You’re not going to find many traditional judges who can lead you any longer, since they now wander helplessly, bemused by the willful ignorance of that bizarre twentieth-century organism, the intellectual. You’re going to have to make the crucial judgments yourselves.
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Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. (born March 2, 1931) is an American author and journalist, best known for his association with and influence over the New Journalism literary movement, in which literary techniques are used extensively and traditional values of journalistic objectivity and evenhandedness are rejected. He began his career as a regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s, but achieved national prominence in the 1960s following the publication of such best-selling books as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters), and two collections of articles and essays, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987, was met with critical acclaim, became a commercial success, and was adapted as a major motion picture (directed by Brian De Palma). 2Early life and education Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Louise (née Agnew), a landscape designer, and Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr., an agronomist. Wolfe grew up on Gloucester Road in the historic Richmond North Side neighborhood of Sherwood Park. He recounts some of his childhood memories of growing up there in a foreword to a book about the nearby historic Ginter Park neighborhood. Wolfe was student council president, editor of the school newspaper and a star baseball player at St. Christopher's School, an Episcopal all-boys school in Richmond, Virginia. Upon graduation in 1947, he turned down admission to Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University, both all-male schools at the time; at Washington and Lee, Wolfe was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternit
To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved in to Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.
Language, said Darwin, originated with the songs birds sang during the mating season. Man began imitating the birds, a cappella. By and by he started repeating certain birdsong sounds so often they began to stand for certain things in nature. They became words in embryo, and man began creating a…
Soon speech will be recognized as the Fourth Kingdom of Earth. We have regnum animalia, regnum vegetabile, regnum lapideum (animal, vegetable, mineral)— and now regnum loquax, the kingdom of speech, inhabited solely by Homo loquax. Or is ‘kingdom’ too small a word for the eminence of speech, which…
Today mnemonics is not thought of as anything more practical than a memory device for remembering ingredients, lists, and in some cases formulas. Virtually all the sciences depend upon mnemonics, typically in the form of sentences or phrases in which the first letter of each word stands for a…
Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below.
Darwin's students wanted to know some small but fundamental details about the moment Evolution got under way and how exactly, physically, it started up— and from what? Darwin had apparently never thought of it quite that way before. Long pause… and finally, ‘Ohhh,’ he said, ‘probably from four or…
In Germany, on the other hand, The Origin of Species was an immediate sensation. By 1874 Nietzsche had paid Darwin and his theory the highest praise with the most famous declaration in modern philosophy: ‘God is dead.’ Without mentioning Darwin by name, he said the ‘doctrine that there is no…
Wallace put his discovery of all discoveries— the origin of species by natural selection— into the hands of a group of distinguished British Gentlemen.
Charles Darwin’s dad nudged him into marrying in his perfectly nice, if plain, thirty-year-old spinster first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and bought them a country place and settled enough money on him for the boy to live well forever and ever. Living well included eight or nine servants— a butler, a…
Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.
Jesus offered great hope. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek shall inherit the earth and ascend to the right hand of God. This, from the Sermon on the Mount, is the most radical social and political doctrine ever…
Jesus is the Rock of Ages for both Marxism and its less vulgar child, Political Correctness in American colleges and universities, today, even though Jesus’s latter-day ducklings would gag on the very thought.
It was not so much the book The Origin of Species as the talk about it that created such a stir.
There were five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis. Had anyone observed the phenomenon— in this case, Evolution— as it occurred and recorded it? Could other scientists replicate it? Could any of them come up with a set of facts that, if true, would contradict the theory (Karl Popper’s…