2050 search results for: Supreme%25252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252BCourt

One of the less appreciated perils of literary fame is the risk a writer runs every hundred years as the anniversary of his birthday approaches.  This year marks the 200th birthday not only of Darwin but of Lincoln, a completely irrelevant coincidence that inspired Smithsonian—the trivializing newsletter of “the nation’s attic”—to celebrate the two men...

When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was first passed, “help wanted: men” and “help wanted: women” ads were common in newspapers.  Private employers could hire and fire for discriminatory reasons.  Title VII made discriminatory ads and the hiring practices they represent illegal.  In their new book, Unequal, two law professors, Sandra...

        “Slavery is as ancient as war, and war as human nature.” —Voltaire Americans, with their strong tendency to externalize the evil within them and to project it onto others, have been waging crusades to extirpate or crush one kind of evil or another for almost 200 years now. The Pelagian belief...

A few months after the close of the American Civil War there was a brief but intense and interesting correspondence between Lord Acton, the European historian of liberty, and General R.E. Lee, hero of the defeated Confederacy, on the issues of the war. In the course of this correspondence Acton commented that Appomattox had been...

“I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.” —Daniel Webster In the spring of 1963, my sister and I were invited, along with my parents, to a dinner party given by White Russian friends at their penthouse apartment in Manhattan, whose tall mahogany-framed windows overlooked lower Central Park. ...

The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, by William Deresiewicz (Henry Holt; 368 pp., $27.99). Members of a book club at my highly selective undergraduate business school were stung by William Deresiewicz’s portrait of careerist, grade-grubbing college students in his scathing 2015 book,...

“An Liberalismus gehen die Völker zugrunde.” —Moeller von den Bruck Pat Buchanan’s exciting new book demonstrates clearly and convincingly that the population base of Western civilization is disappearing as Europeans and Americans are no longer reproducing themselves even at replacement rate and thus are being supplanted, both in their traditional homelands and in the New...

George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England was published in 1935.  It is an exceptionally well-written book and became a cult classic, its haunting title suggesting a mysterious crime, as in a thriller.  Dangerfield’s theme was the decay of the civilization created by the British Liberal movement in the years that led up to...

“There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they had no good in them.” —La Rochefoucauld From the beginning of his literary career, Robert Coover has been driven by the quite commendable ambition to make radical innovations in the forms and styles of contemporary fiction. Like John Barth, who once famously proclaimed the...

“A democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak and is supplanted by oligarchy.” —Aristotle The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz New York: W.W. Norton; 1,004 pp., $35.00 To write a book about democracy, a word that functions today as little more than an advertising slogan, an author should first...

Stephen B. Presser, Chronicles’ legal-affairs editor, identifies a crisis in American legal education.  In his book Law Professors, he shows us why a newly minted graduate of an elite American law school has no clue how to handle a case or provide useful legal services.  This is not a matter of just being young or...