Irish

Thursday

Hannah Moore

How to do St. Patrick’s Day like an Irish American

For a country like Ireland, as devoted to its faith as to a good party, the fact that St. Patrick’s Day falls during Lent poses a problem. The saint himself is said to have broken his fast during Lent, eating meat instead of fish, for which he was so apologetic that an angel came to give him comfort. Put your meat into a dish of water, the angel said, and it will turn to fish. This Patrick did and was very pleased to see that the angel was right. The meat had turned to fish, and he could partake of it without guilt. The Irish call this miracle “St. Patrick’s Fish,” and feel no qualms about eating a pork roast to celebrate the day. You can also keep a holy day and drink to excess, if you’re drinking for the right reasons. St.

St. Patrick's

Sunday

Peter Van Buren

Wokeness claims a museum

When will our intellectual life return to normal, where facts come together into conclusions? Today, in service to ideologies like Critical Race Theory, conclusions are established and facts are manipulated or just ignored to support them. You can't argue intellectually against something so profoundly nonintellectual but you can take note of it in hopes that someday we will untangle ourselves. That's why today we're paying a visit to the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side. When I joined the Museum as an educator in early 2016, it was a small, elegant, good place. Inside a restored 19th-century tenement apartment house, it told the story of some of the actual all-immigrant families who had lived there, from inside their actual apartments.