Two Cheers for the Great Books by Michael S. Kochin We need, as Mansfield says, to teach our students “to recognize [greatness] in its diversity,” but our students have more pressing things to do in college than cram as much of that diversity as they can into four years. We should be more than satisfied if they finish college not saying farewell to books, but longing to continue their hopefully…
Politicians Aren’t Our Friends by Louise Perry Compare this with how people of the past interacted with their politicians—that is, hardly at all. You might have seen a speech delivered, probably at a distance. You might once have briefly met your local representative. Once print media arrived, you might regularly see their images. Once radio arrived, you might regularly hear their voices. For most…
“This is Going to Surprise Some People”: Leading Biden COVID-19 Figure Embraces the Lab Leak Theory by Jonathan Turley “This is going to surprise some people. You know, when I went into the White House, my view was, ‘This was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak.’ Based on information I learned and based on information I‘ve seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have…
Glen Hansard Made Beautiful Music by Kyle Smith Musicians have a rare gift in that their art is inherently social. They don’t need to fumble their way toward forging deep bonds with others. What they do dissolves barriers: age, sex, ethnicity, class, shyness and relative levels of fame melt away. The dinner-party scene recalls a story Mr. Hansard used to tell about his life. When he was a busker,…
A Libertarian Case for Regulating Sports Betting by Logan Tantibanchachai As to the second condition for regulation — its efficacy — several studies suggest that these limited measures can reduce high-risk gambling. One study, for instance, found that among online sports bettors who used voluntary self-control tools, 10.6 percent stopped betting altogether, while those who continued betting…
The Pocket Adam Smith by Julia R. Cartwright The Scotland that produced Smith was itself instructive. Montes gives a vivid description of the paradox of a nation that in the early eighteenth century was the poorest in Europe, yet within decades produced a disproportionate share of the modern world’s foundational ideas. The Act of Union with England in 1707, which most Scots mourned as a loss of…
What I Learned at Alexis de Tocqueville’s Birthday Dinner by Will Ogilvie Vega de Seoane Although Tocqueville never knew him personally, Malesherbes occupied a permanent place in his imagination. Family conversations preserved his memory, and Tocqueville kept a bust of him on his writing desk throughout his life and even considered writing a book about him. The admiration was not sentimental, but…
Welcome to Secular Sharia by River Page > With secular sharia, any day can be Judgment Day—and the internet was ready and primed to judge these two sinning lawyers. For one, Cullerton was making out with a younger woman, and better yet, a younger colleague, who also worked in the litigation department. Even more offensive, they were also adulterers brazenly flaunting their sinful lifestyle in…
All Hail Queen Sophie by Kyle Smith All of this was mere overture to an even more attention-capturing move by Ms. Cunningham. In an ESPN interview published July 21, she noted, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” This touched off a round of disbelief and outrage. Reporters buzzed around her hinting she had…
The End of ‘El Mayo’ Is Only the Beginning by Joshua S. Treviño ‘Violence should stop in Mexico,” said the tired old man. “Too many lives are lost. It destroys families. It thrusts youths into a life without future. Nobody will win this war.” Then, having spoken, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, one of the most fearsome cartel bosses in all of Mexican history, went silent to await his sentencing.…
The Baseball Tax That Made the Great Depression Worse by Antón Chamberlin Baseball during the Great Depression is only one memorable example. Governments often prefer to tax that which is visible, convenient at scale, and politically feasible, making mass consumption easy to tax. But convenience does not mean economically harmless, and it usually means disruption to price-sensitive activities that…
7th Prime Minister in 10 years by Bill Glahn The 7th in ten years, dating back to David Cameron in 2016. By my count, only Burnham’s immediate predecessor, Keir Starmer, took office immediately following a general election. Burnham and four others first assumed office following something like a palace coup. Until recently, Burnham was the Mayor of Manchester. A month ago, Burnham was elected to…
America Needs the Filibuster by Ben Sasse When partisans talk about killing or “reforming” the filibuster, they’re saying they want to turn the Senate into another House of Representatives. That would be a tragic mistake. The filibuster prevents the dramatic pendulum swings that are the natural result of simple-majority lawmaking. Every election and every vote becomes an existential crisis in a…
Let Swifties Be Swifties by Shira Kaplan Every Taylor Swift-dedicated space allows the fan to act as an exegete: poring over CD liners with hidden messages, going frame-by-frame in music videos to find secret clues, analyzing the words she uses in interviews and in social-media posts. We care so deeply because we are watching her complete a 20-year romantic quest we’ve followed since childhood. My…
This Week in American History: How to Say Goodbye to a King by Jonathan Horn At a time when the written word could travel no faster than the riders carrying it, news of the Declaration took time to spread. Some Americans first saw the text printed in newspapers. Others learned about it only after hearing it read aloud in public as it first was in Philadelphia on July 8. Not until the next day did…
When Uncle Sam Turns Venture Capitalist, What Could Go Wrong? by James Varney Government funding of private companies is receiving new scrutiny as the Trump administration is upping the ante on such efforts by demanding that the feds receive an equity stake for their largesse. While this approach is leading the government into uncharted waters, experts say the operative concept – using taxpayer…
America’s Indispensable Man by Wilfred M. McClay The Americans had another crucial advantage. They were blessed with an inspiring leader in the person of George Washington, a committed patriot with extensive military experience and extraordinarily fine character, who commanded the admiration and loyalty of nearly all Americans. When he showed up at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia…
The Rise of Grocery Tourism by Nicole James > I loved the products. Not necessarily the customers who could turn feral over a five-cent discrepancy in canned tomatoes. The conveyor belt was a pageant of human need. It was anthropology in a polyester apron. > When people now declare that they have discovered grocery store tourism, I feel like saying, “We know. We’ve had those for years.” > My first…
The enduring promise of America by Joel Kotkin The greatest Americans – Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the Roosevelts – may be horrified by the banality of Trump’s America today, as well as its gaping fiscal worries. But they would also find much to admire in a very diverse society still growing, still seeking and still reaching ever further into the solar system.…
Europe Chooses to Broil by Matthew Hennessey European homes aren’t air-conditioned the way American homes are, and the consequences are proving deadly. Houston has roughly the same population as Paris and very few people die there when the temperature spikes. The average summer temperature in Phoenix—a city full of elderly people that is only a little smaller than Paris—is over 100 degrees…
America’s Promise and Achievement by Leonidas Zelmanovitz History offers sobering reminders of how fragile civilizations can be. The collapse of Roman authority in Western Europe did not occur in a single dramatic moment. It unfolded gradually through institutional exhaustion, declining civic confidence, and the inability of elites to preserve political order. The Byzantines, too, ultimately…
A Time of Monsters by Jonathan Rosen Walter Russell Mead identified a version of this phenomenon in his book The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, where he likened obsessive, magical thinking about the “Israel lobby,” and its supposedly malign influence on America, to the 19th-century belief that an imaginary planet called Vulcan was responsible for…
Mexico’s Yūshūkan Mindset by Joshua S. Treviño > Ulysses S. Grant, in his Memoirs, disagreed emphatically with the characterization of Mexico’s soldiery of 1846–1848 as intrinsically inferior, and the certainty of American war success was much more tenuous than it might seem: Taylor’s army never meaningfully advanced after Buena Vista, for example, and Scott’s army might have been entombed in the…
America’s Immigrant Soccer Team The U.S. team last week clinched a spot in the knockout round after defeating Australia. A quarter of its players were born outside of the U.S., including Gio Reyna, Antonee Robinson and Sebastian Berhalter (U.K.), Sergiño Dest (Netherlands), Malik Tillman (Germany) and Alejandro Zendejas (Mexico). Many players are also first- or second-generation Americans of…
Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Fed, dies at age 100 by Marty Steinberg > The influential economist died Monday at his home from complications of Parkinson’s Disease, said his wife of 29 years, Andrea Mitchell, the chief Washington correspondent and chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News. > “He was a giant of a man who helped shape the U.S. economy for decades under presidents of…