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Love it or loathe it, Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" has served as a rite of passage for high school students for generations. In addition to the Bard, teachers have long relied on Socrates, Kafka, Steinbeck and a host of other authors whose works earned the distinction of being a classic — albeit rarely landed on teens' top 10 lists. While few dare challenge the texts as exceptional literature, high school teachers throughout the Chicago area and beyond are swapping out the canon for the contemporary, arguing that their selections impart the same themes and skills, with one important caveat: Students...

On the 32nd anniversary of her death, Pastor John Piper discusses the life and influence of Ayn Rand (~11 min interview). https://dwynrhh6bluza.cloudfront.net/website_uploads/audio_files/interviews/292_Ayn_Rand_s_Tragic_Trajectory.mp3

When the Greens speak of "deniers" as they so often do, they are using holocaustal language to describe their opponents metaphorically, but seem to be completely unaware that historically speaking, there was a strong undercurrent of environmentalism swirling under the banner of National Socialism ...

Since 2003, fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work have gathered each March to celebrate and share his writing with each other and the public. Set by the Tolkien Society on March 25 to commemorate the downfall of Sauron in “The Lord of the Rings,” the idea of Tolkien Reading Day was inspired by the annual bloomsday celebration of the works of James Joyce.

Newspaper uses news expression to describe inebriatedA Kuwaiti newspaper has come out with a new expression to describe a drunk man —‘outside the coverage area’ —terminology often used by mobile phone operators. The Arabic language daily ‘Al Watan’ made the description in a brief report about a 42-year-old local man who was caught by police driving his car while drunk. A police patrol stopped the man, a bedoun (without identity), after noticing that the vehicle was moving in a zigzag way on the Gulf emirate’s seaside road. “When police men came close to him, they could smell alcohol. It turned...

The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic...

Economic study suggests we're heading for a Blade Runner future Earlier this month, a group of economists released the results of a massive study looking at the economic prospects of people from across the United States. What they found was that the U.S. is like a patchwork quilt of different countries, where some regions offer people the economic prospects of a typical developed nation — and other regions are more like a developing country. This study debunks a few myths about the United States, including the idea that wealthy nations have wealthy citizens. It's a powerful reminder that nations are...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0983723818/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-5&pf_rd_r=1MSMEA0V0ARW9PEA6TCZ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1741301142&pf_rd_i=507846

The harrowing battle scenes and heartache in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy masterpiece The Lord Of The Rings were inspired by the author’s own First World War nightmare and the death of close friends from Birmingham.

Conservative student group Turning Point USA caused a stir last week by posting pages online from a textbook used at the University of South Carolina. The book calls Ronald Reagan “sexist” and says conservatives “take a basically pessimistic view of human nature” — one in which “people are conceived of as being corrupt.” Several avowed conservatives balked not just at the negative portrayal of Reagan but also at the idea that the conservative persuasion contains a measure of pessimism. On this point, the textbook is right and they are wrong. Russell Kirk was the man credited by William F. Buckley...

The ancient Greeks believed that inspiration came from the Muses, goddesses who came down from Olympus to help common mortals create great works of art. But nowadays we know that creative minds get their ideas from pretty much whatever random s*** comes their way.This even goes for some of the most famous characters in recent pop culture history ...

From the opening ceremony with a malfunctioning ring, to police officers singing Get Lucky, the Sochi Winter Olympics have been a games to remember. But tonight marks the end for the highly controversial games, which are also the most expensive in Olympic history. Showing that the country has a sense of humour, dancers during the opening section of the show mocked the moment a ring failed to open during the opening ceremony. The joke was followed by an opulent show of ballet, circus performances and classical music, an ode to the country's rich literary history - before the Olympic flame...

It’s the film project that many of us fear we may never see. Yet surely, with time, all may be possible. In this article, Rud the Spud takes a look at how a trilogy based on Professor Tolkien’s The Silmarillion might be constructed – should such a project ever come to fruition – and discusses whether or not it could possibily live up to the Professor’s massive collection of stories. The Silmarillion Movie Trilogy By Rud the Spud It’s an idea that has been capturing the minds of Ringers since the days of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings...

A new action/adventure novel with a political twist, Scammed, will be free on the Kindle Store this weekend (Feb. 22, 23) only. If you don't have a Kindle, there's a free Kindle Reading App available from Amazon. Scammed is a novel about a former air force pilot, a retired marine and a disabled ex-army doctor who team up to uncover a scam artist—the current occupant of the White House. When the miscreant behind the greatest Ponzi scheme in history was exposed his name was plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the country and heard on television ad...

In my youth, vampires were EVIL INCARNATE. They used you and left you dead or worse. Somehow, in the past fifty years, vampires have become teenaged heartthrobs, misunderstood and full of angst. But do you realize, from a societal and sociological point of view...vampires are the perfect man for modern women? In my youth, in the movies, men were men. You were either John Wayne…strong, silent, but caring underneath, or you were Cary Grant…quirky, but strong, witty on the surface, but a manly good guy underneath. They were GOOD INCARNATE. We have gelded the modern male. Once they were supposed...

A journey to the heart of New Guinea’s Asmat tribal homeland sheds new light on the mystery of the heir’s disappearance there in 1961 smat is, in its way, a perfect place. Everything you could possibly need is here. It’s teeming with shrimp and crabs and fish and clams. In the jungle there are wild pig, the furry, opossumlike cuscus, and the ostrichlike cassowary. And sago palm, whose pith can be pounded into a white starch and which hosts the larvae of the Capricorn beetle, both key sources of nutrition. The rivers are navigable highways. Crocodiles 15 feet long prowl...

Peter Jackson has made some remarkable movies. There’s no denying that his sprawling Lord of the Rings trilogy was the very definition of epic—filled with massive battles, touching moments, and beautiful cinematography, not to mention a lovely score.

Not all at once, by some surgical procedure. No, this will be a slow, subtle process, taking place over years. Every step will be conducted with utmost seriousness. Scientific validity will be claimed. Endless research will be constantly referenced. If there is little progress or outright failure, teachers always seem amazed, as if such a thing had never happened before. Principals explain that the school is doing everything it can, if only parents would help in this delicate training. Children and families will be told with absolute confidence: we use the best methods here and our students learn to be...

My child is doing a paper on the reasons we were unable to stop communism from spreading to South Vietnam. I was hoping you could suggest some good sources/websites/books for a young conservative interested in the real story of Vietnam. I remember one site on FR years ago ("helicopter pilot" or something) that had all kinds of polls showing things were opposite from what Hollywood would have you believe like: support for the war was high, that service members were proud, that returning vets were less likely to use drugs/commit crimes, etc etc.

I’ve never hated a film quite the way I hate Dead Poets Society. I expect that them’s fighting words, at least in some quarters; at least I hope they are. Because I’m trying to pick a fight here. I was in the last year of my English literature PhD program in the summer of 1989, when Dead Poets Society was released. My younger brother Scott, who really didn’t have the money to spare, slipped my wife Robyn & me a ten-dollar bill (these were simpler times) and told us he’d watch our kids so we could go out to see...

The roots of American liberalism are not compassion, but snobbery. That’s the thesis of Fred Siegel’s revealing new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.

A university-assigned textbook that appears to suggest former President Ronald Reagan was a sexist and says conservatives view individuals as lazy and corrupt is under fire from at least one student. “This is really outrageous,” Anna Chapman, a University of South Carolina student in the class, told Campus Reform. “[I]t’s so in your face, people need to know about it.”

The Iranian clergy has revived Salman Rushdie’s death fatwa 25 years after it was issued over his “blasphemous” Satanic Verses. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called on all Muslims to murder the award-winning author and anyone involved in the publication of his work. This Friday, senior cleric Ahmad Khatami reminded worshipers at the Tehran Friday prayer that the “historical fatwa” is “as fresh as ever”. He added that even if Rushdie repents, it will not affect the sentence. …

WH Auden attempted to persuade JRR Tolkien to drop the romance between Aragorn and Arwen from the storyline of The Lord of the Rings, describing it as "unnecessary and perfunctory", an unpublished letter by the author has revealed. The 1955 letter sees Tolkien writing to his publisher about the difficulties of completing The Return of the King, the third and final part of his magnum opus, in which Aragorn and his men face a final battle with Sauron's troops, as the hobbits Frodo and Sam continue on their journey to destroy the One Ring. At the end, Aragorn is crowned...

Controversial Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been described as the savior of the Islamic world and as a new Ottoman sultan. But likening him to the wizard Saruman from The Lord of the Rings is novel—as was done earlier this week by a leader in the Turkish opposition party: “[Turkey has become] a country where headlines and program flows can change with one phone call as if it were Middle-Earth in Lord of the Rings. The [person] who does it is like a Saruman the White who has lost all sense of shame,” Republican People’s Party’s [CHP] deputy...

MICHELLE OBAMA is already hammering away at a $15 million memoir that will rip the lid off President Barack Obama’s secret extramarital hijinks and public flirta­tions with other women, sources tell The ENQUIRER. “Michelle has suffered in silence, while Barack ignored her to live it up surrounded by adoring beauties,” an insider told The ENQUIRER. “She’s fed up, and she’s going to use a poison-pen memoir of her White House years to get revenge on him

William S. Burroughs was a counterculture icon: In more than two dozen books, including the landmark novel Naked Lunch, he laid down an original vision that influenced everyone from political activists to punk rockers, filmmakers to sci-fi writers. In 1962, writer Norman Mailer described him as "the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Burroughs was born 100 years ago Wednesday.

On this stick from the 1200s found in Bergen, two men named Sigurd and Lavran have written their names both in code and with regular runes. This helped runologist Jonas Nordby to solve the Jötunvillur code. For the first time, the Jötunvillur runic code is cracked. It can help to solve the mystery of the Vikings’ secret codes. Why did the Vikings use codes when they wrote runes? Was it a secret message or other reasons that they encrypted runic texts? This, we still know little about. But runologist Jonas Nordby think he may be one step closer to the...

The 2014 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which includes an award of $50,000, will go to co-winners Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College, for "Gettysburg: The Last Invasion," (Alfred A. Knopf) and Martin P. Johnson of Miami University Hamilton, for "Writing the Gettysburg Address" (University Press of Kansas). Steven Spielberg will also receive a Special Achievement Award for the movie "Lincoln," released in 2012, which won two Academy Awards, was nominated for twelve and grossed over $275 million worldwide.The Prize is awarded by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The winners were chosen from 114 nominations. Guelzo...

It’s no coincidence that the left seems rather Orwellian at times; after all, Ingsoc in 1984 was Orwell’s 1949 warning regarding what English Socialism could metastasize into a generation down the line. Why not American socialism? One of the left’s current (and frequently Orwellian) buzzwords is “sustainability.” Lately, based on recent headlines, the left seems to reaching peak Orwell. Is such a condition sustainable? There seem to be an enormous amount of euphemisms, doublethink and moral evasions in the headlines these days. Here’s a just a taste: In order to play the losing hand the left have chosen to deal...

Sounding a little wounded from the wrath that greeted her 2011 parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua has nonetheless jumped back into the pop-ethnography circus with a new book and fresh controversy. Written with her husband, fellow Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America posits another theory about collective identity, one that toe-tests – or perhaps leaps over – the line of political correctness: Some U.S. cultural groups, the couple say, are bound to be more successful than others. ......

A black Brit on his way to the U.S. wants to know if his use of the word will be offensive—and whether he should care.“Niggardly.” Go on, I dare you. Say it. Savor those syllables. Let your tongue caress those consonants. If you’re black and reading this, you may well have just laughed, smiled knowingly, been confused or even taken offense, depending on the size of your vocabulary. If you’re white and reading this, you will probably have just experienced a mild frisson of linguistic danger, as you are either fully aware of the ramifications that your verbalizing the word...

Captain Robert Posey and Pfc. Lincoln Kirstein were the first through the small gap in the rubble blocking the ancient salt mine at Altausee, high in the Austrian Alps in 1945 as World War II drew to a close in May 1945. They walked past one sidechamber in the cool damp air and entered a second one, the flames of their lamps guiding the way. There, resting on empty cardboard boxes a foot off the ground, were eight panels of The Adoration of the Lamb by Jan van Eyck, considered one of the masterpieces of 15th-century European art. In one...

Best-selling author Brad Thor confirmed to TheBlaze on Friday that one of his most popular books, “The Athena Project,” is set to hit the big screen as a Warner Bros. production. The studio has tapped UFC women’s fighter Ronda Rousey to star in the film, a decision Thor says he couldn’t be more excited about.

"I'd like a shot of whiskey and so would my companion, if ain't too much trouble" ~ Augustus McCrae, Captain, Texas Rangers

Seventy-five years ago this week a revolution in crime-writing began when Knopf published The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler's first novel. Reviews in 1939 were wary and unenthusiastic, however, and only gradually was it recognised that Chandler had pulled off a bold fusion of highbrow and lowbrow – much-applauded by authors such as WH Auden, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but also much-imitated by fellow chroniclers of murder.

About a year ago, I posted a thread asking for recommendations for good republican memoirs. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2981964/posts Since then I've complied quite a reading list. Going on the recommendations that were given to me(which I'm pretty grateful for), I got a few Richard Nixon books(No more Vietnams, The real war, Leaders) George Bush and Dick Cheney's books and others. I'm still to get through the last two, but I've finished reading through No more Vietnams and currently getting through the other Nixon books. But No more Vietnams really quite impressed me by how well detailed and informative it was and this...

Have you ever lied about reading a book? Maybe you didn’t want to seem stupid in front of someone you respected. Maybe you rationalized it by reasoning that you had a familiarity with the book, or knew who the author was, or what the story was about, or had glanced at its Wikipedia page. Or maybe you had tried to read the book, even bought it and set it by your bed for months unopened, hoping that it would impart what was in it merely via proximity (if that worked, please email me).

Dungeons & Dragons, that ground-breaking role-playing game, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Specifically, the game's big "4-0" comes this month. It was in January of 1974 when the game's co-creator, Gary Gygax, officially announced in a newsletter that "the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association has now released its set of fantasy campaign rules (Dungeons and Dragons)." In that announcement, Gygax invited folks to drop by his Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, home some Sunday afternoon to experience Dungeons & Dragons themselves. But lo, those four decades ago, when D&D first debuted, no one knew what to make of it. D&D was...

Only a few poems of the Greek poetess Sappho’s work have survived but thanks to a leading scholar’s investigation two new works have just been recovered—and gives experts hope to find more. A chance inquiry by an unidentified collector has led to a spectacular literary discovery: Parts of two previously unknown poems by Sappho, the great Greek poetess of the 7th Century B.C. One of the poems is remarkably well preserved and adds greatly to what is known about Sappho and her poetic technique. The two poems came to light when the owner of an ancient papyrus, dating to the...

The whole world knows that English spelling is a sick joke. If English is to be the international language of business and commerce, then a rational alphabet and a rational system of spelling need to be devised for it, and the present hodgepodge system needs to be jettissoned altogether. The inordinate amount of time spent by foreigners and English speaking children alike learning our present system of spelling would be better of spent on more reasonable goals. A reasonable system of spelling for English would be based on the following ideas: It should to the extent possible use letters which...

The Guns of August & The Proud Tower by Barbara W. Tuchman http://www.amazon.com/Barbara-W-Tuchman-Library-America/dp/159853145X/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

While getting ready for work this morning, I was pondering the current occupant of the White House and wondered what he read. Or did he even read at all? Then I started thinking about novels and thought about sociopaths and narcissists - do they read novels? The reason I ask this question is that 99 percent of the novels has a hero and villian with the hero winning at the end. And the hero usually wins at the end because he/she can see and know what is bigger than themselves. They achieve by sacrificing certain things in order to achieve...

In the next few days "The Monuments Men," directed by George Clooney and boasting an all-star cast, will be previewed in staid and upper-crust locations such as the National Gallery of Art and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before being released nationally on Feb. 7. This makes sense, for the film is about a small group of art professionals, many of them from Ivy League colleges and top U.S. museums, who, in the last days of the war and well after the surrender of Germany, secured and preserved millions of European cultural objects looted by the Nazis and returned them...

I found this particular old time radio episode very reminiscent of themes in Star Trek, Outer Limits, Ray Bradbury, and Twilight Zone. Furthermore, it was very interesting to hear about the "Holodeck" and distopian, robotic, disassociated society the family lives in. I think you will find the same similarities and more, and look forward to comments. You can find this episode at http://archive.org. I posted the original podcast link to give props to the podcast that put this one online for their show.

He is believed to have died after shooting himself in a Berlin bunker in 1945 when he realized Germany had lost World War II. But a startling new book claims Adolf Hitler actually escaped his hideout and died incognito in 1984 in a small town near Brazil’s border with Bolivia—and it can be proved by a picture. Not only that, but the author believes the Führer fled to Argentina and then Paraguay before settling in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to hunt for buried treasure—with a map given to him by Vatican allies, according to its author. […] Postgraduate...

Marxist leftists have prepared a nightmarish blueprint for American socialism in a new revolutionary "book of imagination." The new book, "Imagine Living in a Socialist USA," was edited by Frances Goldin who praises "life-enhancing socialism" in the preface. The 281 page manifesto showcasea 31 utopian essays written by dangerous criminals, prominent liberals, and self-described communists - all for just $10.11.