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Kindle Deal: This book made my top ten list of favorite reads last year. Right now, it’s only $3.49 on Kindle. Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor.

Seven of the best articles I came across this week:

1. In my earlier columns on polarization and fragmentation (see here and here), I quoted from Kevin den Dulk’s excellent article in Comment magazine: Isolation and the Prospecs for Democracy: The Challenge for the Alienated. Highly recommended.

2. Michael Kelley – The Seductive Song of Self-PitySelf-pity feels so good. What makes it feel even better is, unlike so many times when you have the sense your pride is wrong and unjustified, in the case of self-pity, it feels right. That’s the best kind of pride of all.

3. Judith Thurman – The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages. What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?

4. ‘Every Job is Worthwhile.’ Former Cosby Show Actor Speaks Out After Job-Shaming Photo Goes Viral. I appreciate Geoffrey Owens for calling out “job shaming,” and for lending his voice to lifting up the dignity of various kinds of work.

5. Salena Zito – The Twitter Trolls Attacking My Work are All Wrong. I haven’t read this book yet, and so can’t speak to the merits of her argument, but I am encouraged that more and more people seem to be standing up to the social media mobs that threaten civil discourse.

6. Stephen Marche – The Incest Aesthetic. The erosion of the taboo against incest is more than a symptom of decline and fall. It’s a description of how and why the world falls apart. 

7. Peter Leithart – For Useless LearningTo defend the “usefulness” of the liberal arts is to accept the standards of our critics, the criterion that judges every human pursuit by its economic, political, or personal usefulness. If we do this, we lose the argument before we begin. 

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