War
Story Stream
What's New – And Not So New – In Spy Fiction January 22, 2024
For more than twenty years, I’ve ranted against fashionable claims that spy fiction was out of gas, having lost its raison d’être with the end of the Cold War. On the contrary, I maintained, the genre was enjoying rude health, with a mix of grandmast...
Reactionary Hope January 22, 2024
Within mainstream modern liberal feminism—especially as filtered through America’s bitterly polarized culture wars—to be feminist is self-evidently to be left-wing. Admittedly, one need not dig very deep among “anti-feminist” writers to find individu...
More Light! January 22, 2024
Poets’ reputations often drop in critical stock and general popularity in the decade or two after their death. It takes an event—a biography, new scholarship, a collected or selected poems—to reverse the inertia. Since his death in 2004, Anthony Hech...
War is Boyish and Fought by Boys January 22, 2024
Author Robert Kaplan once shared with me what he believes is the military's greatest weakness: “The general officer corps is sometimes asked to be strategic and understand the world beyond their capability. They are creatures of systems and lack the ...
'Casablanca' Is Worth the Hype January 16, 2024
I recently watched Casablanca (1942) for the first time. It is a war movie in the truest sense. Not only is it about World War II, but it was also filmed during it, from the relative security of California....
Standing Beside History, Yelling ‘Go!’ January 16, 2024
Some policy books have a singular idea, propounded faithfully over hundreds of pages. In The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, James Pethokoukis tackles many ideas through the lens of one overarching theme: Econo...
Revisiting the NBA’s ‘Greatest Ever Season’ January 12, 2024
Fourteen seconds. That’s how close the Detroit Pistons were to a championship in Game 6 of the 1988 NBA finals. Leading by one point over the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers, Detroit had possession. Then momentum shifted: A referee made a much-...
The Remarkable New Godzilla Movie January 11, 2024
In the seven decades since Ishirō Honda’s 1954 classic Godzilla kicked off the durable genre of the kaiju (or giant monster) movie, this fearsome mega-reptile, a prehistoric creature summoned from the depths of the sea by atomic radiation, has stompe...
Godzilla Plus Redemption January 11, 2024
Ever since the first Godzilla movie hit theaters in 1954, the King of the Monsters has served as a metaphor for the moment, standing in for everything from the dangers of nuclear weapons, to man’s destruction of the environment, to the Fukushima nucl...
Overton Collapse January 10, 2024
Grab your popcorn, kids, it’s a good old fashioned Plagiarism War. In the end, it was the morally inverted rape parades that drove America’s more moderate billionaires to interrogate those age old questions “what the hell is going on at Harvard,” and...
The Real Threat to Classical Music January 09, 2024
In 1955, Henry Pleasants, the American music critic and intelligence officer, wrote in The Agony of Modern Music, “Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for 300 years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out.” Yet ...
Out Here, War Is a Precious Memory January 08, 2024
I was very naïve when I left the military.I’d spent years concentrating on “leadership,” daydreaming about how I would perform under threat of gunfire and IEDs, scanning the daily news from Iraq, reading Medal of Honor citations, devouring memoirs of...
‘The Sopranos' Is the Ultimate TV Series About America January 08, 2024
“The Sopranos” debuted 25 years ago, but what makes it a masterpiece is how much older its themes are.In 1827, Goethe wrote a poem that begins, “America, you have it better.”The German genius ended with the wish that America’s children, when they too...
The 20 Most Anticipated Movies of 2024 January 05, 2024
Last year, we were psyched for the seemingly imminent arrival of Dune: Part Two, only to have Denis Villeneuve’s sandworm-sized sequel pushed down the road to spring 2024. Although 2023’s release calendar reflected a return to business as usual, busi...
Alienation in America January 05, 2024
We like to think that today’s society is suffering from a new pathology: alienation from the analog world. While this is unequivocally true, it is not by any means a novel phenomenon. The separation we feel from one another has been exacerbated by th...
What Happens Where Free Speech Is Unprotected January 04, 2024
C.j. hopkins is one of the very few Americans to follow through on the quadrennial promise, sworn by countless millions, to leave the country because they didn’t like the result of a particular general election.You probably haven’t heard of C. J. Hop...
The Most Anticipated 2024 TV Shows January 04, 2024
As we fire up our SAD lamps and prepare to weather the coldest, grayest months of the year, it's comforting to look ahead to the shows that will keep us company as we trundle towards spring (and beyond).2024 is already shaping up to deliver some gems...
Wild Butchery of Souls January 04, 2024
When he set out to write about World War I, in which he’d served as an infantryman, David Jones gave himself a straightforward task: “to make a shape in words, using as data the complex of sights, sounds, fears, hopes, apprehensions, smells, things e...
Beyond the Calendar Wars January 02, 2024
L’affaire de Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer limited-edition Real Women of America 2024 pinup calendar—what many are calling the culture war battle of our time.You’d be hard pressed to find a better encapsulation of today’s American right: Conser...
The Poverty of Anti-Wokeness January 01, 2024
Ten years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates, then a rising writer at The Atlantic, attended a gathering of liberal journalists at the White House. On his blog, Coates had taken a dim view of the post-racial era that had supposedly dawned in 2008, but in a previo...
When Killing the Enemy Wasn't Enough January 01, 2024
I wrote earlier this month about the “final class” of Marine Corps Scout Snipers. The Marine Corps is in process of discontinuing its infantry Scout Sniper platoons in favor of something called “scout platoons.” Undoubtedly, many meetings and opinion...
