Protest
Story Stream
Moral Supremacy June 20, 2023
When left-wing activists confronted Riley Gaines at a San Francisco State University (SFSU) event, they weren’t too happy. Ms. Gaines was chased down a hallway, attacked by a man and found herself barricaded in a room for hours as protestors screamed...
When Your Local Government Goes Broke June 15, 2023
Imagine, sometime in the next decade, that the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago hold a joint press conference to declare that the state and city can’t pay their bills. Schools close, crime spikes, garbage goes uncollected, and public emp...
Against Inhumane Architecture June 13, 2023
I had been in Scandinavia, where I had participated in debates about the appalling damage Modernism has done to old-established towns. This was part of the Norwegian Architectural Uprising against the deliberate Ugliness inflicted worldwide by a quas...
The Medieval Shock of the New June 02, 2023
In 1700 a mathematician submitted a paper to the Royal Society in which he attempted to calculate, amongst other things, the rate at which oral testimony (that is, memory) decayed over long periods of time. It’s a quixotic idea, to be sure, but that ...
Politics, Not Apology June 01, 2023
My book...is about the social justice movement, the efforts by activists to utilize political power to grow their coalitions and achieve certain kinds of policy ends. The George Floyd protest movement and its associated offshoots, which takes up the ...
Soup and Sunflowers November 11, 2022
With the characteristic reasonableness of those who collect their urine and faeces into a jerry can and plaster the contents over statues of national heroes, eco-protestors this week gave the British government an ultimatum. Either the government sto...
The Evangelist Who United America November 08, 2022
There was a time when evangelical Christians were peace-making unifiers in American politics: an era that produced the closest thing to a Protestant saint the nation has ever seen. Billy Graham’s mass appeal stemmed in part from his aversion to parti...
Yoko Tawada’s Enchanted World November 01, 2022
The sushi restaurants in Yoko Tawada’s novel Scattered All Over the Earth bear a similar relation to the country of Japan: that is, a tenuous one. In one, a Danish linguist named Knut remarks to Hiruko, the novel’s Japanese climate refugee heroine, t...
How Picasso's 'Guernica' Flopped July 18, 2022
When it comes to art against tyranny, no work is more seared into our consciousness than Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s dark, howling mural against fascist terror. Created in 1937 at the height of the Spanish Civil War, it has in the 85 years since become...
Art, Performance Art, and Climate Activism July 18, 2022
Last week, members of the climate activist group Just Stop Oil glued their hands to the frame of an early 16th-century copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in London’s Royal Academy of Art. They painted “No New Oil” under the painting and said...
Publishers Will Censor Conservative Authors June 20, 2020
At the same time, these publishing houses are, like many corporations in the country, being asked by their employees and customers to live up to a set of values. And that would seem to be impossible while also publishing the likes of Tucker Carlson, ...
A Day of Industry Reckoning June 12, 2020
Authors and book publishing employees are speaking out against the homogeneity of their industry and how much writers of color are paid, issues that are gaining urgency as protests against systemic racism continue around the U.S.Hand-wringing over di...
A New Book Warns of Our 'Neo-Feudal' Future June 12, 2020
For weeks on end, Americans were told to stay indoors. And for weeks on end, Americans listened (for the most part). For every social-media story and maudlin advertisement feigning concern and peddling social cohesion, heroism, and sacrifice, a gover...
Conversion & Revolution June 08, 2020
The Velvet Revolution, the 1989 revolt that ended the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, was one of the great events of the postwar era. The Czech and Slovak generation that fomented it lived through an eventful half-century that took on the dimensi...
Can the Constitution Survive Civil War? June 08, 2020
In 2017, I was enjoying a cup of coffee with a friend at "Gigi's Café," situated in the cloisters of "woke" left Minneapolis. At a nearby window sat a group of elderly, ill tempered radical feminists, worn out from their morning protest march agains...
Readers Flock to Books About Race Relations June 08, 2020
Books about the history of racism, diversity and race relations are soaring to the top of bestsellers’ lists, a sign of growing interest in racial issues amid nationwide protests against police brutality.As of Friday morning, nine of the top 10 bests...
A War Novelist Turns to More Intimate Battles June 08, 2020
Elliot Ackerman, who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, is known for writing novels set at the burning edges of wars. The beautifully spare “Waiting for Eden” is told by a ghost, the dead comrade of a wounded soldier. An Iraqi-America...
Violent Protest and the Intelligentsia June 06, 2020
The similarities between this week’s riots and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are obvious. Both were occasioned by appalling video images, and both divided the nation along partisan and ideological lines. The differences between the two events, howeve...
The Common Sense of the American Mind Can Prevail June 06, 2020
Over at the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind website, there is a statement every American who loves America will be interested in reading. Please consider taking a look.It is a thoughtful response to the violence and destruction that is being ...
Minneapolis Bookstores Deal With Chaos June 03, 2020
Even as civil unrest radiates outward from Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by a police officer one week ago, the Twin Cities bookselling community continues to struggle to surmount this latest crisis. Most of the bookstores in the areas ta...
A Tense Tale from Turkey June 03, 2020
If you know your Bosphorus from phosphorus and Gezi Park means something to you, you’ll probably love Elliot Ackerman’s new novel. If the strait that separates the European and Asian parts of Turkey and the 2013 demonstrations against urban developme...
