Category: Web

When I was growing up in Manhattan the generational text for the generation immediately before mine was The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.  My tastes in high school ran to Thomas Wolfe (of course), Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Faulkner, etc., and I took it actually as both a point and...

Will he?  Won’t he?  Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a serious presidential contender last year, the British have been excited at the thought of his arrival in the motherland.  Better yet, we have delighted ourselves with the possibility of denying him a visit to meet the Queen.  That sort of thing makes us Brits...

photo of Rosa Ponselle as Reiza in Oberon Of course my account of “the vocal scene” is not by the late George Jellinek—that cultured gentleman of Hungarian background.  He had an extensive, even encyclopedic knowledge of the history of singing.  His presentations of The Vocal Scene were the best things of their kind I have...

New York is always changing: It’s the city that never sleeps.  When local writer Kay Hymowitz wrote a book about Brooklyn recently she talked about “creative destruction” on almost every other page.  She had a point, and the city has seen both sides of the process. Beginning in the 1960’s, the gales of creative destruction...

During the seemingly endless presidential campaign, Donald Trump was often both courageous and decisive, repeatedly refusing to back down from “gaffes” that were unpopular with the media because they were actually expressions of the populist nationalism that won him the White House.  Since entering the White House, though, it often seems that, rather than draining...

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken . . . ” P.G. Wodehouse reached for Keats to describe his emotions when he read the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman saga.  Fraser had already joined the glorious company of famously successful authors who were turned...

In the aftermath of last week’s finale of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) 19th congress, many commentators have opined that President Xi Jinping is now the country’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping. This is incorrect. Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong at home, and arguably the most influential Chinese player...

photo of Jeff Bezos by Steve Jurvetson (CC BY 2.0) Instead of getting life without parole in one of those white isolation cells in the toughest of jails for aiding and abetting terrorism, he is fêted the world over and is among America’s wealthiest men, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.  Step forward, Jeff Bezos...

Following President Trump’s maiden speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 19, ideologically incompatible analysts have found similar reasons to cheer or condemn the 40-minute oration.  To Breitbart’s Adam Shaw it was a powerful, nationalist, full-throated defense of Trump’s “America First” agenda.  To the far more numerous Trumpophobic pundits—like the Chicago Tribune’s David Rothkopf—it...

Bravo to Jason Michael Morgan for his essay “The Pernicious Myth of Two Americas” (View, October).  I am one of those people who live in America, the place, not America, the idea.  Specifically, Middle America—the Heartland, some would say. I am not a Facebooker, so I was unaware, until I read Mr. Morgan’s article, of...

mother! Produced by Protozoa Pictures  Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky  Distributed by Paramount Pictures  The Unknown Girl Produced by Les Films du Fleuve  Written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne Distributed by Sundance Select  Wind River Produced by Acacia Filmed Entertainment  Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan  Distributed by The Weinstein Company  I...

America’s descent into banana republicanism continues apace, and on two fronts.  To begin with, we learn that President Trump’s much-disdained assertion that Trump Tower was being wiretapped during the election campaign turns out to be absolutely true.  On September 19, CNN reported that Paul Manafort, who lived in Trump Tower and was Trump’s campaign manager...

“Where there’s no solution,” James Burnham used to remark, “there’s no problem.” That’s easy for him to say, the modern populist conservative replies.  Burnham died while Reagan was still in office!  What did he know about problems? Ah, the Golden Age of the 1980’s, when life was good.  At least until we compare it with...

Well over a year after the FBI began investigating “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has brought in his first major indictment. Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has been charged with a series of crimes dating back years, though none is tied directly to President Donald Trump or 2016....

U.S. Commandos Are a “Persistent Presence” on Russia’s Doorstep “They are very concerned about their adversary next door,” said General Raymond Thomas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado, in July.  “They make no bones about it.” The “they” in question were various Eastern European and...

“More is now required of us than to put down our thoughts in writing,” declaimed Jeff Flake in his oration against President Trump, just before he announced he will be quitting the Senate. Though he had lifted the title of his August anti-Trump polemic, “Conscience of a Conservative,” from Barry Goldwater, Jeff Flake is no...

In an interview with the Iranian English-language network Press TV Srdja Trifkovic discusses the significance of President Xi Jinping’s emergence as China’s most powerful leader in decades, following the end of the Communist Party congress on October 25. Video (interview starts after 50 seconds) Q: What do you think of Xi’s reelection, considering the fact...

George W. Bush Receives a Character Award at West Point In George W. Bush’s home state of Texas, if you are an ordinary citizen found guilty of capital murder, the mandatory sentence is either life in prison or the death penalty. If, however, you are a former president of the United States responsible for initiating...

“The Kurds have no friends but the mountains,” is an old lament. Last week, it must have been very much on Kurdish minds. As their U.S. allies watched, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were run out of Kirkuk and all the territory they had captured fighting ISIS alongside the Americans. The Iraqi army that ran them...

During the presidency of Barack Obama, George W. Bush generally avoided public criticism of his successor. Bush’s reticence could be read as a recognition of how calamitous his presidency had been, marked as it was by a disastrous war in Iraq that cost thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, wasted...

Asked to name the defining attributes of the America we wish to become, many liberals would answer that we must realize our manifest destiny since 1776, by becoming more equal, more diverse and more democratic—and the model for mankind’s future. Equality, diversity, democracy—this is the holy trinity of the post-Christian secular state at whose altars...

Counterinsurgency, Policing, and the Militarization of America’s Cities “This . . . thing, [the War on Drugs] this ain’t police work . . . I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors . . . running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on...

With his declaration Friday that the Iran nuclear deal is not in the national interest, President Donald Trump may have put us on the road to war with Iran. Indeed, it is easier to see the collisions that are coming than to see how we get off this road before the shooting starts. After “de-certifying”...

From the June 2010 issue of Chronicles. Two politicians get conservative fundraisers’ juices flowing like no others.  One, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, was surely mourned as much by ambitious Richard Viguerie imitators as by teary-eyed, Camelot-addled liberals.  The other, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, they hope will be a gift that keeps on...

On October 13, President Trump declared that the only way to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons was to abrogate the multilateral treaty which has been provenly effective in preventing Iran from developing such weapons. This is potentially the most serious mistake of his foreign policymaking thus far. According to Trump, “the longer we ignore...

Three decades ago, as communications director in the White House, I set up an interview for Bill Rusher of National Review. Among his first questions to President Reagan was to ask him to assess the political importance of Barry Goldwater. Said Reagan, “I guess you could call him the John the Baptist of our movement.”...

Harvey Weinstein was just expressing his little ol’ self, right? That is what you do, even when it gets you fired, as happened to Weinstein, or suspended, as happened to Jemele Hill at ESPN, or threatened with suspension, as in Jerry Jones’ blunt warning to his Cowboys about “taking a knee.” The rule-less disorder of...

Your Tax Dollars Support Troops of Defense Contractor CEOs Here’s a question for you: How do you spell boondoggle? The answer (in case you didn’t already know): P-e-n-t-a-g-o-n. Hawks on Capitol Hill and in the U.S. military routinely justify increases in the Defense Department’s already munificent budget by arguing that yet more money is needed...

To attend the Indianapolis Colts game where the number of the legendary Peyton Manning was to be retired, Vice President Mike Pence, a former governor of Indiana, flew back from Las Vegas. With him in the stadium was wife Karen. In honor of Manning, she wore a No. 18 jersey as “The Star Spangled Banner”...

Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less. Nor can it be said that we don’t care because we don’t know....

On Saturday, tens of thousands of Poles gathered on their country’s borders to pray the rosary. The event was too large for the media to ignore, but most news reports made clear how offensive this combination of Christian faith and patriotic sentiment was to those who write the news. In their headlines, the BBC referred...

What was his motive? Why did he do it? Why did Stephen Paddock, 64, rent rooms at the Mandalay Bay hotel, sneak in an arsenal of guns, a dozen of them converted to fully automatic, and rain down death on a country music concert? “We will never know,” writes columnist Eugene Robinson. “There can be...

We were already roaring down the road when the young man called to me over his shoulder. There was a woman seated between us on the motorbike and with the distance, his accent, the rushing air, and the engine noise, it took a moment for me to decipher what he had just said: We might...

From the June 2002 issue of Chronicles. There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one?  R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work...

“An act of pure evil,” said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: “Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” “Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence,” Trump went on in his...

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system...

Over the past nine days two important referendums on independence were held, in Iraqi Kurdistan (September 25) and in Catalonia (October 1). Both were met with overwhelming disapproval of the outside world. In both cases the local authorities—in Erbil and Barcelona respectively—had a short-term political agenda other than the stated grand objective. That is where...

Not everyone here in the Bluegrass State was delighted by the 2007 opening of the Creation Museum in Boone County.  “There’s been such a push in recent years to improve science education,” a representative of the Kentucky Paleontology Society gloomily observed, yet creationism “still hangs around.”  Church-state separation activists were particularly upset that the government...

We don’t need to be convinced of the European Union’s bureaucratic overreach.  Its administrative and regulatory impulses, particularly in its largest and wealthiest member states, have long been a problem.  Still, despite the ongoing challenges posed by the European “deep state” headquartered in Brussels and Strasbourg, some member states have managed to preserve a little...

The first thing to say about the Romantic Revival is that the phrase itself is a bit ambiguous, though I haven’t meant to be misleading.  Romanticism originally had an aspect of revival of the medieval, as in the Gothic revival and the revival of medieval romance.  And the phrase could also denote the return to...

Beethoven’s Symphonies: Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas, by Martin Geck, trans. by Stewart Spencer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 197 pp., $26.00).  Beethoven wrote his nine symphonies between 1800 and 1824 at the height of the Romantic movement that overlapped the end of the Enlightenment.  In Professor Geck’s opinion, the “First Symphony marks the...

I’ve at times found the great English writer and apologist G.K. Chesterton wearisome for his seemingly unending parade of paradoxes, some of which strike me as the discovery of paradoxes for paradox’s sake.  Yet paradox, as Peter Kreeft notes in his Foreword to ABCs of the Christian Life: The Ultimate Anthology of the Prince of...

When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the harm they were springing on the human race.  Once Lenin had prevailed, he decided to forge a new consciousness, a New Man, as the Bolshies called it, one that would overcome “the antinomies of subjective...