stories. It was emphatically supposed to be good for us.
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May 10, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Stanley Fish |Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Timothy Carney
Once, when I was young, for a period of three months, I was a man of science. When I entered college, I had the aspirationally hard-headed idea that I would get a degree in something quantitative and make a lot of money afterward. The storms of freshman year drove that ship of theory onto the shoals of my profound mathematical incapacity—if the footmen of mental sums tire you, what will the mysteries of matrix algebra do?
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May 9, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Stanley Fish |Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Matthew Walther
Many years ago, when I was a novice and my habit was still dazzlingly white, I said to one of the older sisters, “I think we should all get wimples.” She replied, “That’s because you have no idea what you’re talking about.” I was a little surprised by this answer.
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Matthew Walther |Stanley Fish
Last week, I spent about two hours speaking with Father Justin, the first large language model chatbot ostensibly raised to the priestly order of Melchizedek, while his counsel was still available on the Catholic Answers website. He has since been defrocked, in large part because of people like me.
Like most of this A.I. priest’s conversation partners, I was less interested in learning about Catholicism and more interested in testing his (its?) intellectual boundaries.
