Today America is on its third economic upswing, even as the places I visit have continued to fade away… For 23 years I have been driving country roads, photographing the ruins of rural America for a documentary I call “Lost Americana.” As population decline claims town after town, I have been talking to those who [...]
It might be too early to say, but the present recoil from fake news might prove that we are not quite ready to abandon the values we once thought so completely debunked. Truth might still stand a chance… Over the last few months, a number of publications have been running articles about what may be [...]
When politicians succumb to the temptation of turning policy into spectacle—even if it is good policy—it makes the show more important than the policy… It has become trendy to call everything fake. This is helped by the fact that so many things are fake. The world is awash in “fake news.” So much of what [...]
Where today can we turn not for opinion, but for actual facts and events, names, and dates—unburdened by emotion and vitriol? Over the past year, I—like, I’m sure, most Americans—have found the official news outlets to be more than untrustworthy. When I was in high school, I became a news junky. Being involved in debate [...]
If the mainstream media continue to be deceitful about the travel ban and other presidential orders, Americans who heretofore have sat on the fence in regard to President Trump will start to slip down from that fence and sidle over to him in sympathy. One assumes that to get a job as a journalist a [...]
“The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.” The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation [...]
Never has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule on any other thing than public opinion. In these words, Jose Ortega y Gassett, most famous for a book entitled Revolt of the Masses, affirmed the eternal truth and problem of rule by consent. Ortega y Gassett, a classical liberal theorist from Spain, spent [...]
I recall seeing a political cartoon that contrasted the way the media treated Tim Tebow versus how it treated Jason Collins, the first openly-homosexual NBA player. It depicted Tebow saying: “I’m a Christian,” and the reporter turns his back to him and walks away muttering: “Keep it to yourself.” Next to that picture, Collins is [...]
Last month, I was fortunate enough to once again work at the Kansas City Catholic Homeschool Conference. As I was setting up my table, a couple sat down at the table next to mine and began to set up their table for the conference. We introduced ourselves and ended up chatting throughout the two-day event. [...]
Those of our readers, with the good sense to follow Al-Arabiya News, will not have missed their story from the United Arab Emirates, in which a court granted divorce to a man whose wife was possessed by a djinn (a genie).* His wife refused to have sex with him, and he discussed it patiently. She [...]
Lewis H. Lapham of Hearst Magazine fame is a man on a mission. Recently at an event in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the Hirshhorn Museum, called “Days of Endless Time,” Mr. Lapham plumbed the depths of time in lighthearted, humorous banter with two writers. The conversation gave a peek into the rich literary world of Mr. Lapham’s New York-based magazine, Lapham’s [...]
The scholarly journal Studies in Burke and His Time appeared originally, under the title The Burke Newsletter, in 1959. In 2002, the newly established Edmund Burke Society of America decided to revive the title, which had by then been in abeyance for some years, and, since that time, three issues (2005, 2007, and 2011) have [...]
Please forgive the following rambles. I’m in Louisville, ready to work with the mighty Gary Gregg again today. Last night, I had the great privilege of speaking with a number of his excellent McConnell Fellows for nearly two hours about Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and another ninety minutes on Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. I [...]