The Amazon Kindle was released on November 19, 2007. A little tablet full of countless books you can take with you anywhere — it was a cool idea then, and I suppose it’s still a cool idea now. Over the years there have been a bunch of new versions. Amazon updated theirs, and other companies have released their own versions of what is now known as an e-reader.

My wife’s got one. She just bought it a few months ago. She wanted it because she was sick of looking at her phone when nursing our daughter in the middle of the night. It’s worked well. She hasn’t been scrolling; she’s been reading instead.

Sometimes I like thinking about my kids coming across my books when I’m old or dead and gone and finding these little things I’ve written.

I’ve held hers and played with it a little. It’s very cool, and I want to like it. I want to load one up with lots of books, read it on the airplane or right before I drift off after midnight with all the lights off in the bedroom, and join the future with all other fellow e-readers (the people, not the object).

But I just can’t; I like books too much.

Judging covers

I like the way the real pages feel on the pads of my fingers. I like how it sounds when I flip the page. I like to fold back the edge and mark my spot. There’s something about the smell too, especially the old books. You know that smell, don’t you? If you put your nose near the inside of the binding and sniff, you will get it. It’s the faint scent of a college library and an old house.

I love the covers of paperbacks and how they change over the years as new editions are released. I most particularly love the old(ish) ones most. I can always pinpoint the decade based on the fonts and colors. It’s funny how deeply infused a book is with the aesthetic sensibilities of the decade in which it was printed and just how easy it is to discern when one was released.

The 60s were simple and modern. The 70s had loopy fonts with lots of brown, greens, and yellows. The 80s were colorful with floral patterns, some neon, and sharp lines. The 90s were classy and simple with understated serifs and an air of sophistication.

Paperback delighter

One of my favorite things to do is lie in the hammock on a Saturday afternoon reading. A small, flimsy paperback in my right hand, two fingers on the inside holding the pages open, and three others on the outside for support. The summer breeze, the leaves on the birch above, the ropes of the hammock on my back, and a little paperback.

I love to write in my books too, mostly the more intellectual ones. I underline sentences, bracket paragraphs of importance, and write things in the margins. They are things I want to remember. Even if I don’t know when I will come back to the book again, I want to make a note in the event I do. Sometimes I like thinking about my kids coming across my books when I’m old or dead and gone and finding these little things I’ve written. Maybe they will want to read what I wrote; maybe they won’t.

I’ve heard that we don’t remember words we read on the screen as much as words we read on a page. I don’t know the science behind it, but I feel like it’s true — or at least it is for me and my wife. I asked her what she thought as a newly minted e-reader enjoyer, and she said she agrees. She said it feels like she remembers ever so slightly less. Like it doesn’t stick quite as much or like it just doesn’t go deep enough into her brain.

Slightly foxed

The books on the e-reader remain perfect forever. They look the exact same on every single device. In the event the device falls in the lake, you might be out $200, but soon enough you’ll have a new one, and all 500 books will appear on that little screen just as they were before.

Real books don’t stay perfect for very long. The pages get bent, the binding gets broken, the margins are full of ink, and the edges of the pages yellow as the years pass. The more we read a book, the more we know a book, and the more beaten a book becomes. Old floppy paperbacks that look like they’ve been through a war are coveted in the same way leather bags with beautiful patina are.

I want to like the e-reader. I want to join the future. I would feel so futuristic and so efficient with one in my hand. But I can’t, and I won’t. I like the physicality of books too much. I like the wear they have; I like the time they show; I like the fact they tell a story of who and where we were when we read them.

Russell Brand’s 'How to Become a Christian': A superficial, self-serving memoir of conversion

When Russell Brand published his 2007 memoir, "My Booky Wook," I bought it with no particular expectations. The lanky provocateur from Essex was already famous for his drug-addled, debauched adventures as a stand-up comic and onetime MTV host — a job he lost after showing up the day after 9/11 dressed as Osama bin Laden. I suspected this latest venture might be no more than a shoddy attempt to cash in on this notoriety.

I was wrong. "My Booky Wook" was engaging, witty, and painfully self-aware. Brand could write.

The unbuttoned shirts and Jim Morrison-like leather pants mask a keen intelligence and shrewd rhetorical instincts.

Born identity

And Brand can still write, in the strict sense. The sentences in his new book, "How to Become a Christian in Seven Days," are sometimes funny, often eloquent, and occasionally beautiful. The man has range. He has cadence. He has, by any measure, talent.

He also has a problem with the truth, as his subsequent New Age-inflected leftist activism has demonstrated. Now that he's taken a turn for the traditional, Brand still shows the same affinity for self-serving fabulation — and the same instinct for monetizing his "countercultural" views.

I am a Catholic. I take conversion seriously, which is precisely why I take this one so unseriously. I never agreed with Brand's anti-capitalism shtick, the Che Guevara cosplay, the Bernie Sanders lovefests — but I always thought he meant it. That was the charm. Like Jon Stewart, he used humor to make political points. Unlike the erstwhile "Daily Show" host, Brand showed real humility while doing so, presenting himself less as an authority than as a fellow truth-seeker.

It's precisely humility, ironically enough, that is missing from Brand's public embrace of Christianity.

Brand management

Part of it, certainly, is the convenient timing. In September 2023, a Channel 4 "Dispatches" documentary and a Sunday Times investigation surfaced allegations of rape and sexual assault against Brand. A few months later, Bear Grylls — yes, that Bear Grylls — baptized him in the Thames. Recently, in an interview with Megyn Kelly, Brand admitted on the record to sleeping with a 16-year-old when he was 30, calling himself an "exploiter of women." I watched the interview. He delivered the lines as eloquently as ever, but the remorse seemed rehearsed rather than felt.

Now comes the book. One hundred thirty-four pages. Thirty-three dollars. A man who once wrote a manifesto called "Revolution" about the predations of capitalism is selling salvation by the page at roughly a quarter a sheet.

The prose tells you what kind of conversion this is. Brand opens with a passage about how the title is "figurative" because seven days might take longer, then immediately explains that in the Bible, "days" don't really mean days because the earth's rotation, et cetera, et cetera and concludes: "This book has already paid for itself in cosmological bullion — 'Now I know what a day is!'"

That is, to be fair, a funny line. It is also the entire book. He cracks a gag, dresses it in Scripture, and bills you for the privilege. Later, he writes that he is "attempting to reinterpret the Bible," catches himself, and adds: "Phew, for a minute I thought I was an out-of-control egomaniac trying to rewrite the Bible and charge you for the privilege." The self-awareness is the alibi. He names the con and proceeds with it.

MEGA/GC Images via Getty Images

Selling salvation

None of this is to say genuine conversion is impossible for the famous, the rich, or the disgraced. Augustine was a libertine before he was a saint. Dorothy Day had a common-law husband and an abortion behind her when she found Catholicism. Conversion is exactly the sort of thing that happens to people whose lives have spiraled. That is half of the point of the doctrine.

What separates those stories from this one is the absence of a sales pitch. Augustine wrote his "Confessions" 15 years after his baptism, in Latin, for an audience of fellow bishops, and he spent most of it agonizing over a pear he stole as a boy. Day lived a life of voluntary poverty and poured any money she made from "The Long Loneliness" back into her work for the poor. Neither of them timed their repentance to a court docket.

Any considering this purchase should realize that Brand, perhaps more than many celebrities, is a shrewd manipulator of the media. The unbuttoned shirts and Jim Morrison-like leather pants disguise a keen intelligence and shrewd rhetorical instincts; this is a man who has survived two decades in the crosshairs of the British tabloids (which, it must be said, operate with a brutality that makes their American counterparts look like Ladies' Home Journal). Brand is a warrior, someone capable of weathering the most brutal of storms.

Property of Jesus

He’s also capable of reading the room. In this case, the room is a world besotted with American evangelicalism, which tends to focus on dramatic tales of redemption more than on the day-by-day grind of repentance.

That this type of Christianity is so forthright about embracing the broken is its glory, but it can also be its blind spot. Brand has bet, with considerable shrewdness, that this audience will buy the book without interrogating the allegations behind it.

Every person is owed his day in court, presumed innocent until proven guilty. I am not here to litigate the allegations, but to question the suddenness of the transformation. People who knew Brand well have described him as sociopathic. That is plausible. If Brand's come-to-Jesus moment is no more than a way to leverage other people's decency for personal gain, the word would certainly apply.

In the meantime, the best we can do for Brand is pray, as we would for any fellow sinner. It's not for us to judge the authenticity of his conversion; that's between him and God. But we should be wary of supporting his attempts — whether cynical or simply misguided — to profit from it.

'Against the Machine' offers playbook for battling leftist lies

How did we end up with modern leftism and all its ills?

For Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the answer depended on how deep you were willing to dig. For the average person, the problem seems to have started with World War II; the "more informed" soon realize that World War I is when things went wrong.

This battle will not be won on social media, through new platforms, or by means of yet another ideology.

But the "genuine historian," writes von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in "Leftism Revisted," goes further back in history still, all the way to the "mother of most of the ideological evils besetting not only Western civilization but also the rest of the world": the French Revolution.

Paul Kingsnorth’s compelling diagnosis of what ails modern man in "Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity" places him somewhere in von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's third category

The Machine

It’s not that this English writer — a recent convert to the Orthodox Church — dismisses the damage wrought by the 20th century, which shattered the West’s confidence in its animating principles and, in time, killed Christendom — setting in motion a broader campaign of deracination, disorientation, and disenchantment, advanced from both sides of the liberal political binary.

Like von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Kingsnorth understands that these terrible events are the expression of a sickness that took hold centuries ago, at the storming of the Bastille — an event that ushered in the birth of ideology, the razing of ancient hierarchies, the sacrifice of multitudes in the name of "Reason," and the initiation of the continental variety of the liberal experiment.

Kingsnorth, however, goes a step farther. He does not merely trace the origins of the crisis — he names the thing that now drives it.

That which has demolished "borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing" is, according to Kingsnorth, a centuries-old "monster that grows in deserts," coming of age in the spiritual wastelands created by the French and Industrial Revolutions.

This insatiable force — what Kingsnorth calls the "Machine," but also "Progress" — has swallowed the world and, in doing so, made it increasingly difficult for those within it to perceive reality except through its own corrupting lens.

What cannot be quantified or digitized — "that irrational, illogical world of beauty, wild nature, and spiritual truth" — is not merely ignored but actively obscured.

Science, self, sex, screen

The Machine’s values — progress, openness, the rejection of limits and borders, therapeutic individualism, universalism, materialism, scientism, and the primacy of market logic — have become so ubiquitous, writes Kingsnorth, that we now treat them "as if they were natural as rain or wind."

These values can be distilled into what he calls the "Four S’s":

science, which offers a purely material account of origins;
the self, which defines identity and purpose;
sex, which anchors meaning in desire; and
the screen, "our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming post-human reality of the Machine."

They stand in direct opposition to the older order, grounded in the "Four P's": past, place, people, and prayer.

Where the Four S's dissolve inheritance, the Four P's depend on it.

Care for and attention to the Four P's threaten the Machine’s liberal anti-culture and are therefore treated with suspicion or contempt — dismissed as naive at best and at worst as reactionary, bigoted, or "deplorable."

Recall former President Barack Obama’s remarks about working-class Pennsylvanians who failed to embrace the promises of progress: "It’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion ..."

Like its supporters, the Machine’s critics are legion. Yet their opposition is often absorbed.

Breaking the framework

Kingsnorth acknowledges that conservatism, at least in theory, comes closest to offering an anti-Machine politics rooted in human reality. It values tradition, centers home and family, affirms religious faith, and resists both centralized power and abstract utopianism.

But the problem, says Kingsnorth — drawing on Roger Scruton and G.K. Chesterton — is that mainstream conservatism operates largely within the same liberal framework it claims to resist.

As Chesterton observed in 1924, "Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition."

The result is a politics that conserves the aftermath of revolution rather than the inheritance it displaced.

The goalposts, in other words, were moved long ago — inside the belly of the beast.

Reactionary radicalism

After searching for a label for those who would genuinely resist the Machine — those seeking, as Rod Dreher has put it, to build "networks of resistance" — Kingsnorth arrives at a term deliberately resistant to left-right categorization: reactionary radicalism.

Reactionary radicalism, says Kingsnorth:

aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomized individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a world view. A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion. … A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbor rather than competition with everyone.

But how, exactly, can this be put into practice?

This battle will not be won on social media, through new platforms, or by means of yet another ideology. These are the Machine’s native terrain — its shock absorbers.

Raw and the cooked

One increasingly widespread act of resistance Kingsnorth highlights is homeschooling, which he calls "the most important thing any parent can do to resist Machine culture."

More broadly, he urges a turn away from the purely rational toward the reasonable; the building of parallel systems resilient enough to resist assimilation; the rejection of technologies that promise freedom while delivering dependence; and a renewed pursuit of transcendence.

In short: a recovery of the Four P's.

To those still enthralled by the Machine, such people will appear as barbarians — unrefined, unassimilable, and threatening.

The question, Kingsnorth suggests, is what kind of barbarian one will become.

The "raw" barbarian has fled the Machine’s reach. The "cooked" barbarian remains within its walls but practices quiet, persistent dissent.

Either way, he has made himself inedible. Enough indigestible barbarians, and the all-devouring Machine may choke to death.

Alito Teaches The Right How To Have Principles And Win At The Same Time

In Alito, Hemingway paints a picture of a justice who understands the greatest constitution in the world is only as good as those who steward it.

Welcome to WokeNut Grove: Sneak peek at Netflix's 'Little House on the Prairie' reboot

Because Hollywood has been unable to create anything new for at least 20 years, Netflix is "rebooting" "Little House on the Prairie." That almost certainly means trouble.

No stories have been more important to me than the fictionalized autobiographical series written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. As a poor child in a single-mother broken home, we didn't have luxuries growing up. Some kind soul donated a boxed set of the "Little House" books to an "angel tree" Christmas drive where poor families could choose a gift for their children.

The Ingalls family leave their cabin in Wisconsin to make way for an indigenous family violently displaced by pioneer gentrification.

I opened my present to find this set of books. I read and re-read them so many times they were in tatters when I reluctantly threw them away a few years ago. I'm lucky to have a good friend who bought me a new hardback set for Christmas.

'House' away from home

The values of independence, self-sufficiency, owning your mistakes, repentance, and forgiveness inside a loving family and community was everything I wanted life to be. It taught me values and gave me hope for something better than the frightening home in which I was raised.

The long-running television series based on the books was my favorite show. We watched it when it was new, and we watched it in reruns. Viewing the original "Little House" series today, one is struck at first by how sentimental it seems. But on second thought, it probably reads that way not because the original was truly that sappy, but because our society and our selves have been so coarsened in the 40 years since the show aired.

Look at where we are today as the release of the new Netflix version approaches. It used to be that when new movies or TV shows came out, prospective viewers would ask questions like: Will the cast be good? Will the premise hold up for more than one season? How are they going to pull off the special effects that the premise demands?

'Middle' mangled

What we weren’t talking about was whether the show was going to beat us over the head with painfully au courant political and social dogma. The thought didn't even occur to us before about 2014. Now, it's the only thing any aware adult can think about when they see yet another "reimagining" of a book or TV series.

Reimagining? A better word is "profanation." These reboots often explicitly insult the original version in order to signal how superior the current show runners are to their "racist," "sexist," "homophobic," and otherwise unenlightened forbears.

Look what Hulu has done to the 2000s-era sitcom "Malcolm in the Middle." The original show — that is to say, the real show — was about an “eccentric” family that drove middle child and IQ genius Malcolm nuts. The reboot, titled "Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair," brings back most of the original cast with some 2020s-style mandatory identity insertions.

Malcolm's best friend Stevie has gay-married a man and adopted a boy child. But wait, there's more! Malcolm and his brothers have a new "sibling" named Kelly who's not a girl. She ... sorry, they is ... sorry, are "non-binary."

The piano-music-special-moment-interlude is like getting teeth drilled without anesthetic. The very obviously female Kelly tells her ... darn it, tells they’s parents, "I was like 5 when I started feeling wrong."

Take an antacid before you watch the clip.

Theo Wargo/Getty Images

Back to the Future Prairie

I know that I don't have to watch the new "Little House on the Prairie," but I do have to. Won't be able to stop myself, even though I know it's probably going to make me mad. I know the original books still exist, and I know that I can watch the original show. But irrational though it may be, just the possibility that Netflix is going to inject modern-day narcissistic depravity into something so pure — well, it feels like it's going to contaminate my memories of something wholesome.

So let's rip the Band-Aid off and get the hard feelings out of the way before the show comes out. Here are my predictions for the first season of the new and undoubtedly to-be-improved "Little House on the Prairie."

Episode 1: 'Decolonizing the Big Woods'

The Ingalls family leave their cabin in Wisconsin to make way for an indigenous family violently displaced by pioneer gentrification. We see the covered wagon pull away from the cabin as Chief Whining Shrew refits the log house with dreamcatchers, essential oils, and a slot machine by the side of the road.

They set out across the prairie headed for a town where they can make a new, sustainable life. In the closing scene, a sign ahead reads Welcome to WokeNut Grove. A young indigenous woman in traditional garb halts the wagon and warns Pa, "Bruh — do not EVEN call me squaw."

Episode 2: 'School's Out'

Mary and Laura's first day of school teaches them a lesson more valuable than the three Rs: empathy. The one-room schoolhouse is presided over by Mx. Beadle, a spinster — sorry, a non-binary educator — who keeps breast binders in her desk for the children who can't afford affirming clothing.

When Laura wrinkles her nose at the proffered tube top, Mx. Beadle makes Laura write, "NON-MEN AND NON-WOMEN ARE VALID" 50 times on the blackboard.

Episode 3: 'Farmer Boi'

We're introduced to the spoiled rich kid bully, Nelson Oleson. Nelson was assigned female at birth, but with the help of his domineering mother, Harriet, Nelson discovers he was actually a boy inside all along. In a surprising twist, it turns out Nelson's little brother is also actually his little sister, Wilhelmina. Everyone accepts this statistical improbability, AND YOU'D BETTER TOO.

With his golden ringlets peeking out from under a newsboy cap, Nelson taunts Laura on the way to school, shouting, "Sissy! Sissy! Sissy!" until Laura pushes him into Plum Creek. Nelson's binder pops off during the scuffle, revealing his gender assigned at birth. Laura has to work after school at the Oleson Mercantile sewing Nelson new binders by hand while Wilhelmina gets to make doll clothes on the newfangled sewing machine.

Episode 4: 'No One Is Free Until We're All Free'

With the crops failing, Pa goes to the town sawmill to look for work. He's about to join the crew when he notices that all the working hands are white men. Pa calls for the immediate shutdown of the mill until the diversity-in-work committee can get to the bottom of why so many white men have been allowed paying jobs.

The mill stays shuttered throughout the summer under a banner proclaiming "NO JUSTICE, NO PIECE (OF LUMBER)." Meanwhile, the town's white men are conscripted into a chain gang to build a wheelchair hoist so that Hester Sue Terhune, the town's wise black paraplegic, can wheel over to the cutting blade and take her rightful place as foreman. Three white families in tents die from exposure that winter, and the town celebrates with an ice cream social.

Episode 5: 'Horizontal Work Is Work'

When a family of gypsies — sorry, travelers — rolls into town, they are met with prejudice and bigotry as they try to open an honest business for Roma sex workers. Realizing the violent oppression woven into WokeNut Grove's founding documents, the town council repeals the ban on bawdy houses. The Pekrul family opens the Galatea Galerie, where rooms are let by the half-hour.

Mary goes to work at the Galerie but comes home with a severe case of harlot fever. Bedridden for weeks, when Mary tries to get up, she realizes something is terribly wrong. The camera zooms in on her vacant eyes as she cries, "Pa! Pa! I can't see my gender identity!" Ma, Laura, Pa, and Carrie take on extra jobs to save up so Mary can afford to go to the Iowa School for the Trans.

The season ends with Ma applying homemade dye to Mary's hair made from crushed lavender. Credits roll as a train whistle approaches town.

Stay tuned for Season 2.

The return of Drag Queen Story Hour?

I was at my local library recently when I saw something odd on the bulletin board. It looked like a poster for a Drag Queen Story Hour.

They can’t be doing that again? I thought to myself.

Much of drag comedy focuses on the fact that as hard as they try, most men can’t actually pull off impersonating a woman.

In case you don’t remember, Drag Queen Story Hour was one of the most bizarrely inappropriate events ever to appear at your local library.

When these “story hours” first began to proliferate in the late 2010s, the idea of drag queens reading books to very small children set off one of the fiercest battles of the culture wars.

Because it was so transgressive, outrageous, and effective as a way of infuriating the general populace, the proponents of DQSH doubled down on it. They kept pushing it. They founded an NGO. They rammed it down our throats.

Blake Nelson

Queen's gambit

The way DQSH worked: Libraries would hire a professional drag queen to read books to children ages 3 to 11. It was presented to the public as a “fun twist” on the idea of a kindly grandmother or librarian reading to the kids.

The drag queens they hired were adult men from the local area, men who were otherwise employed performing “drag shows” at nightclubs, bars, and private events.

These men dressed up like women — more specifically, super-sexualized women (prostitutes). Then they went on stage and told raunchy stories and sexually explicit jokes. Sometimes they sang songs and did pratfalls, all of which were of a sexual nature.

The understanding was that a drag show would feature explicit sexual content. Which is why they were performed in 21-and-over establishments.

That is, until Drag Queen Story Hour came along. And someone decided that drag queens belonged in libraries, reading to children.

Live, love, laugh

Part of the appeal of drag queens is the humorous sight of a chubby, stubbly, middle-aged man wearing lipstick, mascara, and gigantic false eyelashes. Much of drag comedy focuses on the fact that as hard as they try, most men can’t actually pull off impersonating a woman. And the results of their clumsy failures are often very funny.

Drag shows — or something like them — have appeared in many cultures throughout history. The humor of men pretending to be women is universal. Everyone finds those situations funny.

Everyone, that is, except for 4-year-olds, who might not understand this style of humor just yet. And don’t need to.

The fact is that it would be hard to predict how a small child would react to a professional drag queen in person.

Oh, sure, a child who has been coached and prepped by a progressive parent might enjoy it. But your average child? Especially those under the age of 6? They might be traumatized.

And then doubly so when the adults they usually trust (parents, teachers, librarians) tell them not to be afraid, that it is wrong to feel uncomfortable, that if they have any negative feelings whatsoever about “Miss Wiggles” — who is 6'2", wearing ghoulish makeup, and pretending to be a woman — they are committing a grave moral sin.

Some small children are frightened by the sight of their own parents dressed up in Halloween costumes. Think of what an encounter with “Sashay D. Lite” might do to them.

Joe McNally/Getty Images

Properly checked and vetted

Some conservatives raised the issue that some of these performers might be predators of some kind.

This was met with attacks and smears that conservatives were homophobic, transphobic bigots, hatemongers, etc. Besides, all the drag queens would, of course, be thoroughly screened and vetted.

And yet at a Houston library in 2019, one of the drag queens reading stories to children was found to be a registered child sex offender.

So except for that guy. Everyone else had been properly checked and vetted.

Culture war, wins and losses

Looking back at the original battle over Drag Queen Story Hour ... who actually won?

In my mind, the general public did. Obviously a large majority of people believed DQSH was a bad idea. And the libraries stopped doing it.

But here I was, in my local library, staring at a poster with a Pride flag. And a drag queen. With the words Story Hour on it.

Looking closer, I saw they had changed the name. Now it was called Family Pride Story Hour. It would be specifically for LGBTQ families. A drag queen would be reading the stories. And then there would be a dance.

The suggested age for children attending? “Birth to six years old.”

No rest for the wicked

Ahhh. Those sneaky leftists. They couldn’t let this go. Subjecting infant children to the most grotesque adults they could find was too good a strategy to abandon.

What better way to divide and conquer? To confound and demoralize? They want us to fight over the drag queens again!

My advice is: Don’t do it. Don’t give them what they want. Talk to your librarians ahead of time. Talk to your library’s supervisor.

But be aware: If Family Pride Story Hour is coming to my town, it might well be coming to yours.