Old-fashioned English professors like to speak of “the Canon” in reverential tones, as if there were a list of great books as ancient as the Spartan king list and as hallowed as the kyrie. In fact, what they usually have in mind is a rummage sale assortment of a few really essential works jumbled together...
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The Fading of Feminism
Writing her column the other day in a London newspaper, a feminist confessed that the women’s movement that started some 25 years ago had “spluttered to a halt.” Many a middle-aged feminist nowadays will tell you the same thing. The young, they will say with an air of regret, meaning their daughters and the friends...
Chicken Soup Starring: The Marx Bros.
“How can tyrants safely govern home I Unless abroad they purchase great alliance?”—William Shakespeare There is something compelling in reading about spies and something compelling as well about spying, or we would not have so many spies to read about, fictional or not. Our century has been a century of spies:...
My Kavanaugh Hearing Nightmare and ‘Oprah Moment’ on Fox
One thing I learned from my ordeal in the limelight of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations is that the truth is always more complicated than the narrative.
Great Expectations
Foreign aid, like other forms of aid, is a subsidy that distorts choice. The distortion takes many forms; for example, aid is sometimes put to uses unintended by the giver; it also lets the recipient pursue activities below their real cost. Since President Harry Truman launched the foreign-aid crusade, U.S. economic aid to developing nations...
What We Are Reading: February 2024
Short reviews of The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Shall We Gather by the River?
When I was invited last spring to be a judge at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest some envious backbiters put it about that it wasn’t because I’m well known as a discriminating ami de swine, but because my sister knows the woman who picks the judges. I have just one thing...
The Grit and the Gritless
True Grit Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen The Green Hornet Produced and distributed by Columbia Pictures Directed by Michel Gondry Screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg The King’s Speech Produced by See-Saw Films Directed by Tom Hooper Screenplay by David Seidler Distributed by The Weinstein...
Lamentations of a Recovering Marxist
“Progress needs the brakeman, but the brakeman should not spend all his time putting on the brakes.” —Elbert Hubbard The case for pessimism has been easy to make since Lincoln, and mandatory since Franklin Roosevelt. Today, not much is left of the Old Republic. As early as the 1930’s, Frank Chodorov could describe Washington, D.C.,...
Abortion Delusion
Planned Parenthood Dominatrix Cecile Richards sat defiantly before a congressional panel on September 29, making little effort to conceal her disgust at the perfunctory speeches made in front of her. She exuded a fierce confidence that dwarfed the resolve of her Republican opponents, presaging the House’s passage the very next day of a gutted stopgap...
When Lorena Bobbitt Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbing Along
Dear Howard Stern, I don’t care if your New Year’s Eve program did set the all-time world record for a pay-for-view TV event. And I don’t care, either, if your book is a best-seller and people are lining up around the block to get a signed copy of it. I just want to tell you,...
On Morality in Film
In his review of John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama (In the Dark, June), George McCartney comments in detail and at great length on what he perceives to be the film’s merits. Some of these are real, though hardly worthy of the extravagant praise that McCartney bestows. He especially praises Pierce Brosnan for his portrayal...
A Plague on All Our Houses
Ending Plague, by Francis Ruscetti, Judy Mikovits, and Kent Heckenlively, draws a connection between big pharma’s vaccine industry and a host of modern diseases.
Television
Events in India of nearly 40 years ago are in the news all at once. The television series, The Jewel in the Crown, has touched the public’s nerve—not necessarily the raw nerve. The reaction has been so strong that the chemistry of success deserves close scrutiny. The exploitation of India’s resources is an old story....
Sighting Sylphs and Stalking Sense
One of the primary functions of literary criticism is to impose a certain order on the subject, the text. In a very basic sense, it can be thought of as a set of instructions for the reader of the text, not unlike those packed along with a dishwasher or a swing set. However, there is...
What the Editors Are Reading
Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a...
Trail Life: A Christian Answer to the Boy Scouts
When Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced their decision to welcome and validate openly homosexual boys six years ago, Cub Scout mom Theresa Waning saw the writing on the wall. Shortly after BSA’s announcement, the church chartering her son’s troop, like many other churches across the country, revoked their BSA charter, leaving Waning’s son and...
Theresa May’s Impending Exit
The War of the Tory Succession is now entering its terminal phase. The ultra-loyalist Amber Rudd, badly wounded a couple of months ago, has now after convalescence returned to the Front. She is back in the Cabinet after Dominic Raab became the second Brexit Secretary to pull out from that unfulfilling job. Michael Gove avoided...
Doe Fever
The Case Against Hillary Clinton is a strange book. It would be less strange if it were titled Peggy Noonan’s Psychoanalyses, Future Speculations, and General Meanderings, Which Are All Well-Written and Witty. But a book billed as an indictment of the First Lady, written by none other than Ronald Reagan’s most lauded speechwriter, creates certain...
Delusion Is Killing the American Republic
More Americans are mentally ill than ever before. It’s no wonder we are seeing signs of it in our politics.