Author Archive
November 1, 2013In various lectures and publications, Iâ??ve had occasion to call attention to the problem of the â??birth dearth,â? the fact that the birth rate has dropped belowâ??often...- September 6, 2013So I spoke at what the American Political Science Association apparently viewed as one of the key sessions of their recent annual meeting. The session was about how to respond to...
- August 22, 2013So we live in a time when we look for wisdom from mega-entrepreneurs. I admit that theyâ??re usually really smart and fascinating--not to say full of contradictions. Peter Thiel,...
- August 19, 2013Someone might sayâ??and libertarians skeptics often doâ??that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do...
- August 12, 2013
- July 29, 2013
- July 19, 2013Martin Heidegger called Socrates “the purest thinker” in the West, which, I gather, doesn’t necessarily mean the best thinker. The sign of Socrates’ purity...
- June 14, 2013Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, gave by far the most thoughtful and combative commencement address this year, at Brandeis. He defended the humanities as our...
- May 30, 2013And I’ve been sharing with the organizers of a big Percy conference that will occur next year in the now-legendary St. Francisville my fake-sociological efforts to...
- March 1, 2013Here's the third part of my celebration of Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos. I know I'm annoying many BIG THINK readers. I may even be bad for their health; one...
- February 27, 2013The title Lost in the Cosmos is meant to be a correction to Carl Sagan’s “splendid picture book” Cosmos, which Percy understands as a failed self-help...
- February 25, 2013So lots of readers (about six) have written ME asking for advice on what book they should read to turn their lives around.
- January 7, 2013I'm taking a break from talking about conservative diversity to think more about justifying the content of liberal education these days.So here’s an account of...
- January 2, 2013Ross Douthatâ??the only really conservative columnist for the NYTâ??has been endlessly patient in trying to explain to his basically hostile audience that conservative opinion is...
