Book of the Week: 'Reclaiming Common Sense'
In America today, right is wrong, men are women, 2+2=5, and the truth as we all understood it is over. What happened? In his philosophic survival guide for our postmodern age,
The story of America over the last half-century is the story of the baby boomers. Born between 1946 and 1964, the boomers were, for more than... Read More
In the third decade of the 21st century, the Social Register still exists, there are still debutante balls, polo and lacrosse are still... Read More
Polish statesman and political philosopher Ryszard Legutko has written an essential guide to understanding the ongoing debasement of freedom.... Read More
Voltaire published his Siècle de Louis XIV in 1751, but he had been working on it since the late 1720s, and parts appeared... Read More
The conventional account of modern thinking about economics starts with Adam Smith’s 1776 book “The Wealth of Nations.”... Read More
“You don’t have to like it,” my late father would tell my siblings and me when we complained about our jobs.... Read More
“If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." — Obi Wan Kenobi to Darth VaderSomewhere in... Read More
Making one’s fortune in Occupied Paris was largely a matter of knowing the right people: in fact, the further to the right the better.... Read More
There is a zone of twenty precisely measured feet of naked North American land, kept strictly clear of people and trees and all invasive... Read More
On a fall day in 1870, a Chinese woman with bound feet gave birth to a baby boy named Wong Kim Ark. He entered the world in the back bedroom... Read More
On this year’s Indigenous People’s Day I encountered a curious phenomenon. My social circles are largely college-educated,... Read More
On October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer named Robert Weryk was reviewing images captured by a telescope known as Pan-starrs1 when he... Read More
If there is just one point to glean from Nina Jankowicz’s How to Lose the Information War, it is this: The threats that... Read More
WHEN I WAS EIGHT OR NINE, my father bought an encyclopedia. To him, maybe because there had been one in his childhood home—a... Read More
Robert Kaplan’s new book, The Good American, takes as its epigraph V.S. Naipaul’s observation that ‘Pessimism…... Read More
Joe Biden’s presidency will create a new crisis for the literary world. That, at least, is the opinion offered by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a... Read More
Ryszard Legutko knows about freedom. He experienced a lack of freedom when his native Poland was under communism, and the State controlled... Read More
In 2018, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, the editor of Areo magazine and a Ph.D. mathematician, respectively, achieved internet... Read More
It says something about our times that the trauma of the assault on the Capitol in Washington, D. C. is already scabbing over. But the events... Read More
The genre of “we have a polarized and screwed up political society, here’s how we got here, and here’s how we can get out... Read More
Samuel Beckett’s writing often seems to have a religious air about it. Take his most famous play, Waiting for Godot (1953).... Read More
Paris, a great literary city, is losing one of its most celebrated bookshops. Gibert Jeune, a popular chain, has announced it will be closing... Read More
It ranks with the filibuster and the chaplain’s prayer among the hoariest traditions of the United States Senate: Every year since... Read More
The death of Joseph Conrad made Graham Greene feel, at 19, sitting on a beach in Yorkshire, ‘as if there was a kind of blank in the whole of contemporary literature’. Greene’s own death in 1991, aged 87, had a similar effect on many younger writers, myself included. For John Le Carré, his most obvious successor, Greene had ‘carried the torch of English literature, almost alone’. His coo... Read More
The collapse of the Roman republic, and the establishment amid its rubble of the rule of the Caesars, constitutes the primal political narrative of the West. In 49 BC, a system of government founded on the conviction that the only conceivable alternative to liberty was death spectacularly imploded. The claim of Julius Caesar, the greatest general of his day, to a primacy over his fellow citizens r... Read More
Really, I’ve done my best to keep up my spirits during this past sorely trying year of pandemic and traumatizing politics. I’ve weeded my books and sorted my papers, written about comic novels and escapist fiction in this weekly column, helped care for my wife who smashed up her ankle last fall, with attendant complications and surgeries. Above all, like most people, I’ve done my best not to... Read More
In America today, right is wrong, men are women, 2+2=5, and the truth as we all understood it is over. What happened? In his philosophic survival guide for our postmodern age,