“Education begins with life,” said Benjamin Franklin somewhere. That was how it always seemed to me when I was growing up in Southern Ireland in the 1970’s and 80’s. I enjoyed some things about school, especially my secondary school—an experimental comprehensive, one of only two in the country at that time, opened to cater to...
Politicians are trying to use the Uvalde school shooting to introduce new gun control measures, but the horrible event actually shows how useless government is at protecting the vulnerable.
In September 2010, Émile Perreau-Saussine, age 37, was rushed to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, U.K., with chest pains. The junior physician on staff misdiagnosed his condition and thus failed to prevent his death hours later of a massive heart attack. This tragic incident is much more than a sad commentary on the quality of socialized healthcare...
In Martin Heidegger’s existentialism, two centuries of German philosophy have culminated in an unexpected, almost scandalous way. Since Immanuel Kant, at least, this philosophy was bent on finding proofs that Being is unknowable, or that it is not God but the World Spirit, History, the Will to Power, the Proletariat, whatever. Heidegger went back to...
Ever since Machiavelli, and probably long before that, successful statesmen have known that a plentiful stock of mendacity, as well as guile, are essential for anyone wishing to get ahead in politics. But what many of them may have forgotten during their arduous climb to the summit is that the often bitter accusations they level...
Donald Trump’s inaugural address was a powerful, straightforward articulation of American nationalism: “At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens. . . . From this day forward, a new vision will govern this land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every...
The inability to speak well was once upon a time a great hurdle to overcome. But in today’s schools, pupils are taught that speaking properly is elitist, snobby, and not with the times.
Few people have been so hated that their enemies have disrupted their funeral processions in an attempt to throw their coffins into a river, but that is precisely what happened to Pope Pius IX on the night of July 12, 1881. Amid the heated debate surrounding Pio Nono’s beatification this past September 3, a few...
The past months have been strange for everyone, for New Yorkers most of all. What happens when the city that never sleeps locks down? When commuters stay home, subways are deserted, and shops, restaurants, theaters, museums, libraries, schools, playgrounds, public gardens, sports arenas, churches, and concert halls are all locked? Or for that matter, what happens...
“It is becoming more obvious with each passing day that the men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon,” wrote David Broder on Oct. 8, 1969. “The likelihood is great that they will succeed again.” A columnist for the Washington Post, Broder was no fan of...
I recently sat down with a friend of more than 50 years, Reinaldo Herrera, and was filmed by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, also an old friend, while lunching and discussing the past. The Herrera house is a grand one, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and Graydon’s idea was to film...
Dick McIlhenny awoke with a cold foot in the blackness that could be an hour after he fell asleep or ten minutes before the alarm clock went off. He attended to the foot inside the sleeping bag and checked the luminous dial on the clock beside his pillow. The clock said 30 minutes past one....
Philip Jenkins’ essay about McCarthyism (“Goodbye, Senator McCarthy,” Breaking Glass, May) was an exercise in retailing received opinions about the Wisconsin senator and his countersubversion efforts. Without offering specific illustrations, Professor Jenkins execrated Senator McCarthy as “a liar and a jerk of the first order” who conducted a “campaign of name-calling, accusations, and smears ....
Thomas Pynchon has been living out of the public eye for almost four decades now, a literary hermit who has succeeded by his very reclusiveness in attracting more attention than his less retiring colleagues. Seventeen years ago, his novel Gravity’s Rainbow elevated Pynchon to cult-hero status, and ever since his acolytes have eagerly awaited a...
This town ain’t big This town ain’t small. It’s a little of both they say. And our ball club may be minor league But at least it’s Triple A. . . . We don’t worry ’bout the pennant much We just like to see the boys hit it deep There’s nothing like the view From...
Perhaps it is inevitable that the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa (already dubbed the “Bo Derek of the Steppes” in a British press report) will come to the United States. If Secretary Gorbachev does visit, the journalists and commentators who report the visit should be required to read The Brezhnev Politburo...
Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been in trouble many times in the course of his long and colorful political career. As mayor of Jerusalem, he was suspected of accepting bribes in the “Greek-island affair” involving former premier Ariel Sharon and his son, Omri (who was eventually convicted and jailed for seven months); but the...
“Well, I do believe some things, of course . . . and therefore, of course, I don’t believe other things.” —G.K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown The progressive turning away from belief in God that characterized Western intellectuals during the 19th century continues, alas, in the 20th. This intellectual shift has often been attributed...
In the second book, Tocqueville tries to demonstrate a double thesis, which may be summarized as: 1) The centralized authoritarian regime installed by the FR represents continuity with the old regime, not a break with the past, and 2) there is, nonetheless a qualitative difference between the benevolent busybodying of ...
The elitist bureaucracy created during the Carter administration makes nothing more efficient and is at odds with the interests of the American people.
This temperate and thorough book commences with a detailed description of President Nixon’s activities on May 8 and 9, 1970, when thousands of young people had poured into Washington to protest the American expedition into Cambodia. This was the most dramatic of the several crises in Richard Nixon’s life. As Dr. Parmet writes, “Nixon’s postmortem...
The presidency must be destroyed. It is the primary evil we face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us am harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank...
“There is always something new from Africa.” —Pliny the Elder By the early 1970’s, I had come to the conclusion that American higher education could not get any worse. Most of the young and not-so-young Ph.D.’s in the humanities were intellectually anemic. What few brains they possessed had been starved on a diet of bogus...
In being the selfish bonehead Joe Biden has always and demonstrably been, there is hope that he could perform an act of unintentional patriotism by taking down the sham regime that has propped him up for so long.
Homosexuals coast-to-coast have been doing the slow burn in the past few months because their jug-eared leader, Barack Obama, has delayed fulfilling a key campaign promise: to scrap the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. The policy is actually federal law, and it’s very simple: Keep your mouth shut, and you can serve. Ten months...
The state of higher education in our country is best passed over in silence, in order to avoid both useless exasperation and any provocation of “reform.” The mess we are in is the result of a parade of fraudulent reforms and movements, of a national, political, and social corruption so pervasive that I see no...
During the 1950s, the twin pillars of worldwide anti-communism were Dwight Eisenhower’s America and the Roman Catholic Church of Pope Pius XII. During the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and the Polish pope, John Paul II, were the pillars of resistance. When Pope Francis arrives in Washington on Tuesday afternoon,...
The reemergence of rape accusations against Bill Cosby have divided this nation of TV-watchers. Most members of Mr. Cosby’s race and a large percentage of his fellow males have responded with a skepticism that is not entirely unjustified. It is all too common for women to “discover” through therapy or introspection that their lives have...
The typical animal rights activist is a female agnostic or atheist, unmarried with no children and six “companion animals,” “educated,” and living a resolutely urban life in the company of other activists on behalf of all sorts of causes, most of them left-wing. This bizarre specimen of contemporary humanity aspires to echo one day over...
The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is widely recognized by American military officers and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Sanchez says, is “to stave...
Leonid Ilych Brezhnev presided over the irreversible decline of the USSR during his 18 years in power, initially as Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party and later also as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He was two years younger than Joseph Biden is today when he died in 1982, but – just...
In an attempt to lure immigrants to Arizona in 1881, Patrick Hamilton wrote, “Irrigation is the life of agriculture in the Territory. Without it scarcely anything can be raised; with it the soil is the most prolific in the west. Water, therefore, is the most precious element for the farmer in Arizona.” The same was—and...
President Obama, in his State of the Union Address last January, called upon American students, teachers, scientists, and business executives to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” We are living, the President announced, in a “Sputnik moment.” As polls show the majority of the country considers the United States to be rather...
“The question is,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “which is to be master—that’s all.” As overused as the quotation may be, it nevertheless communicates a perennial truth that most people forget when it comes to understanding not only the answer but also the question itself, a truth that explains much of...
As New York City’s mayoral campaign kicked into overdrive earlier this spring, the New York Times saw fit to question the viability of Republican candidate Joe Lhota, former chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. With all the populist fervor it could muster, the Times asked readers, “Can New Yorkers learn to love someone who increased...
Supreme Court Justice John Harlan helped to shape the “color-blind” legal approach toward race in America, and his views were likely shaped by a man likely to have been his mixed-race half-brother.
The controversy over ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) is a typical modern morality tale, in which the moral always lose. Although a few generals and admirals objected to allowing homosexuals to serve openly, a military led by real men would have seen every general and admiral resign in protest unless the new policy was...
We need to rethink how we fight the ascendant cultural left, which does not consider truth an arbiter.
During the early 1920’s, 30 years after he had written his famous essay on the significance of the frontier in the nation’s history, the great American historian Frederick Jackson Turner published two other works on the democratizing role of what he termed the “section.” Sections, Turner wrote, “serve as restraints upon a deadly uniformity. They...
To what extent (if at all) does natural law entail religious liberty? To put it another way, is religious liberty a natural right? An attempt to answer this question should elucidate the long and sometimes equivocal tradition of natural law. What, for example, is the proper relationship between tolerance and the truth? When does tolerance...
What is it about Ayn Rand that so fascinates her enemies as well as her admirers? Her two major novels, Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943), are enduring pillars of popular culture. Her paeans to egoism make Nietzsche look like a piker, and, quite unlike that sickly aesthete, she had a life as dramatic...
I have always wanted to spend some time in Rome, for a whole rosary of personal reasons. As with much else in a person’s private life, to recount these in print is to expose oneself to public ridicule. Yes, Rome is a wonderful city. Yes, the food is good. But then in England, where I...
David Gilmour’s witty and elegant, original and useful book chronicles “Kipling’s political life, his early role as apostle of the Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline.” Sympathetic yet aware of Kipling’s faults, Gilmour shows that his ideas were more subtle than those of a crude...
About Schmidt Produced and distributed by New Line Cinema Directed by Alexander Payne Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from Louis Begley’s novel The Quiet American Produced by William Harberg and Stefen Ahrenberg Directed by Phillip Noyce and Robert Schenkkan Screenplay by Christopher Hampton from Graham Greene’s novel Distributed by Miramax Films Bulletin: Hollywood...
Erdoğan narrowly won a third term as Turkey’s president in the most momentous electoral contest of the year. Critics of his record on Western-style human rights fail to grasp that his blend of nationalism, Islamism, and neo-Ottoman visions of imperial grandeur has been enormously successful.
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...
Most sober historians have little respect for counterfactuals, those extrapolations of alternative worlds where matters developed differently from the world we know. Yet such alternatives are actually hard to avoid. How can you claim that Gettysburg was a significant battle unless you contemplate the other paths that American history might have taken if the South...
“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes. “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.” The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter. Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of...
As any connoisseur of the manifest absurdities that daily emanate from Inside the Beltway is well aware, what we read in the venerable Congressional Record is not necessarily a verbatim account of what was stated, on any given day, by our lawmakers on the floors of the House or Senate. It is common practice to...
Every well-read person used to know Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and, knowing that collection, knew who Richard Savage was—or at least knew who Richard Savage told people he was. Richard Savage was a minor poet and convicted murderer, a charming rascal and rackety man about town entirely lacking normal instincts of prudence and self-preservation....