It seems that H.L. Mencken always ranged the borderlands of faith—wary, yet vigilant. Did he ever pass beyond? When I was a boy, white-haired Alistair Cooke used to host “Masterpiece Theatre” on PBS. As I write these lines, I hear echoes of the theme music that opened each episode: the Rondeau from Mouret’s “Symphonies and [...]
One really misses something about William F. Buckley Jr. to not grasp that this man was a fighter. Not everyone blessed with logic lacks spirit. Monday marks the centenary of William F. Buckley Jr.’s birth. Those misled by recent mischaracterizations of the National Review co-founder might imagine a French fop’s harpsichord or Gavin MacCleod’s Love [...]
R. Emmett Tyrrell’s short version of American history from the 1960s to the 2020s can essentially be reduced to this: periods of Episodic Chaos followed by periods of Episodic Calm. In his recent book, he asks whether we can finally be free of these alternating historical episodes. How Do We Get Out of Here? by [...]
Which print journals are still worth reading? Herein you will find my favorite ones, in alphabetical order. The scholar and researcher Stanley Kurtz once opined that one can really be a great reader in only one of three categories: books; journals and newspapers; or the internet. I’m not sure if it’s true, though it probably [...]
Walter Lippmann believed that Natural Laws are the principles of right reason and behavior in the good society governed by Western traditions of civility. It is possible to organize a state and conduct a government on quite different principles, but the outcome will not be freedom and the good life. Thus the environment with which [...]
What National Review has always been for is limited government, authentic federalism, limited spending, a strong national defense, a respect for cultural pieties, civility and civil order, religious freedom, the Constitution properly construed, and mostly just leaving people alone, as well an understanding that to be free first you have to be born. William [...]
Though known to posterity as a wit, a controversialist, and a Christian apologist, G.K. Chesterton considered himself primarily to be merely a “jolly journalist” and it was through the writing of essays for newspapers and magazines that he made both his reputation and his living. G.K. Chesterton is known to posterity as a wit, a [...]
Editorializing in news stories, once verboten, has now become de rigueur. Journalism, never perfect at any moment of its history, but full of aspiration to be objective and balanced, has now conceded entirely to Nietzsche’s critique of empiricism: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Many years ago, in an earlier contentious era of American politics, [...]
Today, Theodore Roosevelt prompts us to ask the same question he raised over a century ago in his speech “The Man with the Muck-Rake”: How do we devote our attention to society’s problems without allowing them to devour us? Our survival in the Information Age hinges upon on our ability to address this problem. In [...]
What makes an article, or essay, great? Does it need to challenge us to move in a different direction, or can it also challenge us to move higher up and further in to the truths we already hold? You’ve seen it on a thousand social media posts. “This is a great article!” Sometimes you will [...]
California’s AB-5 law severely limits the type of freelance work that people can do. Several other blue states, including New York and New Jersey, are considering some variation on this unintentionally harmful law. It would be nice if legislators aiming to help workers would recall the adage, “First, do no harm.” Is schadenfreude, the phenomenon [...]
A nation-state as old, and as large in territory, as the United States will experience in its old-age problems we associate with the elderly: loss of memory, preference for the past, reliance on creaky institutions that no longer work, limited income, and questions about the future. Our Constitution has logged 230 years since it was [...]
Rupert Murdoch In August of last year, I published my observations under the header “FoxNews Moving Leftward” about what we can now call the “maturing” of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.[1] Even earlier, on January 27, 2017, I observed that “the octogenarian Rupert Murdoch and sons, Lachlan and James, have achieved a balance of authority [...]
We have all seen the scene at least once, although some of us have savored it perhaps dozens of times. The handsome, dynamic, misunderstood, modernizing young king, with his slender physique, slender beard, and even more slender morals, strutting about the banquet hall knocking the plates and goblets off the table in a drunken frenzy. [...]