A few things can be said with certainty of the BBC’s Call the Midwife: None of those babies are swaddled tightly enough. Car births aren’t the greatest, but I’ve seen worse than the one in Season Four. And if Sister Evangelina doesn’t know why Sister Monica Joan paired the ass and the angel in her...
Like many young men graduating high school in 1966, my father took a fast track to the politically seething, war-shattered jungles of a small country on the other side of the world. He had no middle name, no college degree (nor any aspirations of pursuing one), five siblings, and no “rich dad” culture to be...
Donald Trump’s political success dramatizes the nature of today’s politics. On one side we have denationalized ruling elites with absolute faith in their own outlook and very little concern for Americans as Americans. On the other we have an increasingly incoherent and corrupted populace that nonetheless retains for the most part the basic political virtue...
In August of 1955, William Faulkner traveled to Japan. Based in the out-of-the-way mountain province of Nagano—which, until the 1998 Winter Olympics, enjoyed a benign anonymity in perfect proportion to its relative unimportance in world affairs—Faulkner lectured and temple-toured for two weeks, doing the bidding of the U.S. State Department, which had sponsored his trip. ...
At the United Nations in the fall of 2009, Barack Obama acknowledged, with customary self-regard, “the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world,” no doubt referring to his pledge about the receding oceans, healing the planet and reviving the animal kingdom, and the unprecedented wisdom of his associates and himself. Sure enough: The Russian...
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” remains a lighthouse, the beam sweeping past the scene for a moment of blinding illumination before passing on to darkness. Though Orwell enjoined us against cliché, Hamlet’s “More honoured in the breach than the observance” applies: Everybody lauds Orwell, but few appear to have read him. And of...
“Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather told me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the Business Administration faculty at the nearby university, joined us for lunch. This was in Tacoma, Washington, in the summer of 1975, and I was visiting from England, on vacation from college. In that particular summer, it...
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American. At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...
I was recently perplexed to see in the news that Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the nation, had declared that, though master has no etymological relation to slavery (but rather to magister), the word would nevertheless be abandoned as a title for a resident supervisor of student housing, and be replaced by...
Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have frequently flared over the years, reached full intensity this winter when the Saudi government executed 47 regime opponents, including the prominent Shi’ite cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Immediately, there were riots in Iran directed against Saudi targets, culminating in the burning of the Saudi embassy—an incident that even Iran’s...
What follows is not an anthropometric description of France, but neither does it reflect the fancy of the author: It is what one can see of France from a certain distance, which blurs the finer details but allows the main features to stand out. When looking at the Great Wall of China from a certain...
So what is objectionable about Game of Thrones? In posing the question, please note that I am assuming that something is objectionable. So let me count the ways. If we are talking about the books, the prose is klonkingly pedestrian—although in fairness it must be said that George R.R. Martin, author of the internationally best-selling...
Is Donald Trump a Burkean? Would Russell Kirk vote for him for president? Can a paleoconservative legal scholar imagine any benefit to a Trump presidency? Of course, the neoconservatives are piling on Trump. Most notable was National Review’s January 21 issue, “Against Trump.” “Trump,” say the editors, “is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would...
How very vulgar I have been—I am sorry, and I apologize! I am just terrible, and it is all my fault. And I accept the responsibility. And how could I accept my own shame if I had not done so in public? Yet my own vulgarity has been hedged, because I neither sinned nor confessed...
When you have over an hour to kill downtown in a major city, time seems to slow to a stop. Fortunately, the Roman houses beneath the Palazzo Valentini, which we were waiting to visit, are a stone’s throw from the column of Trajan. On that warm and sunny day in February, we took over an...
The distinctive regional "America," composed of Midwestern German and Scandinavian enclaves, lasted barely four decades, dying as a coherent entity sometime in the early 1950s.
Four decades before Hillary Clinton coined the term “Deplorables,” Chronicles predicted how the battle lines in the culture war would be drawn.