One of the most unsung and nearly forgotten cultural critics of the 1980s was director John Hughes. His movies were equal parts perceptive insights into the human condition, mockeries of unearned and undeserved authority, slapstick comedy, and examinations of tight friendships. "We'll never see his like again," said economist Ben Stein, a close friend of [...]
John Lukacs has given us a short, penetrating study of George Kennan, who is forever associated with the Cold War strategy of containment. For all of Kennan’s famed realism, Lukacs shows that there was also a streak of naïveté in some of his views. George Kennan: A Study of Character, by John Lukacs (Yale University Press [...]
It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people, but in a school today the baby submits to a system that is younger than himself. “The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “is…that there is a whole [...]
Her is quite the meticulous and creepily seductive criticism of our techno-orientation toward transhumanism. It is the dystopian film of our time, a haunting glimpse at the near future. The transhumanist theory is that, when you strip away the illusions, we’re all basically operating systems. We’re, as Descartes first explained, conscious machines. A problem, though, is that our bodies [...]
Respect for the notion of tradition comprises a core element within the paleoconservative bag of ideas. As it should. Respect for tradition constitutes one of those attitudes that separates the paleoconservative from both the neoconservative (for whom tradition begins some 200 years ago at most) and many libertarians (for whom the individual is an end in [...]
Christians and Catholics, in particular, often have been on the front lines of battles supporting the rights and dignity of immigrants. From the “no Irish allowed” signs so common on the streets of nineteenth century America to opposition to immigrants from Southern Europe, the arrival of newcomers to this nation has occasioned discomfort and, sadly, [...]
Bill Gates is largely a conventional thinker, but he’s still willing to challenge the conventional wisdom from time to time. In his annual letter, released in January, Bill challenges what he calls “three myths that block progress for the poor.” The third myth he takes on is this: “Helping the Poor Leads to Overpopulation.” As [...]
“Extreme” activities have come into fashion in recent years. Extreme sports, extreme travel, extreme survival expeditions now seem to be a fixture of the cultural landscape. Few know, however, that there is such a thing as extreme liberal education, or that St. John’s College has been practicing it for more than seventy-five years. What is extreme liberal education? [...]
Alexander Hamilton is a controversial figure on the modern Right. Conservatives of a more libertarian vent tend to view Hamilton with suspicion if not outright hostility, viewing him as the American Founder most responsible for popularizing an expansive approach to the Constitution that would eventually lead to the increasing power of the federal government over [...]
You bent to pull your top, your arms so tan. I watched you from the cliff at quarry cove. Your bend of neck revealed, I felt like Pan, his belly in the brush, and then you dove. Your pointed feet were last to disappear. Arising with a stroke, you blew out air, driving through deepest [...]
The Rise of Matriarchy and Polygamy Believers in the inevitability of progress point to the sexual revolution and feminism as examples of “liberation.” At last women are freed from the drudgery of domestic life and they are able to assert their “reproductive freedom.” At last they are free to embark on meaningful and lucrative careers [...]
In the historical and often hysterical debate surrounding the legal definition of marriage, there is one crucial class of people whose voice has not been heard and whose fate and future will be affected profoundly by the radical changes being proposed and initiated. It seems that the whole marriage debate has been concerned with the [...]
One reason to have a liberal education—one that’s usually neglected by all those experts these days who are saying that the value of an education is measured by the money you earn after graduation—is that it’s indispensable for understanding the political teachings of the better summer blockbuster movies, such as the very thoughtful new Superman [...]
by Timothy Gordon and Stephen Jonathan Rummelsburg Mr. Stephen Klugewicz and Mr. Kevin Brady surprised us in their Imaginative Conservative article last week by affixing the epithet “straw men” to arguments against the Common Core’s increasingly centralized approach to education. Precisely speaking, arguments for or against the Common Core doubtless employ at least a few [...]