In Henrik Ibsen’s seminal play A Doll’s House, protagonist Nora Helmer, a hitherto devoted wife and mother, walks out on her husband and their three children, significantly slamming the door behind her in the last scene. Continue Reading...
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February 09, 2022
Ilya Shapiro’s ill-worded tweet and the crying game
Ilya Shapiro, a Russian émigré, a serious scholar of the American Constitution, and formerly of the libertarian Cato Institute until he was scheduled on February 1 to begin running Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, has found himself in a thicket of racial controversy. Continue Reading...
February 08, 2022
House of Gucci is Ridley Scott’s “Basta!” to the commercialization of art
My first Oscars essay presented Wes Anderson, the Hollywood dandy’s Francophilia, The French Dispatch, and gentle criticism of liberal intellectual pretense. The 2022 Oscar contenders also include an examination of American Italophilia—veteran Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, as full of today’s stars as Anderson’s movies are of yesteryear’s. Continue Reading...
February 07, 2022
Reply to The New York Times: Online worship is still worship
I love watching men’s college basketball. Three games come to mind that I’m so thankful to have seen on TV—Chris Jenkins’ buzzer beater to lift Villanova over North Carolina in 2016, Christian Laettner’s dagger to catapult Duke past Kentucky in the Elite Eight round of 1992, and the heave of Derrick Whittenberg of North Carolina State, which his teammate Lorenzo Charles grabbed and dunked to beat Houston for the 1983 National Championship. Continue Reading...
February 06, 2022
What message does NBC’s Olympics coverage send?
The media world is not a principled one, and its decisions are often not moral in nature. Standards of coverage are rarely dictated by the metric of right versus wrong but by popular versus unpopular—determined more by what’s likely to attract viewership than what certain subsets of the viewing public may deem the right thing to do. Continue Reading...
February 04, 2022
Saving men requires the leadership of laymen
Progressives are finally waking up to the reality that men and boys are struggling in America. On January 27, Andrew Yang posted a Twitter thread observing that “there’s a crisis among American boys and men that is too often ignored and is definitely going unaddressed.” Continue Reading...
February 03, 2022
The Scottish play comes alive in imaginative new Joel Coen film
Who needs another version of Macbeth on film? You may find yourself asking this question with the release of director Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which stars Denzel Washington in the title role and, in the part of Lady Macbeth, Coen’s seemingly ubiquitous wife, three-time Academy Award winner Frances McDormand. Continue Reading...
February 02, 2022
Christian leaders sign petition asking for amnesty for Jimmy Lai and his co-defendants
A worldwide coalition of Christian leaders submitted a petition to Carrie Lam, chief executive of Hong Kong, asking her to grant amnesty to individuals charged under the city’s repressive National Security Law (NSL), including one of the city’s most prominent human rights activists and media tycoons, Jimmy Lai. Continue Reading...
February 02, 2022
Religious freedom must be protected even from the religious
These are strange times in the United States. We are now living under the second consecutive presidency whose legitimacy is disputed by a significant proportion of the American people. The typical debates about taxation and foreign policy have been eclipsed by arguments about identity politics. Continue Reading...
February 01, 2022
The French Dispatch is a nostalgic look back at a Paris of the imagination
I offer you a series on Hollywood as seen by its artists, on the occasion of the impending Oscars. I don’t mean the dominant liberal arrogance that has doomed cinema, but rather the efforts of artists who have spent their careers trying to advance a view of America that might bring us together, or at least help prevent us coming apart, the concern of all decent people who have influence. Continue Reading...
