Happy is the eye that saw all this, but our souls were anguished by what our ear heard." This is the refrain of an ancient poem in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, a lament for its author's belatedness.

Emile Zola never wrote a vampire flick, but if he had, we can assume it would have resembled Park Chan-wook’s Thirst. This is in part because the Korean writer-director’s film is based (very loosely) on an early Zola novel, Therese Raquin, and is, to the best of my knowledge, the only vampire movie to bear this distinction. But there are other echoes as well. Zola examined the darker side of family life: violence, greed, mental illness, alcoholism, and other “accidents” of the “nerves and blood.” The vision Park has laid out in films such as Oldboy and Lady Vengeance has a still harsher, exaggerated brutality, as if by pushing the boundaries of savage metaphor he can shed light on the quieter tragedies of everyday life. Zola had his naturalism; Park, his super-naturalism.

In the three-and-a-half years I worked at First Things magazine, I came to know two Richard John Neuhauses. The first is the one I worked with in the journal's offices every day: personally generous and jovial, intellectually and theologically curious, alert to political and cultural complications, overflowing with energy and ideas. This is the Neuhaus readers encountered in his lengthy, erudite essays on philosophy, theology, and history, which frequently graced the pages of the magazine.

Now that the schools have more or less abandoned the responsibility, passing judgment on speech has become semi-institutionalized in our society in the columns and commentaries of the so-called 'pop grammarians.' The label is a little unfair, since talking about talk is, or ought to be, a kind of right of cultural citizenship. But the unfairness reflects a suspicion that usage commentators are not really talking about talk at all: they are trying to tell us how to live.