It all comes down to questions of fairness. On January 27, 2007, a journalist by the name of Peter Finn published in the Washington Post an interview with Ivan Tolstoy, a literary scholar distantly related to the famous writer. The subject of the interview was Tolstoy’s The Laundered Novel, a product of his ten-year investigation...
It has been argued that, after Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is the finest writer in the English language. His works have forged their way into the canon to such a degree that it is much more difficult to know which of his novels to leave off the recommended reading list than it is to choose which...
You knew it would come to this. So did I. And yet one is still surprised by the sheer boldness of it all. From my local paper: California public schools do an inadequate job of teaching students about gay and lesbian history, despite a 2011 law that requires schools to teach such lessons, according to...
This past year, we have heard a great deal about the centennial of the outbreak of World War I. Throughout that commemoration, though, we have rarely paid due attention to the religious language of Holy War and crusade deployed by all combatants. Think, for instance, of the great historic moment that many will remember this...
This morning, an icy December predawn, about 5:30, Oncor, our utility company, performed a miracle. I’m not sure if anyone actually said, “Let there be light!”; but for a certainty, there was light—and heat—and it was good. After more than 55 hours without electrical power, my wife and I, our three animals, and an array...
George Nevers and Mary McKenna were married in 1881 in New Brunswick, Canada. He was from an old Sunbury County family, but her parents were immigrants to neighboring York County from Ireland. The Neverses would have eight children. The first two were born in Canada, and the rest in either Minnesota or Wisconsin after the...
In the lands of “Real Socialism,” four or five decades ago, it was a standard practice to denounce the “enemies of the people” without actually quoting their incriminating statements. I remember the final major press campaign against Milovan Djilas, when I was a preteen in Tito’s Yugoslavia. It consisted of ritualistic slanders that asserted his...
Opera has been in the news lately—in Paris and New York, that is. And no, this doesn’t mean things are culturally looking up—to the contrary, I’m afraid. Let’s start with the City of Light, where millions of Muslims surround the capital (most of them in the suburbs), waiting for the day they can sweep away...
Dante Alighieri died here in Ravenna, a little city where any sane man or woman might well choose to live and die. Like most people, I come here from time to time to stare stupidly at the Roman and Byzantine mosaics—though as the years go by I notice most people are letting their cameras and...
The Center for Immigration Studies recently issued two reports that show how transformative mass immigration has been in recent decades. The first study focused on the number of immigrants now living in the United States. Recent data from the Census Bureau show that 3.3 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, came to America between July...
I enjoy Justin Raimondo’s contributions to Chronicles (and Antiwar.com), and I concur with his characterization of Alex Jones (“My Conversation With Alex Jones,” Between the Lines, November), especially the astute observation that Jones seems the perfect tool to discredit those who question conventional wisdom. Imagine my surprise, therefore, at Mr. Raimondo’s illogical ridiculing of those...
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 306 pp., $26.95 Conservatives have a love-hate relationship with technology. Although we often decry the effects of the usage of new technologies on societal traditions, it is conservative...
The life of Lee having been “done,” redone, and perhaps even undone by revisionist treatment, the present weighty phenomenon requires some contextual examination. We might first and simply ask the question, What is the purpose of this book? I mean to say that the revisionist treatment of the so-called Civil War has been gathering force...
When I was a junior at the Trinity School in New York, Mr. Clarence Bruner-Smith, head of the Upper School, assured me that I had an excellent chance of being accepted at Yale if I accepted the editorship of the school literary magazine. I thought that a ridiculous reason to be accepted anywhere, and that...
My local post office in suburban Seattle seems to be rigged to discourage customers these days. When you ask for the slightest bit of “consumer assistance”—as their cheerful mission statement on the wall promises they’re only too happy to provide—they seem to get ferociously cross. I was once read the riot act by a young...
That characteristic feature of our age, the impressively feckless adolescent indulged by a craven and cynical media, reared its head this past October 15 in the rural community of Randle, Washington. For reasons known only to themselves, the authorities at the 188-student White Pass High School invited their charges to attend class that particular morning...
One of the most intriguing paradoxes of Dante’s Divine Comedy is the pervasive presence of pagan classical antiquity in what was meant to be (and is) Europe’s greatest Christian poem. Dante juxtaposes and interweaves classical and Christian, from Virgil’s appearance in the poem’s first canto to the homage to Aristotle (“the love that moves the...
In recent decades, conflict within the broader conservative universe has witnessed the increasing marginalization of traditionalists, who consistently refuse to accommodate their detractors’ leftist ideological worldview. The camp that has been triumphant—so far—has generally been the one most willing to betray principle for temporary electoral convenience, as well as to sacrifice the loyalty of its...
“I think Boris honestly sees it as churlish of us not to regard him as an exception—one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.” These words were written by a housemaster at Eton College about a young student named Boris Johnson. Today, over 30 years later, Johnson seems to...
Prima sedes a nemine iudicatur: “The First See is judged by no one.” Thus reads Canon 1404 of the current Code of Canon Law of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, and Canon 1556 of the previous code. Romanus Pontifex a nemine iudicatur: “The Roman Pontiff is judged by no one.” That is Canon...
Gone Girl Produced by New Regency Pictures Directed by David Fincher Screenplay by Gillian Flynn, from her novel Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox If only James Thurber were still with us. I’d love to hear him address Gone Girl, both Gillian Flynn’s novel and David Fincher’s film adaptation thereof. Why? Because the story trades on...
The ruckus over Ebola would be funny if the stakes weren’t so high. Here’s a disease that presents a lethal threat to the general public, but rather than addressing its danger on purely medical grounds, our officials and commentators are subjecting it to political calculation. Rush Limbaugh, for one, knows precisely who’s responsible for the...
The U.S. Supreme Court decision Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, issued last spring, upheld a 2006 citizen-approved ballot initiative in Michigan to amend the state constitution to ban reverse discrimination in public employment, contracting, and education, including at the University of Michigan. The ruling ends a quarter-century battle that began when David Jaye,...
