The Trouble in Toyland

The world of childrens’ toys teems with mutated reptiles in sewers, strong men bent on mastering the universe, and helpless, vain women with expensive tastes in fashions. Toyland today is a post-modern and post-Cold War world, where GI-Joe battle Third World terrorists and the heavens are besieged by weird, quasi-human “Mosquitors” whose translucent stomachs glow with the blood they’ve sucked…

Everybody’s Counting Kids (But Something Doesn’t Add Up)

Call me too sensitive, but since we had our fourth child last August, my wife and I have been getting lots of unsolicited feedback on our family size. People who wouldn’t dare the affrontery of asking what I make in a year, or what our house is worth, feel emboldened to preach to us the gospel of better living through…

Zach And His Dangerous Book

By all accounts, Zachary Hood is a pretty normal 9–year–old Catholic boy. A couple of years ago, while a first–grader in a Northern New Jersey public school, Zach was asked by his teacher to read his favorite story in front of the class. He chose one from “The Beginners Bible”—about Jacob’s reunion with his estranged brother Esau, one of the…