I’ve been back and forth on the topic of Ben Stein for well over 20 years. I loved his writing from the time I was first exposed to it, and he used to be human-sized enough to correspond with me by email when he just wrote for the old American Spectator, but oddly enough when I would challenge him — gingerly — on religious issues (he is Jewish, as I am), he would stop (and eventually did) stop writing back. Okay, I get it. Celebrity, kind of.

His writing is certainly idiosyncratic, and I don’t agree with everything he says. But he says it very well, very sincerely and he’s mostly right, and very original.

But he just may win me back over with this — his crusade against the crusade against Intelligent Design. He even has a blog about it. I need to do some homework to figure out the relationship between Ben Stein and God, but evidently he’s, not surprisingly, kept an open mind about it… unlike some people. Stein told the New York Times:

Mr. Stein, a prolific author who has acted in movies like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and appeared on television programs including “Win Ben Stein’s Money” on Comedy Central, said in a telephone interview that he accepted the producers’ invitation to participate in the film not because he disavows the theory of evolution — he said there was a “very high likelihood” that Darwin was on to something — but because he does not accept that evolution alone can explain life on earth.

He said he also believed the theory of evolution leads to racism and ultimately genocide, an idea common among creationist thinkers. If it were up to him, he said, the film would be called “From Darwin to Hitler.”

Well, of course, just as we can’t say that the theory of evolution is not valid because it leads to atheism, we can’t say that if it leads to racism and genocide, it also must be empirically incorrect. As he says, surely Darwin is onto something, and, short of unethical experimentation, we should probably always let science take us where it goes. But he and the filmmakers are challenging a cultural moment here, not arguing the merits of the debate, from what I can tell (I can also tell where the comments section is going to go notwithstanding that caveat), and I can’t wait for the picture to come out.

Norman Mailer is in the hospital. “He’s not in very good shape. It’s breaking my heart,” his ex-wife Carol Mailer told the New York Post yesterday.

I hadn’t thought of the old man in a long time, until the picture above started glowering at me on all the newsstands in New York, from the cover of New York magazine, which announces thereon that Mailer has started his own new religion, kind of:

In a six-decade career, Norman Mailer has written thirteen novels, nineteen works of nonfiction, two poetry collections, and one play. He’s directed four movies. He ran for mayor of New York, and in the living room of his Brooklyn Heights home, he built, in three weeks, with two friends, a vast Lego city, incorporating some 15,000 pieces, known as the city of the future, seeming to take as much pride in it as in any of his other creations. But even at 84, he has a vast ambition. And now he has created something like a religion. In a new book, On God, a dialogue with one of his literary executors, Michael Lennon, he lays out his highly personal vision of what the universe’s higher truths might look like, if we were in a position to know them. But his theology is not theoretical to him. After eight decades, it is what he believes to be true. He expects no adherents, and does not profess to be a prophet, but he has worked to forge his beliefs into a coherent catechism.

I doubt it. But it appears he may find out very soon.