Can relations between the United States and China avoid the brink?
Shortly after becoming president, Donald Trump invited his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to a festive visit at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. Continue Reading...
Latest Posts
May 10, 2024
Whose Speech? What Limits?
Depending on your view, free speech in the United States is either beleaguered and endangered or far too expansive, even out of control. Ours is a society that censors books, forbids the honest teaching of unpalatable historical truths, cancels speakers, fires tenured professors for ordinary academic work, and forbids prayers at public school graduation ceremonies. Continue Reading...
May 09, 2024
The Campus Protests Have Nothing to Do with Free Speech
The turmoil on American campuses today has nothing to do with free speech. Rather, it uses free speech as an appeal to a Boomer trope—but it’s the wrong trope to use in this case. Continue Reading...
May 08, 2024
Happy Birthday, Harry Truman
It happens in many careers. A person with a “Do not steal” moral standard enters an organization where, it seems, everyone steals. What then?
Most of us have heard of Harry S. Continue Reading...
May 07, 2024
The Heart, Not the Head: Stephen Breyer’s Approach to the Constitution
Zack Fontenot was a menace. In fact, had we both been alive in 1904, he is the last person I would have wanted anywhere near my merry-go-round because he had a history of setting them on fire. Continue Reading...
May 03, 2024
3 Body Problem Has Always Been Our Problem
My bad. When I was asked to write a review of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, I assumed we had entered a new stage in the gender wars. Having successfully worked around my undergraduate physical science requirement by taking a January-term class on Einstein and writing a paper on his philosophical ideas, I trust I’m forgiven for not knowing that the “three-body problem” refers to an unsolvable problem in physics. Continue Reading...
May 02, 2024
Dickens, Diabetes, and Positive-Sum Games
Is it this best or worst of times? Pessimism sells, but the reality of our daily lives makes a case for optimism today and hope for the future.
The preponderance of negativity and pessimism in the news makes it easy to believe that the world is at its worst, but my experience and yours can reveal that it may be the best of times. Continue Reading...
May 01, 2024
The Church Is All Right
G.K. Chesterton once said that a stolen umbrella confirmed for him that the Catholic Church was where he belonged. As he explained, when attending different Christian churches, he often left his umbrella at the back door and collected it after the service. Continue Reading...
April 30, 2024
Shogun: A Refreshingly Unironic Historical Drama
Based on the 1975 novel of the same name (adapted before in 1980), Shogun is a 10-episode miniseries set in 1600s Japan and follows multiple characters from multiple points of view as they vie for power and pursue their personal agendas. Continue Reading...
April 26, 2024
Finding Contentment in the Chaos
In today’s ever-changing world, contentment seems like a forgotten virtue. The pace of our gig economy only seems to be speeding up, as institutions and organizations all struggle to adjust to new realities. Continue Reading...
