Law
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Father of the Originalist Legal Revolution February 20, 2025
Many books have been written about the presidency of Ronald Reagan or the “Reagan Revolution,” but far fewer have been written about the role that one of his most trusted appointees, Attorney General Edwin Meese, played in transforming American law. ...
American Letters Will Endure the End of “BookTok” February 18, 2025
TikTok is democracy in its rawest form. All that matters on the video-sharing platform is mass appeal and virality (so long as it does not offend the sensibilities of the Chinese Communist Party). The app debases its users to anonymous atoms, equal t...
Charles Kesler’s Struggle for the Constitution February 11, 2025
American conservatism finds itself in a strange place. A resounding electoral victory was achieved in the 2024 election by a Republican party that, while modified from its Goldwater-Reagan standard, remains comprehensible to the conservative temperam...
American Nihilism and Hope February 07, 2025
It is widely accepted that America is fundamentally fractured, and there is no shortage of books diagnosing the causes of our wobbling solidarity. Despite this mood of loss, even despair, most of these books maintain the typically American can-do spi...
James Madison, Game Theorist February 06, 2025
At least since Edmund Burke, the right has looked askance at mixing mathematics and politics. The French revolutionaries and philosophes, with their elegantly geometric counties and their 10-hour days and their Year Zeroes, were trying to squeeze the...
Collectivism in the C-Suite February 06, 2025
On January 10, Federal Judge Reed O’Connor, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, ruled that American Airlines had violated both federal law and its fiduciary duty of loyalty to its employees by contracting with BlackRock to ...
Ill Legal January 22, 2025
There were some things I really loved about working for Columbia Law School. I had a fantastic team of colleagues in the Office of Public Affairs who taught me much of what I know about journalism and PR alike. It was a great honor to get to work wit...
We Also Need Democracy in Aesthetics January 21, 2025
In a new book entitled BACKBONE: Why American Populism Should Be Welcomed, Not Feared, author Karl Zinsmeister reports on middle Americans living all across the country, and why they want dramatic change in the direction of our country. He examines p...
Why Trump Brought TikTok Back to Life January 21, 2025
Trade war (we’re so back). Yesterday morning, as the company ran out of all the time it didn’t use to divest, TikTok (very briefly) died as it lived: purposely misinforming nearly 200 million Americans. “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U...
The Unbearable Burden January 17, 2025
You already have an opinion on this man. You may like him, you may dislike him. You may have a long list of gripes about things he has said or things you imagine he has said: “He claimed that dragons are real! He wanted to give bride-slaves to incels...
Porn Is Inevitable January 16, 2025
American lawmakers are about to determine the future of pornography, or they’re trying, at least. In recent years, 19 states—most of them Republican-led—have passed legislation that requires any site with a significant amount of adult content to prov...
Piety, Love, and the Permanent Things January 16, 2025
In the closing sentence of his article for the 2019 Christmas issue of The Spectator, Sir Roger Scruton wrote, “Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” He wrote these words as a dying man who believed...
The Tiger Mother Roars Back January 14, 2025
In January 2011, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua was in the middle of her book tour, in her hotel room in Seattle, when an email came in from the future vice president of the United States.Her book—Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—had just come out...
When Parenting is Politicized January 14, 2025
In 1967, my mother was 10 years old. By that time, she had for about a year been taking a city bus alone, from her residential neighborhood to Philadelphia’s city center, where she would walk and window shop. She had also been babysitting her two you...
The Storytelling of Clint Eastwood January 13, 2025
Clint Eastwood is an unstoppable force. An actor and a director who has been building his career since his first appearance on screen in 1955, Eastwood, now 94 years old, has directed and produced a new film. Juror #2 was released in November, and li...
Sleep Training the American People January 10, 2025
As a new chapter opens for American politics, it is natural to feel a certain uneasiness. What lies ahead? Will Americans continue to enjoy the peace and prosperity with which we have for so long been blessed, or will our way of life be torn asunder,...
Jordan Peterson’s Bible Study January 09, 2025
If there’s one thing Jordan B. Peterson has proved in his almost-decade run as an internationally known public intellectual, it’s that he can fight. Since his 2016 criticism of a Canadian law for effectively compelling speech related to the use of ce...
Did a Best-Selling Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story? January 08, 2025
In the autumn of 2010, Lynne Freeman, a family-law attorney and an unpublished author, put the final touches on her first novel, “Blue Moon Rising.” The story revolved around a teen-age girl named Anna who falls in love with a werewolf and learns tha...
Lively vs. Baldoni January 08, 2025
The first thing I said to my mother-in-law as we arrived at her home for Christmas—after “hi” and “how are you”—was this: “Oh my god, did you hear what Justin Baldoni tried to do to Blake Lively?!”...
How to Storm and Save an Ivory Tower January 07, 2025
Not until quite recently did American colleges cease being free expression zones. After University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom sounded the alarm with his bestselling The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and...
The Woman-of-Color Nanny Novel January 07, 2025
The young nanny has long captured our collective imagination as a feminine ideal: youthful, vulnerable in a stranger’s home, and professionally obligated to please. She’s invariably beautiful, or at least sexually appealing in her availability, and i...
Burying Settler Colonialism's Ideologiekritik January 07, 2025
In his clearly written, concise little work , Adam Kirsch has done for settler colonialism what John Fonte did for “transnational progressivism” at the turn of the century, Peter W. Wood and Phillip W. Magness did for The 1619 Project in 2020, and Jo...
Scrutonian Conservatism Reconsidered January 07, 2025
Sir Roger Scruton died just shy of his 76th birthday on January 12, 2020, after a short but valiant struggle with cancer. For many of us, he was the very model of personal and intellectual integrity, a courageous thinker and writer whose adamant “No!...
How Saturday Night Live Televised the Revolution January 06, 2025
Humor is “the best guide to changing perceptions,” writes Marshall McLuhan. Because “older societies thrived on purely literary plots” and “demanded storylines” to channel sophomoric energy, they employed elaborate farce in poems, plays, operas, and ...
Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and the Art of the Smear January 03, 2025
The first thing I said to my mother-in-law as we arrived at her home for Christmas—after “hi” and “how are you”—was this: “Oh my god, did you hear what Justin Baldoni tried to do to Blake Lively?!”This was December 22, less than a day after The New Y...
