Pants Are the Enemy of Freedom

For reasons too drab to mention, we recently stumbled across this sordid 1982 tale about a self-described "mountain man" who turned murderous. We were struck not so much by the brutality of Henry Burton Merrill's crimes, but rather by the media's insistence on referring to him as a "hermit." And that got us thinking, naturally, about the American tradition of eremitism, and how it has come to take on very different dimensions than back in the days of Walden Pond.

When we usually think of...