The problems of what passes for higher education today are many and deep and entrenched. The time for major reform is at hand. This collection of essays, edited by Kevin Roberts, is an important part of the effort to hurry this process along. Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think, ed. Kevin D. [...]
Peter Gammons has given us a series of glimpses into the recent baseball past and a crutch to help us survive what might be a baseball-less future–at least for a while. It’s All About The Players: What I Have Learned About Baseball’s Best, by Peter Gammons (347 pages, Grand Central Publishing, 2026) What might have [...]
Theodore Roosevelt contributed to creating what amounts to a fourth branch of government that now works against presidential power—or at least it works against the presidential power of one of our two major parties. Theodore Roosevelt could be turning over in his grave. And maybe Woodrow Wilson is spinning right along with him. Why? Well, [...]
Popping up all over the country are chapters of the Catholic Land Movement, which is a distributist-inspired and Chesterton-inspired attempt to revive the economic vision of Pope Leo XIII. Grounded in conversion and conviction, such a movement is growing. Is it time—or already past time—to consider something that was once called distributism as an alternative [...]
Put simply and starkly, Michael Anton sees little reason for optimism about America. How is a multi-ethnic society to be governed? The most common method is some form of one-man rule, whether “monarchist, Caesarist or tyrannical.” But America is different. Or is it? Michael Anton, Dispatches From the Late Republic: The Culture, Politics and Prophets [...]
Paul Kingsnorth believes that the Machine Age has replaced the four P's of traditional culture (the past, the people, place, and prayer) with four S's: science, self, sex, and the screen. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, by Paul Kingsnorth. (348 pages, Random House, 2025) Paul Kingsnorth is right about much, and he [...]
What is America? Are we a nation or an idea? A recent essay by one Colin Woodard contends that we must choose one or the other. More than that, Woodard chooses to make his choice very clear, while also claiming to know the choices of President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance. America as a [...]
Charles Murray may well have been both a well-educated agnostic and a happy one, but today he believes that the “inescapable conclusion” is that “a God created a universe that would enable life to exist.” And in his new book, he seeks to nudge secularists along the same route that he has taken to this [...]
None of the pieces in this collection are excerpts from David McCullough's many books. And none are culled from anything that might have been on its way to becoming an autobiography. They are simply essays, talks, and musings offered by David McCullough the writer, the student, the artist, and the reader. History Matters, by David [...]
The original progressives presumed that a permanent federal bureaucracy would be politically neutral. That hasn’t been the case for a very long time. Therefore, real progress today should lead to seriously trimming what is accurately called our administrative state and dramatically increasing the number of political appointees. While the latest round of “no kings” rallies [...]
"You are holding in your hands one of the most important dystopian novels ever written,” claims the introduction to the new edition of Jean Raspail's controversial 1973 novel, "The Camp of the Saints," an alternately brutal and comedic savaging of guilt-ridden Westerners, who allow their civilization to disappear by welcoming mass migration from the Third [...]
Sportswriter Jane Leavy believes that baseball is in trouble, but she also thinks she knows how to fix it. And yet there is a notion that lurks here and there in her new book: Maybe, just maybe, the game is not fixable—at least not fixable in the sense of its ever being restored to its [...]
Clearly, Frank Meyer was a major player in the modern conservative movement in its early days. But the heart of Daniel J. Flynn's new book doesn’t really explain just how it was that its subject somehow “invented” conservatism. The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, by Daniel J. Flynn. (562 [...]
Who would have thought that a teacher might convince a student that living a virtuous life was both a challenge and an adventure? David Hein apparently has done just that in the classroom, and those classroom teachers who read his book might well come to learn from him and agree with him—and do the same [...]