Now that he’s Donald Trump’s VP pick, I’ve been thinking about J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and my own similar journey from family dysfunction to becoming a relatively healthy human being. Continue Reading...
Latest Posts
September 11, 2024
World Trade Center: A Patriotic Film from a Misunderstood Filmmaker
September 11 is not usually portrayed in cinema, perhaps as a sign of respect for the most shocking event in recent history. Perhaps it’s also because we do not know how to deal with terror. Continue Reading...
September 10, 2024
Staying Human in the A.I. Mega-Machine
Recently I went to see my doctor for a follow-up to spine surgery that alleviated much of the severe pain that had been limiting my life in serious ways. The surgery was a success, and with less pain came more mobility, better sleep, and increased vitality. Continue Reading...
September 05, 2024
New Norms and the Death of Culture
There are no writers left in America: no impressive novelist, no essayist who commands prestige and popularity. This is true of Britain, too. Now as never before, the great modern empires of liberalism and democracy seem to have nothing to say for themselves. Continue Reading...
September 04, 2024
The Road to Serfdom at 80
F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) is often portrayed as a mid-20th-century economist’s restatement of a 19th-century case for unreconstructed laissez-faire economics. Anyone who has read the text, however, knows that this is a serious misrepresentation of Hayek’s most famous book. Continue Reading...
August 30, 2024
Toasters and Trade: How Misguided Policies Could Burn the American Dream
This weekend, Americans will celebrate Labor Day and the unofficial close of summer with barbecues, parades, and a few extra lazy days before the onset of fall. This year happens to mark the 130th official Labor Day holiday, signed into law by President Grover Cleveland in 1894. Continue Reading...
August 29, 2024
Randy E. Barnett: A Principled Commitment to the Truth
The term “Greenhouse effect” is primarily used by the environmentalist movement as an explanation for global warming, but in 1992 Judge Laurence Silberman appropriated the term and in a clever play on words linked it to Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who covered the Supreme Court at the New York Times for more than 40 years. Continue Reading...
August 28, 2024
Invisible Logic: Boy, Do I Have a Conspiracy Theory for You
At page 99 of their substance-free investigation into the effects of the doctrine they call “neoliberalism,” George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison start talking about “conspiracy fictions,” which is what they prefer to call conspiracy theories. Continue Reading...
August 27, 2024
The Regime, or How Not to Do a Dark Political Comedy
Dark political comedy is an underrated genre, as it enables us to see both the horror and the humor in a given political situation. Politicians often behave in ridiculous ways, but because of their incredible power, their actions have serious real-world consequences. Continue Reading...
August 23, 2024
Three Cheers for Color-Blindness
Until the philosophy which holds one race
Superior and another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war, me say war.
—Bob Marley, “War”
In his compelling new treatise on race, The Virtue of Color-Blindness, Andre Archie laments that no one has made the “conservative case for the virtue of American color-blind principles in a manner that addresses our present turmoil.” Continue Reading...
