Christopher Orlet

For years we’ve been seeing stories that essentially repeat the same mantra: smart guys prefer dumb women. Smart women, naturally, are offended and angered by these stories (as they are, indeed, by a lot of things). That only proves how…

Stroll through any city with a formerly Episcopalian, German Lutheran, and Roman Catholic majority population, and one will find on every block the ghost of a corner tavern. In his excellent history of watering holes, The Old-Time Saloon, the humorist…

One of the gimmicks of Obamacare that got too little attention, in my opinion, was the proposal to keep “dependents” on their parents’ healthcare plans till age 26. I forget what I was doing at 25, but it sure wasn’t…

The Obama administration presented the release of Bowe Bergdahl as an indisputably glorious moment for the country. Amidst the celebration on Saturday, Obama didn’t bother to mention that Bergdahl was a deserter. Obama considered the swap of five of the…

ThursdayStrange day. I awakened to a text from a close friend who is a devout Christian and who was so angry at the elite media that she could not sleep. “I am so frikkin’ sick of the media telling us…

A few blocks from my home is the spot where the most famous exorcism in American history took place, the one William Peter Blatty used as the basis for his novel The Exorcist. Most of “the rite” took place in…

I’ve been wondering lately whether I, too, haven’t been guilty of “incivility” and “heated political rhetoric.” My rhetoric has been called lots of things of late — confused, frivolous, inane — but never heated. Certainly, there was a time when…

Three items from the recent news that even a cynical bastard like me thought could never happen: • Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has voluntarily turned over the speakership to John Boehner, thereby avoiding the potentially ugly, but totally radical spectacle…

The notion that humans are growing increasingly dumb has been around for millennia. Socrates, in his Unapologia, noted how his fellow Athenians didn’t know their “arse from an urn.” And Desiderius Erasmus was equally appalled by the ignorance of his Dutch…

I was really looking forward to being a grumpy old man — nothing to do all day but shuffle about the house kicking the cat, writing angry letters to the editor, and spending long periods secluded in the bathroom. But now…