Star section in Sun-Times

Tom McNamee is editor of the Sunday Sun-Times Controversy section that debuted in mid-July.  He and the paper’s higher-ups deserve credit for running stuff you find on Conservative Book Club reading lists and in Reason Mag, such as today’s excerpt from One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-reliance, by feminist antagonist Christina Hoff Sommers and American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Sally Satel, M.D. and “How Not to Fight Fat,” which makes fun of federal “disease detectives,” by the eminently contrarian libertarian Jacob Sullum, author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (and he’s not talking about what you get over any counter).

The section also has a delicious religious joke, winner of competition organized by ShipofFools.com, which has an 1879 Reformed Baptist calling an 1915 version “heretic scum” and pushing him off a bridge — a guy he’d been trying to talk out of suicide before he found him out.

This Ship of Fools site is a gem, by the way — it shows how one thing leads to another, if the first thing is at all Internet-based.  It features “the Mystery Worshiper,” in the British Isles and elsewhere, which has included Chicago, where the RC St. Mary of the Angels in Bucktown and the Episcopal Church of the Ascension on LaSalle Street.  It’s lively, intelligent commentary, cleanly written.

Can’t say enough for S-T and McNamee for breaking new ground here.