SEBASTIEN WRITES: For three years years now the Chateau de Versailles has been disfigured by temporary exhibitions of state-promoted contemporary art. This year the culprit is the Japanese manga ‘artist’ Takashi Murakami whose plastic sculptures have ruined the Versailles experience for hundreds of thousands of tourists from all the over the world. Some of the [...]

  COLLEGES, which are always seeking new marketing schemes now that they aggressively pursue a business model, almost universally advertise their study abroad programs. For $50,000, or whatever the going rate for tuition, parents send their college students to a foreign country for a year. Why should a young person party in his native country when he can live hard on an international scale? 

  THE NUMBER of married adults has fallen to its lowest level since the government began keeping records more than 100 years ago. According to Census Bureau data in today’s New York Times, 52 percent of the population over 18 years is now married, as opposed to 57 percent ten years ago. That’s a drop of five [...]

  IMAGINE if instead of lame “Family Day” proclamations, a single prominent politician stood up and said words similar to those of Theodore Roosevelt when he spoke before the National Congress of Mothers in 1905: In our modern industrial civilization there are many and grave dangers to counterbalance the splendors and the triumphs. It is not a good thing to [...]

  REPUBLICANS continue to do a fine job of normalizing family breakdown and sexual freedom. This breezy New York Times profile of Carl P. Paladino includes information about his dog, his favorite vodka and his favorite nighttime ritual. He “travels to the home of Sarah, his daughter from an extramarital relationship, and puts her to bed.” 

  GAIL AGGEN writes: When I read the reasons Theodore Dalrymple gives for the increase in domestic violence in the U.K., I felt that more needs to be said about specific causative behaviors, and the dehumanizing influences that spawn and maintain them. For example, if you visit Britain, you cannot help but notice that excessive alcohol consumption [...]

  IN HIS 2007 book In Praise of Prejudice, Theodore Dalrymple, who formerly worked as a clinical psychiatrist in Britain, offers a compelling theory for an increase in domestic violence. He attributes the rise to two factors: sexual freedom and the cult of non-judgmentalism. The first makes men insecure about the fidelity of their companions:  How does a man who lives in a sexual free-for-all, [...]