Nathanael Yellis

Peggy Noonan's column on Prince Harry, published last week, ended with a broader thought about privacy. It has all of the pearl-clutching and "back in my day" of a good Noonan column, but I think her point is worth quoting at length:

Earlier this week, my friend Alex asked me if I was a reader. I said “not really,” and he laughed: behind my head in Zoom videos are twenty or so books in a stack. I read two books of them this week. They’re the ones linked below. I found them at a book swap in Salem. I figured that I needed to give the “Benedict Option” a fairer shake, and while I wouldn’t support its author and doubt its wisdom, I couldn’t say no to a free book. Then, I saw the best book title:

Don’t just do something, sit there.

The place where my parenting has been the most publicly coached is a small stream on the side of Sugarloaf Mt, in western Maine. The stream is one of those joyful mountain brooks that’s mostly rocks and sand, but with a lot of tributaries, it never dries up in the Summer and surges with snowmelt in the late Spring. Our kids love it: in the winter they test all areas to see if the ice will hold and in the rest of the year they get as cold and wet and muddy as possible. From the time they can stand, throwing rocks into its deepest pools has been their mountain pastime. A couple of years ago, I led the older kids on a hike up the stream. No trail, just hopping rocks and scrambling up. They’re begging to do it again.

f you know me, then you know that I’m a Christian. My faith’s bloody history might suggest that people like me wouldn’t want mosques. But both my Dad and I had the same reaction to the piece linked below: we need more mosques.