From the Inbox 15 April 2005

Just a few things today:

From the Acton Institute’s Power Blog: Study of Clerical Careers, a short item expanding on the Pew study I mentioned in yesterday’s Inbox.

From the Daily Telegraph, a review of Max Hasting’s book Warriors.

Also from the DT, for those of you who like mystery novels, Her Dark Materials, an interview with Ruth Rendell. I like mystery stories, and once read a few of her books because everyone praised them. The solution to each one depended upon a sexual perversion (incest particularly). I suppose this was a good trick for the writer, making the key to the solution something the average reader would not think of, but it was too creepy for me and I went on to other writers. Even the interviewer refers to “the chilly and amoral tone of her novels,” and the interview itself seems revealing.

From the Wall Street Journal, Some Like It Less Hot, subtitled “Hollywood wages war on ‘family friendly’ film versions” (I have some sympathy for the directors’ feelings, actually, having been the victim of ham-fisted editors); Welcome to L.A., subtitled “A notorious book publisher heads to Los Angeles and ‘culture.’ Stop laughing”; and the Orthodox theologian Alexander Webster’s Death of a Patriarch, about the late Greek Orthodox Archbishop Iakovos.

And finally, from NewScientist.com, Risk-taking boys do not get the girls, which seems to me a dubious finding, and Gay men read maps like women. If the story is correct, they have an advantage over straight men and women in this.