Are addictions real? We talk as if they are. Many women say they are addicted to chocolate. Actor David Duchovny has been diagnosed with having a sex addiction. In the early 90’s, when crack was all the rage, one Christian pop singer encouraged young people to get off drugs and get “Addicted to Jesus.” What...
On December 7, 2015—Pearl Harbor Day—candidate Donald Trump called “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” After applause from the large crowd at a campaign rally in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, Trump emphasized, “We have no choice. ...
As I write, the attempted CIA coup against the Trump administration is ongoing. Yes, you read that right: We’re getting awfully close to Seven Days in May territory. Through a series of leaks to the “mainstream” media, the Langley spooks have launched a propaganda campaign that outdoes any of their overseas operations by a long...
George Goodwin’s new book on Benjamin Franklin explores the 18 years Franklin spent in England working as a printer (1726-28) and as an agent representing the Pennsylvania assembly and other American colonies (1757-62, 1766-75). The author of this excellent book is an Englishman who offers fresh insights into the period from a British perspective. Benjamin...
For years I taught a course on the history of World War II. I liked to ask the students if any of them had ever flown into Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Invariably, one or more in each class had. This was not surprising, because for the last 40 or 50 years O’Hare has been the...
Fake news, as I discussed last month (“Faking It,” The Rockford Files), is a very real problem, though less for the reasons commonly given (the potentially destructive effects it may have on our “democracy”) and more for the fact that it both flows from a lack of concern for truth (and thus says something about...
When people compare politics to sports, they do not mean the comparison to be flattering. Voters, we are told, treat politics as irrationally as sports fans do football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. (The less said about soccer, the better—a good principle for life in general.) In this analogy, the Democratic and Republican parties are the...
Knowing what is going on in the Hobbesian world of international politics is an essential function of the state apparatus. Detecting, assessing, and countering external threats, real and potential, helped the Byzantine empire survive a thousand years longer than its Western counterpart—well beyond its strictly geopolitical potential for endurance. Essential to its longevity was its...
Call me old fashioned, and I will thank you for the compliment. Call me a fool for rosy nostalgia, and more thanks will be in order. Yes, Fred and Ginger are my favorite movie couple, and last year while recuperating from a broken leg, I watched four of their movies back to back, shown on...
Just after 6 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, February 7, 2016, a tuxedo-clad Alex Smith sat alone on stage at a grand piano near the 50-yard line in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, set to accompany Lady Gaga as she sang the National Anthem to introduce the championship game between the Carolina Panthers and...
As a new subscriber to Chronicles, I was drawn to Chilton Williamson’s reply to Mr. Patterson in the December issue (“Start Somewhere,” Polemics & Exchanges). He wrote that “ideology by definition is silly.” It made me recall my late Austrian friend, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Mr. Williamson may be aware of Erik’s 1981 article, “The Portland...
Things are not so bad with the National Anthem as James O. Tate might think (“The Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” The Music Column, December). In October I attended the fall meeting of Keeneland Racetrack in Lexington, Kentucky. On one of the days, the announcer told us that the anthem would now be sung by a young...
In the Winter 2015/2016 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, William Voegeli argues, Conservatives have been firing shots across the bow of higher education for years, but the Ship of Fools has never turned back, or changed course. It’s time either to surrender or to shoot a round into the engine room. While the...
The statistics that break down the consumption of music into types and groups are not very comforting to consider. But if we really want to know what the musical situation is, rather than to entertain a fantasy of what it ought to be, we would have to acknowledge the realities of musical art in our...
A subplot of the 2016 presidential campaign was the Green Party’s ability, for the second time in the 21st century, to achieve balance of power in a close race won by a Republican. Physician Jill Stein, 66, earned 1.4 million votes, or one percent—a miniscule amount, but more than the difference between Republican Donald Trump...
Gilbert & Sullivan’s enduring operetta The Mikado is funny because it skewers Victorian British society by allowing us to laugh at the absurdities of the fictive Japanese town of Titipu, where flirting is a capital offense, according to the autocratic rule of the emperor (Mikado). Nanki-Poo loves Yum-Yum, who is pledged to Lord High Executioner...
Returning to the embrace of the Eternal City is never difficult. Its many charms make one easily forget the minor inconveniences: the strikes, noise pollution, and general chaos. The city’s many glories, both pagan and Christian, are always on display, easily accessible, even to the most unsophisticated of visitors. Over the past decade, my wife...
“Jeff Sachs is like the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, moving from cup to cup. He can never return to any country that he advised, since they all hate him. It happened in Latin America, in Slovenia, in Poland, a few of the Baltic States, and it was the same in Russia. They maintain...
The Democrats and the rest of the left are taking the results of last November’s election no better than they predicted the Republicans and the right would do if their man lost. The street riots, lawsuits, recounts, constitutional challenges, furious denial, and refusal to accept the electoral decision in a spirit of peace, resignation, and...
August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month That Changed the World Forever, by Bruno Cabanes; translated by Stephanie O’Hara (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 230 pp., $27.50). This superb and marvelously readable work of social and political history, drawn from a wide variety of personal and official documents and records, recounts the...
Taking up one of Graham Greene’s many novels has for me always been a hit-or-miss affair. Over the Christmas holidays I read The Honorary Consul, a copy of which I’ve owned for years. The Third World setting, this time Argentina, will be familiar to Greene’s admirers, and so will the author’s abiding preoccupation with religious...
The only way the American political class will ever accommodate itself to the reality of post-Soviet Russia would be if that country succumbed to the second leftist revolution it has been trying for years to incite. Whether the revolutionaries called themselves communists or “liberal democrats” would make little or no difference so long as the...
On November 8 last year, Donald Trump prevented a resurrection of the Clinton administration 16 years after it left office. That same day, in an election paid scant attention by the national media, the spirit of George W. Bush’s administration was given new life in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President...
To address the main question first: Yes, they really can. That’s the definitive answer to America’s burning cultural debate of the 1960’s about whether or not the Monkees could actually play their musical instruments. Perhaps you remember the general contours of the arguments pro and con: on the one hand, that the Monkees were four...
Nocturnal Animals Produced by Fade to Black Productions Directed and written by Tom Ford, based on Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan Distributed by Focus Features Doctor Strange Produced by Marvel and Disney Studios Directed and written by Scott Derrickson Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Erstwhile fashion designer turned film director Tom Ford seems to...
The election of Donald Trump has upended the expectations of what paleoconservatives and others have long called Conservatism, Inc. The influence of establishment conservatism all but evaporated during the primaries, as its chosen champions—Bush, Rubio, Cruz, Jindal, and the rest—fell one by one. As President-Elect, Trump moved away from an unthinking reliance on Republican lobbyists...
