Despite Jeff Bezos's libertarian ideology, Amazon has used governmental privilege to grow to a massive scale, and has had a disastrous effect on American life, as Alec MacGillis shows in Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.
4610 search results for: The Old Right
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The Gamblers’ Club
On July 15 Goldman Sachs reported that its second-quarter profits were the highest in 140 years. It netted $3.4 billion on $13.4 billion in revenue (78 percent of which came from trading and principal investments and 11 percent from investment banking). Exactly which trades brought in such large profits is said to be proprietary. It...
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Obamacare: Charity or Marxism, II
This part two of a series. If you have any doubts about the premise accepted here, that Obamacare represents an implementation of socialist principles, please read Part I. I should not that I have borrowed passages from the first chapter of a book in progress, tentatively titled Cities of Man. In Part III, I’ll...
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Election Suspense
Where then shall Hope and Fear their Objects find? Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant Mind? —Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” At the time of writing in late August, the coming U.S. election is hard to call, so that dull Suspence must indeed prevail for a few more weeks. One need not let...
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All That Jazz
Extraordinary writing about music doesn’t come along very often, as I have been forced to notice by my own experience—as have my own put-upon readers! But in the realm of classical music, I would suggest that Donald F. Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis is an imposing composition, a stunt of writing—the freight of its assertions...
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A Billion Sordid Images
Disconnected is not an amusing book. The subtitle’s “digitally distracted” doesn’t hint at its grim findings. This short text—a long one might be too dispiriting—is nevertheless lengthy enough to expose the digital revolution as an outright calamity, though the author generally eschews the apocalyptic tone. Of course, there is the familiar boast that children now...
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Fact and Fiction
Kingdom of Heaven Produced and distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Directed by Ridley Scott Screenplay by William Monahan Crash Produced and distributed by Bull’s Eye Entertainment Directed and written by Paul Haggis As I watched Kingdom of Heaven, Sir Ridley Scott’s most recent directorial effort, a feeling of déjà vu descended upon me, the story...
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Economics and the Catholic Ethic
Amintore Fanfani (1908-99) was an economic historian whose scholarship focused on the origins of capitalism and questions of economic and social equity. In his early career, he was part of a broader Catholic and conservative intellectual movement that was active during the interwar years and included the English Distributists and the Southern Agrarians. Like these...
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Light Reading
Is it possible, in 50 words or less, to describe today’s woman, the postfeminist 80’s woman, the woman who will soon become the 90’s woman? I’m glad you asked. The typical American woman in 1989 is divorced, in need of financial guidance, worried about her career, either agonizing about her biological clock or searching out...
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Geostrategic Challenges in 2020
As we approach the last year of this century’s second decade, the United States is still the most powerful state in the world, safe from direct threats by foreign state actors. Two oceans separate America from actual or potential hot spots on other continents, while its neighbors to the north and south are harmless and...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Dostoevsky’s great 1866 novel Crime and Punishment reads like a frenetic vision. A compulsive gambler and one-time political radical who was condemned to Siberia and forced labor, Dostoevsky created the novel’s Rodion Raskolnikov, a half-mad dreamer who expressed the radical, nihilistic ideas of the time. Drawing on his own struggles and experiences, Dostoevsky used Raskolnikov...
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Saying Goodbye to Papa
I first became a huge fan of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway back in my twenties. I read his short stories, nearly all his novels, and his memoir, A Moveable Feast, recounting the time in Paris when he was just beginning his adventures in fiction. I also read several biographies about him, including Carlos Baker’s classic Ernest Hemingway: A...
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No Amnesty for COVID Tyrants
The establishment would love nothing more than for you to forgive and forget their tyrannical imposition of COVID policies. But simply moving on and pretending that nothing happened would be foolish, not to mention unjust.
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Exorcisms
“Truth rests with God alone, and a little bit with me.” —Yiddish Proverb Moshe Leshem ends Balaam’s Curse with a warning against the growing political power of the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate. By yielding to Orthodox authorities on educational and cultural matters, he says, Israelis are sacrificing their democratic patrimony. For the sake of Israeli democracy...
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Space Invaders: Part II
Last spring, my friend Dick, a history professor here, was riding in a Long Island airport limousine when it stopped to pick up another passenger, an elderly lady burdened with luggage and confronted by a garden gate that wouldn’t open. After watching her struggle for a while, Dick’ got out and gave her a hand....
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Future Shock?
This won’t be easy. But, it may be the future, at least according to a number of science-fiction writers collectively known as the “cyberpunks.” More disturbingly, there seems to be a number of scientists and researchers who agree. Hang on. The first part of the word cyberpunks comes from cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert...
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The Other Lindbergh
While the most famous member of the Lindbergh clan is undoubtedly the aviator and World War II-era isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the qualities for which he won renown—his courage, his Scandinavian severity, his willingness to stand against the tide of popular opinion, his dislike of cities and the elites they spawned, and (most of...
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Journalism’s ‘Year of Confessions’ Needs a Deeper Confessional
Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron’s acknowledgment that George Stephanopoulos’s journalistic mea culpa was necessary rings hollow.
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Alvin Bragg—Nothing to Brag About
New Yorkers need a DA who watches out for them, not for himself.
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Socialist Realism from Giotto to Warhol
In the 1960’s, a fashionable subject of conversation among the Russian intelligentsia was Mikhail Sholokhov’s plagiarism. Sholokhov, it was alleged, had found the manuscript of And Quiet Flows the Don among the personal effects of a certain Cossack, published it as his own, and eventually pocketed the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature. Just look at...
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Muse of Apollo
Is it really necessary to explain why President Trump’s proposed Space Force would be a boon to humankind? Do I have to contrast such a noble project with the other possible uses to which our tax dollars would be put? Perhaps a study of how transsexuals are prone to certain color combinations. Or one on...
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Poems of the Week: March 13, 2012
Let us now have a look at the so-called Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. It was popularized by the great Aretine poet Petrarch, and early examples of the sonnet are often overt imitations of the master. The problem for the English poet is that Italian is a language in which rhyme comes so easily as...
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The Allure of the Lurid
Reviews of Blonde, adapted from the Joyce Carol Oates biographical novel of the same title, and the 1951 film, The Enforcer.
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Clap & Trap
I had heard about, but not read, “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama’s star-burst essay published in 1989; but I felt a twinge of sympathy for him as his critics chortled and pointed at history rumbling anew: people dancing atop the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union falling to pieces, an American Army flying into Arabia....
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Jolly Good Fellow
“The more I began to think about and read Coward, the more convinced I became that the history of British entertainment in the first half of this century was essentially the history of his own career.” With that observation, Sheridan Morley, drama critic and arts editor of Punch, begins his biography of Noel Coward. The...
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Preparing for a Turbulent Four Years
During the campaign for the presidency, the major media were relentless in their attacks on Donald Trump. Reading the Washington Post daily I couldn’t believe the news coverage. It was one anti-Trump story after another. The reporters didn’t even bother to disguise what clearly were opinion pieces, passing them off as news. “Racist,” “sexist,” “anti-Semite”—these...
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Ignorance and Freedom
“In a state of civilization,” opined Thomas Jefferson, it is not possible to be both ignorant and free. In Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson laid out his plan for public education. Every free man would learn “the most useful facts” from ancient and modern history. The “best geniuses” would go...
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Sheldon Whitehouse’s Sauronian Return
The senator attempts to revisit and relitigate the heinous and thoroughly discredited allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and me.
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Brexit: What Now?
It’s been quite a summer in the United Kingdom. On June 23, we the British people surprised everyone—including, perhaps most of all, ourselves—by voting to leave the European Union. That wasn’t meant to happen. All year, the E.U. referendum polls had shown a consistent advantage for the pro-E.U. “Remain” side. Celebrities and important people spent...
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Confronting Jihad
Paris (twice in ten months), San Bernardino, Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Ansbach, Munich, Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray: Hundreds of people blown up, pulverized, shot, knifed. Who is next? That such attacks will continue is certain. That the political class has no strategic blueprint for dealing with the scourge of jihad terrorism is obvious. That all Western security services have...
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The Democratic Crusade
In The Hollow Men Charles J. Sykes resumes the brief against American higher education that he began in his widely publicized Profscam, published in 1988. Sykes argues in both books that our best universities, most conspicuously in their humanities faculties, have betrayed their true educational mission: instead of challenging students to think, professors parrot prescribed...
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Handgun Culture
Bob Costas fired off a lecture during prime-time NBC coverage of the NFL that outraged some political commentators and fans. The speech was in response to a murder-suicide committed by Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, 25, who killed Kasandra Perkins, 22, the mother of his infant daughter, before kneeling, making the sign of the...
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Best of British Conservatism
“Hail, happy Britain! Highly favored isle, And Heaven’s peculiar care!”—William Somerville British conservative circles are awash with books at the moment. Apart from the usual think-tank reports and surveys, we have seen recently John Major’s and Norman Lamont’s memoirs, John Redwood’s Death of Britain, and the latest miscellany from Daily Telegraph...
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Crowned With Thorns and Glory
[Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart, by Felicity Allen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press) 808 pp., $34.95] “As the tug bore him away from the ship, he stood with bared head between the files of undersized German and other foreign soldiers on either side of him, and as we looked, as we thought, our last upon his...
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Joe Biden’s Polish Joke
Earlier this year, Joe Biden gave a lengthy interview to The New York Times, a venue as friendly toward Biden as Sean Hannity is to Donald Trump. In the course of this interview, Biden offered the following observation: Well, look what’s happened. Look what started to seep in, beginning and probably even with candidates during our administration. We stopped showing...
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Dutch Euthanasia Case Serves as Harbinger
In 2002 the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia, formalizing what had been tolerated by the government for several decades prior. Today, however, the Dutch practice of euthanasia is arguably less settled legally than ever before. In September, a doctor was found not guilty of breaking the law after administering...
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Remember Diana?
I was in London on a brief visit last weekend, which happened to be the tenth anniversary of the accidental death, at the age of 36, of Princess Diana, the divorced wife of the heir-apparent to the British throne. In marked contrast to the ...
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The Road to Rome–and Back
The title is intended as a joke and not as a declaration of apostasy. The past two weeks my attention has been almost entirely absorbed, first by our Winter School program and then by an informal after-excursion to Rome with a few lingering students. I enjoy these programs, but while they are going on I...
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The View From Mount Nebo
Last summer this expansive sagebrush basin at the lower end of the Wyoming Range made the annual encampment of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, spawn of a congestive civilization. Fifteen thousand strong, they organized according to their various pursuits: drinking, drugs, nudity, fornication, and—for all the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department knows—cannibalism and human sacrifice....
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On Consistency
In the April 30 issue of the Remnant, Christopher Ferrara cites a priest in New York who claims that the percentage of seminarians within his diocese who are homosexual may be conservatively estimated at 60 percent. If this is what Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford (quoted in “De Profundis,” The Rockford Files, June) refers to...
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A Good Idea
The most readily saleable kind of merchandise a writer keeps on offer is his natural gregariousness, with the widely advertised consequence that so many writers drink themselves to death. In this steady though unprofitable trade of ours, I am pleased to say, I have some distinct advantage over the competition, as I never went to...
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The New Kohlonization
The euphoria that accompanied the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, should still be fresh in our minds. We remember the scenes of people dancing on the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, total strangers embracing each other, sharing bottles of champagne. We remember the party atmosphere that culminated in reunification...
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The Surley Skies & Other Civil Slights
What kinds of behavior does our culture encourage? The question is ever in style, and usually a pat and misleading answer is on the tongue of every commentator. Greed, bellicosity, phoniness, racism, sexism, and speciesism come immediately to their minds. However, the question inevitably is worthy of a more meaningful analysis. Our culture has accomplished...
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Mayhem and Civility
Joker Directed and written by Todd Phillips • Produced by Creative Wealth Media Finance and DC Entertainment • Distributed by Warner Brothers Downton Abbey Directed by Michael Engler • Screenplay by Julian Fellowes • Produced and distributed by Focus Features The Conversation Directed and written by Francis Ford Coppola • Produced by The Coppola Company...
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The Modesty of a New Yorker
I may be the only person in America—I am certainly the only one in New England—who did not mourn the recent passing of E.B. White. Of course, I don’t mean to say I celebrated his death. On the contrary, I was horrified by the New York Times‘ obituary, which began with the brutal, if unassailable,...
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Selling Out—Past and Present
Many who leave Main Street, U.S.A., to do good in Washington, D.C., remain on to do well for themselves. Since the beginnings of the American Republic, thousands of former congressmen, staff assistants, and senior officials in the executive branch have trod that familiar career path. The bright and ambitious, as well as the foolish and...
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Role Models and Poetry
Societies, as much as individuals, need role models. For good and for ill, our cultural tradition has been influenced by the figures of Achilles and Odysseus, placed at the center of our moral imagination by Homer almost three millennia ago. The shaping power of the tradition is clearest where there has been no direct influence,...
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Memories of Mr. Lytle
Almost nobody thinks that Yankees can possibly understand agrarians. But one of the great pleasures in my life is that I was, at least at one time or another, Mel Bradford’s favorite Yankee. And because Mel introduced me with great good manners to Mr. Andrew Nelson Lytle, I became one of his favorite Yankees, too....