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The Power of American Originals February 26, 2025
“In the US, voters just loosed a genuine bull into the china shop of the ruling class.”Karl Zinsmeister, 2025BACKBONE: Maverick Essays in Middle America: Why American Populism Should be Welcomed, Not Feared is a collection of short essays about Ameri...
Labor Unions, Roman History, and Community February 26, 2025
Though the concept of organized labor may seem distinctively modern, what we today might call a workers’ strike has precedent in the early Roman Republic according to historian Sarah Bond in her insightful new history of the Roman world through labor...
The Loneliness of the Conservative Pronatalist February 25, 2025
A vocal group of conservative intellectuals really, really wants Americans to have more babies. The movement is small, but it doesn’t lack for high-profile adherents. Vice President J. D. Vance, a father of three, recently proclaimed, “Very simply, I...
Making the Arts Great Again February 24, 2025
The nation’s arts community is suddenly aflutter with apprehension, doubt, and some mild public protests over President Donald Trump’s recent decision to overhaul the leadership of Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In...
The USCCB Should Reject Federal Funds February 17, 2025
On Monday, Pope Francis sent a letter to the bishops of the United States. Criticizing the Trump administration’s plan to deport illegal immigrants, he wrote: “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is . . . love that builds a fraternity open to ...
Why Voice Notes Are a Small Act of Love February 13, 2025
Somewhere in the blur of 2020, as I slipped outside with a mask and running shoes in the early morning to walk around the block, the lilting drawl of a friend’s “hiiiiii” nearly stopped me in my tracks. It was the first voice note I remember clicking...
‘Severance’ Gets the Internet February 13, 2025
In Episode 3 of this season of Severance, Mark and his sister, Devon, have an idea. They need to ask Mark’s innie a question, but Lumon’s famous code detectors make this impossible. Nothing with any letters or symbols on it can pass through the eleva...
Writer's Diary February 10, 2025
It's harder to communicate now that people don’t read. One way to look at books is as shorthand—summarizing vast swaths of human experience. Reading a great book is like memorizing all the moves of chess grandmasters, like memorizing Fischer versus B...
All Talk February 06, 2025
One night in October 1952, an electrician named Frank Walsh crept down the stairs of his Long Island home, drew his gun, and blasted a hole in his family’s television. His wife and kids had been watching with the volume too high, keeping him awake, a...
Stop Blaming Misinformation for Cynicism and Mistrust February 03, 2025
Meta is ending fact-checking and removing restrictions on speech across Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO, recently announced, calling the move an attempt to restore free expression on its platforms. Fact-checkers will be replaced with...
The Masterpiece of Our Time May 28, 2024
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in 1973, its impact, the author recalled, was immediate: “Like matter enveloped by antimatter, it exploded instantaneously!” The first translations ...
“Friends” as the Ideal Community May 28, 2024
In the very first episode of “Friends,” Rachel flees her wedding to find her high school friend. Monica invites Rachel to move into her spare bedroom and helps her get a job. Her brother Ross and their friends help her cut up her credit cards and lea...
Resisting the Joy Killers May 15, 2024
It is perhaps unsurprising that plans to build a new skateboarding park in Brooklyn have met with resistance. As we learned during COVID, few things cause more consternation in the souls of leftists than the possibility that someone, somewhere, might...
Welcome To Anti-Woke Hell May 14, 2024
I grew up in Georgia, surrounded by some of the most conservative communities in the United States. But while those conservatives held right-wing views on a wide range of topics, they weren’t for the most part fixated on provoking racial conflict or ...
The Most Earnest Thing You Can Do Is a Book Deal May 14, 2024
One time really late at night I tried to draw the definitive scale of irony versus earnestness in the Notes app on my phone. My best friend was muddling through why she didn’t mesh with a certain person, why conversations hung so awkwardly that being...
Recognizing the Enemy Within May 06, 2024
Political intrigue, Communism, and an ongoing Cold War are the engaging backdrop contributing to the excellent story in John Frankenheimer’s film, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The film epitomizes the tense political atmosphere in the United State...
Liberalism Hijacked May 02, 2024
Liberalism has been getting a bad press. Even self-described liberal Francis Fukuyama endorses “the substantive conservative critique of liberalism - that liberal societies provide no common moral horizon around which community can be built,” proof o...
What We Can Offer If We Uncircle the Wagons April 18, 2024
Growing up, our car radio was always tuned to 90.7, American Family Radio. We lived about 15 minutes from the nearest town, so we spent a lot of time driving. If we were lucky, Mr. Whittaker’s warm, grandfatherly voice invited us to join him for Adve...
The End for LeBron and Steph Is Uncomfortably Close April 17, 2024
When a particular brand of greatness persists for more than two decades, as LeBron James’s career has, certain real-time moments can feel like inadvertent communes with the past. Watching James freely and calmly dismantle the New Orleans Pelicans on ...
Is Positive Thinking a Mistake? April 17, 2024
Two studies published last year cast a bit of shade on the power of positive thinking and of avoiding negative emotions. This thinking came as a bit of a surprise to me, given that the business and consulting world is one that feeds on optimism and p...
How to Be Enough April 15, 2024
Recently, psychologist Maytal Eyal has observed what she calls an “epidemic of self-hatred.” Both within her work as a therapist and in her wider community, Eyal noticed how the weight of self-criticism and self-loathing wears on people’s souls. “It’...
War Is Hell, Ain’t It? April 12, 2024
“What’s so civil about war, anyway?” asked Axl Rose back in 1990, when he and his band had the world’s ear. Nobody would accuse Guns N’ Roses of being a political act like, say, U2, but releasing a single that paid homage to Martin Luther King Jr. wh...
A Salon for ‘Nones’ April 12, 2024
In the Hayes Valley neighborhood in the heart of San Francisco, a group of young tech workers, artists, and thinkers are taking part in a revival of the intellectual salon, the 18th- and 19th-century tradition where the beau monde mixed with the thou...
PBS Misremembers William F. Buckley Jr. April 10, 2024
Imagine making a documentary about one of the 20th century’s leading opponents of the Ku Klux Klan — without ever talking about the evil of the KKK itself.If that sounds like malpractice, consider PBS’s new documentary on the life of William F. Buckl...
The Right Balance April 09, 2024
“The outside pressure of Communism” helped unify the American Right during the Cold War—that’s how Matthew Continetti put it, as we spoke in the dining room of the American Enterprise Institute, where he serves as director of domestic policy studies....
