Book Reviews

June 29, 2022

The ground is shifting under Francis Fukuyama’s feet

In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama aims to defend liberal political ideas and institutions against rising and now entrenched detractors from the postliberal left and the right. As he notes, “liberalism is under severe threat around the world … its virtues need to be clearly articulated and celebrated once again.” Continue Reading...

June 14, 2022

Fix America’s broken schools before it’s too late

There’s a currently a revolution erupting in public school districts across the country. For quite some time, students haven’t been learning, teachers haven’t been teaching, and educational leaders have only been making things worse. Continue Reading...

June 07, 2022

Why Nineteen Eighty-Four still matters

June 8 marks the anniversary of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. That a greater gap separates us from 1984 than 1984 from Nineteen-Eighty Four’s 1949 publication staggers. The book, at least in terms of pundits’ invoking it, seems so very 2022 even if the script dictated that its peak as a cultural touchstone would occur in 1984. Continue Reading...

May 11, 2022

The Sowell of black America

“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” —Augustine Thomas Sowell is a towering figure in the liberty movement, certainly the most (in)famous “black conservative” of the 20th century. Continue Reading...

May 10, 2022

The Founders’ Constitution and its discontents

The term “constitutional law” is in large part a misnomer. This is rarely discussed within the guild of the legal profession and heretical in the increasingly woke precincts of the legal academy, where the field of “constitutional theory” is a cottage industry. Continue Reading...

May 04, 2022

How will Christians fare in our Strange New World?

Virtually every sphere of American culture—from the university to the church to the mass media to multinational corporations and Big Tech—has become host to hotly contested debates over gender, race, sexual orientation, and a host of other issues. Continue Reading...

May 03, 2022

Hollywood’s craven surrender to the Chinese Communist government

Who’s in charge in Hollywood? Surely studio bosses, well-compensated executives, A-list actors, and celebrated writers and directors set the agenda in the American entertainment industry, don’t they? Not so fast, says Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel in a rigorously researched, admirably hard-hitting new book that looks at the pernicious influence of China on Hollywood. Continue Reading...

March 28, 2022

The “Dumbest Generation” has finally grown up

In his “Parable of the Madman,” Nietzsche, reflecting on the death of God, observes that “this tremendous event is still on its way,” continuing that “deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.” Continue Reading...

March 15, 2022

“Make it art first”: The freedom of the artist in cancel culture

Among the rarest qualities of the late American filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who died in January at age 82, was his conviction, repeatedly stated and consistently in evidence in his work, that the art of film had its own set of rules and precedents. Continue Reading...

March 01, 2022

Does anyone care who John Galt is anymore?

If it had not been for the railroads, I would never have gotten beyond the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged. Having had a vague idea of what Ayn Rand believed in, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the story depended so heavily on the Iron Horse (given that most “libertarians” view trains as collectivist and bad and cars as admirable chariots of liberty). Continue Reading...

< Previous 1 … 11 12 13 14 15 … 18 Next >