The word “person” captures a concept so fundamental to Westerners that it can be jarring to discover that it once had a different... Read More
One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda once owned by Albania’s Stalinist dictator Enver... Read More
In George Orwell’s “1984,” the classics of literature are rewritten into Newspeak, a revision and reduction of the... Read More
Eight rules governed the original Ayn Rand clubs that proliferated across college campuses in the 1960s, as they sought to seed... Read More
1. In 1959 Edwin Fishel discovered, in the National Archives, the intelligence files of the Army of the Potomac still wrapped in the red... Read More
These words, from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, are so familiar that it is easy to assume their meaning is... Read More
So god says to Satan, “You there, what have you been up to?” And Satan says, “Oh, you know, just hanging around,... Read More
AN ORPHAN is a diaspora of one, carrying an enormous burden of memory. Before he became the indispensable historian of the rise of... Read More
Rabbits hit the headlines earlier this year. A fragment of tibia, unearthed in the 1960s during an archaeological dig at Fishbourne Roman... Read More
In the summer of 1987, I graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas, and headed northeast to attend Yale. I then spent nearly... Read More
North Korea watchers are good book-buyers, rarely able to resist scratching that itch of interest caused by the world’s worst regime.... Read More
Kevin D. Williamson, longtime columnist and roving correspondent for National Review before and after a much-publicized brief interlude at... Read More
I have written elsewhere about the fatwa issued 30 years ago by a sinister religious cleric commanding the world’s Muslims to... Read More
Why would anyone deny that they are anti-Semitic? Why is racism seen as wrong? Historically, distaste, suspicion or hatred of Jews and other... Read More
Delba Winthrop’s Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science addresses itself to modern political scientists who are, in her... Read More
[I intend] to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle, that is to say, to outline a theory so comprehensive that, for a long time to come,... Read More
During the 16th century, the Roman market for antiquities became highly competitive. Competence and money were crucial, but so were... Read More
Dawn Eden Goldstein came to my and many other people’s attention back in the early 2000s under the less Jewish moniker “Dawn... Read More
For nearly 300 years, until the mid-17th century, the Ottoman Empire operated a tribute system known as devshirme—the “collecting.” Army officers would descend on the villages of Anatolia and the Balkans and remove male, Christian children as young as 8. Enslaved, forcibly converted to Islam and discouraged from marriage, the boys would receive rigorous physical training and form the ranks ... Read More
The first sentence of the epilogue to Marion Turner’s biography of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1342-1400) aptly summarizes the poet’s legacy: “Chaucer became a monumental poet, enclosed in a monumental tomb, with monumental volumes of his Complete Works functioning as the bedrock of the English national canon.” Among his achievements, he invented iambic pentameter, a meter so dominant that all... Read More
Things looked good for the Democrats in 2009. Not only had Barack Obama been elected president, but for the first time in 14 years, their party controlled both houses of Congress as well as the White House. Then came the 2010 midterms: In what Obama called a “shellacking,” the Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. While the headlines focused on the Republican takeo... 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...
