“All the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.” —Acts 17:21 To some, Jordan Peterson is a breath of fresh air. To others, a guru. Many find him and his ideas to be dangerous. Still others see him as a...
Life changed forever for me and my family on June 19, 2015, when tragedy struck suddenly. In the aftermath, I turned to an old mentor. In the ashes of our loss and dismal emptiness, I opened A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. The first line: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like...
As I write this the news of Tom Wolfe’s death is breaking. The stylish author of The Right Stuff, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the progenitor of the “New Journalism,” Wolfe was one of the last of the serious celebrity authors. He contributed at least a few memorable phrases to the American lexicon, one...
The Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages are today deployed for a wide range of political and rhetorical purposes—to make claims about the Church’s betrayal of Christ’s teaching, the evils of European imperialism, or the inextricable link between intolerant religion and ghastly violence. Any or all of those claims might be justified. One problem, though,...
It is time to ring down the curtain on the troubled rule of Theresa May. May became Prime Minister as the result of a series of flukes, which a scriptwriter would have dismissed as too implausible to work. She was home secretary in the Cameron Government, and cannot have entertained serious hopes beyond retaining her...
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden Communication, in the abstract, is easier today than it has ever been before, largely because of the advance of technology. From the telegraph to the...
The conventional view among antiglobalist conservatives is that President Donald Trump’s nixing of the Iran nuclear deal, coupled with the much-heralded relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, is bad news. Their arguments are clear. America seems to be moving closer to another war of choice in the Middle East—potentially far more costly and devastating...
I recently had a spirited discussion with the British historian James Holland, brother of Tom Holland, also a distinguished man of letters, about FDR, his oil embargo of Japan, and the root causes of World War II. We were in Normandy, inspecting the battle scenes of D-day, with James giving us the kind of briefings...
One of Donald Trump’s signature issues during the presidential campaign was his assertion that bad trade deals had cost millions of American manufacturing jobs, and his promise to do something to reverse that doleful trend. As with many of Trump’s assertions, these claims brought only scorn from the purveyors of respectable opinion, who insisted either...
When Tom Wolfe’s debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in November 1987, the book was greeted with effusive praise and became a best-seller, although some literati seemed offended by Wolfe’s highly descriptive prose, the hyperbole, exuberant punctuation, and occasional sound effects. After film rights were sold for $750,000 that winter to Peter...
Rafael Palmeiro has ED. How do I know? He told me. He told you, too. Heck, he told the whole country about 15 years ago. He went on national television (while intermittently swinging a big bat—Freudian subtlety is lost on the Madison Avenue types) to say that he was having a bit of trouble with...
An Italian-American restaurant I count on features sound reasons for my presence there, and that of others. I like the tone in that environment. There is an aspect of 1950’s atmosphere—the place is quiet, the lighting subdued, and the manners polite. The menu is gratifying when the garlic is held in control, and the service...
Chappaquiddick Produced and distributed by Entertainment Studios Directed by John Curran Screenplay by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan A Quiet Place Produced by Platinum Dunes Directed and written by John Krasinski Distributed by Paramount Pictures On July 18, 1969, Sen. Edward Kennedy infamously drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. He had left a late-night...
In an era of political correctness, “safe spaces,” and “trigger warnings” for the constitutionally feeble, there are plenty of things we are not supposed to talk about. Increasingly in recent months, this seems to include crime and immigration in the Kingdom of Sweden. From across the political spectrum and on both sides of the Atlantic,...
A brief article in The Spectator (May 19) by Fredrik Erixon speculates that President Emmanuel Macron of France, generally considered a liberal centrist énarque, seems to be reconsidering his position following the anniversary of his first year in office. Faced with the continuing rise of the right in Europe, the rebellion of Chancellor Merkel’s conservatives...
Field of Blood is one of the best new novels I have read in many a year, a superbly written book by a Russian scholar and analyst who is also a careful artist, a stylist, and a poet in prose and in form who has accomplished what few essayists and nonfiction authors ever succeed at:...
Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life, by Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin (Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge; 368 pp., $35.00). Theodore Roosevelt always considered himself a man of letters, and indeed he was one. He began reading widely and writing at an early age, and a day never seems to have passed when he did not read and...
Ross Douthat, who converted to Catholicism as a teenager, performed a great service to the Church when he wrote To Change the Church, his assessment of Pope Francis’s pontificate thus far. Despite his many criticisms of Francis, Douthat avoids anger and bitterness, giving the Pope the benefit of every doubt and freely acknowledging that the...
The Republican candidate for President of the United States in 2016 made major immigration restriction the broadest and thickest plank in his platform. That candidate went on to defeat 16 other GOP candidates, all of them to a greater or lesser degree pro-immigration. (The difference in degree largely corresponded with the candidate’s honesty, or dishonesty,...
The mice had a problem with Faith Whittlesey. These mice were not the four-legged kind; they were Chief of Staff Donald Regan’s functionaries in the Reagan White House, scurrying around and gnawing away at conservative policy efforts. Faith was Reagan’s director of the Office of Public Liaison, and she was not just a conservative but...
History can be refracted through countless prisms—cultural, economic, environmental, ideological, moral, national, racial, religious—but one has been oddly unexplored, despite being not just obvious but ubiquitous. That prism is color, an element that suffuses every instinct and thought, hues our whole universe. Since hominids evolved opsin genes, we have been able to distinguish between colors...
If you wanted to imagine a British Donald J. Trump, Jacob William Rees-Mogg would not spring to mind. Mogg is younger than Trump (49 to Trump’s 71), thinner, and pale instead of orange. If they were cheeses, Mogg would be Stilton, and Trump would be Jack. Mogg has excellent manners—not something the 45th American President...
