Perhaps the best way to understand the psychology of radicals is to read accounts of former believers. In that classic collection of essays... Read More
In the past, fears of job losses from automation were often overstated. Technological progress eliminated some jobs but created others, and... Read More
Given all the absurdities worthy of comment in the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump, history will probably overlook the... Read More
The concept of natural evil continues to befuddle mankind. Moral evil we can explain, with varying levels of cogency—murder, arson,... Read More
What is a simulation? The once feared, now de-fanged and nearly forgotten Jean Baudrillard wrote in Simulacra and Simulation that... Read More
The young Philip Larkin, in his poem “Best Society”, thought that solitude was a simple matter: Something everybody had,Like... Read More
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) is often said to be up there with John Marshall as one of the greatest justices of the United States... Read More
If you know your Bosphorus from phosphorus and Gezi Park means something to you, you’ll probably love Elliot Ackerman’s new... Read More
The cultural magnificence of the vinaigrette was revealed to me in a paper read by Timothy Tomasik, an accomplished scholar of 16th-century... Read More
Even as civil unrest radiates outward from Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by a police officer one week ago, the Twin Cities... Read More
Of all the many counterfactuals, those “what-ifs” posed by history, perhaps the most arresting, if only because the most... Read More
Who could resist the title? László F. Földényi’s new book of essays is called “Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel... Read More
Agreat deal of attention has been given recently to the rise of extremely online illiberal movements. These movements are politically... Read More
Many years ago, I undertook an internship at the New Statesman on the books desk. I would like to say that I found myself exposed... Read More
I worked one summer as a kitchen boy in a Wisconsin summer camp. It was one of those jobs from which you fall down at night... Read More
Augustine had it that ‘no one is free from sin, not even an infant’. Machiavelli deemed that humans are ‘ungrateful, fickle... Read More
Culture and the universal genius were not the only things to thrive in this supposed golden age â?" so too did slavery and warfare We... Read More
From G. K. Chesterton to Sidney Mead to Robert Bellah and beyond, observers have noted that America is a “nation with the soul of... Read More
Until the very end of his life, when he died aged 44 in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald would send diagrams of football plays to the Princeton head... Read More
Why does Clarissa Dalloway want to buy the flowers herself? In the famous opening sentence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.... Read More
In a 2019 survey, Japan dropped to 53rd in global English proficiency, squarely in the “low proficiency” band. Japan ranks... Read More
Good satire is hard to find. The absurdity of modern life accelerates and mutates so rapidly that satire often tells a joke just as... Read More
Bill Buford has had a storied and variegated career, a mix of high and low and sensitive and almost macho — a career that has twisted... Read More
4 The best thing about baseball happens also to be the worst thing about baseball—its adherents’ almost... Read More
According to Isaiah Berlin, it is not Machiavelli’s supposed immorality that has made him a perennially scandalous thinker: “There is evidently something peculiarly disturbing about what Machiavelli said or implied,” Berlin wrote, “something that has caused profound and lasting uneasiness.” The Renaissance Italian diplomat and historian did not prize power for its own sake, as has been s... Read More
Signatures consists of a series of short essays about writers. They are people whom David Pryce-Jones has interviewed or been friends with or known through a family connection, and whose own books he has asked them to sign. This is a neat and attractive idea, one that could only be thought of and brought off so successfully by that ever-dying phenomenon, the man of letters. Pryce-Jones might easi... Read More
Over the past 40 years, American universities have descended into a kind of academic Cubism, which can be defined as the “ability to make the familiar unrecognizable—without providing new insights.” Stanley Kurtz’s short, brilliant book, the Lost History of Western Civilization, is an account of a key chapter in the development of this institutionalized obfuscation: the deconstruction of... Read More
In Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, Wilfred M. McClay has produced an inspiring exploration of America’s past that is out of step with the fashionably fractured narratives...
