Corporate scandals over the last two decades, followed by the crash of the economy in 2008, have brought about widespread skepticism toward America’s corporate leaders. Almost daily there are calls for new legal and regulatory reforms directed at businesses, especially banks and investment firms. Some corporations have even begun to reassess their own business practices. [...]
For those of us with (just the hint of) a sadistic turn, the square-wheeled rollout of Obamacare—or, as the White House suddenly prefers, “the Affordable Care Act”—is nothing short of schadenfreudetastic. The administration long ago gave up on “glitch,” a term that never approached capturing the problems with the launch of President Obama’s signature legislative [...]
A young man and woman arrive at the office of the town clerk to procure a marriage license. They’re all smiles, until the secretary hands them a document to sign, wherein they read this remarkable sentence: “The State, conceding to the parents the making of their children’s bodies, asserts its primacy in the making of [...]
I admit it. I am not an athlete. I am ham fisted and physically illiterate. In school I was always one of the last chosen for a game of pick up football, and if a teammate was kind enough to throw me a pass I was likely to fumble the ball or run the wrong [...]
In most cases the only effective way we can hope to get a handle on that which plagues our public life is if our representatives choose to either ban the problematic behavior (e.g., smoking in public) or regulate it (e.g., ensuring Wall Street will not again take risks that will lead to taxpayer bailouts)—which is [...]
The Common Mind by Andre Gushurst-Moore A hallmark of the current age is the ease with which it embraces any number of rival moral narratives in the name of “open-mindedness” or “diversity.” Indeed, the thousand and one “isms” that are impossibly espoused serve only to erode further even the very concept of a common culture. [...]
Although he was friends with Groucho Marx, T.S. Eliot is not usually considered a comedian. His appearance was described as “liturgical.” He was buttoned up. So much so that Virginia Woolf once quipped about him, “Tom will be here in his six piece suit.” Nevertheless, Eliot was capable of real buffoonery. Writing ribald verse for [...]
…[W]e can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe there was once something else, that something [...]
Brad Birzer was thinking, the other day, about intellectual refugees from Nazi Germany and other parts of Nazi-controlled Europe during the years leading up to and including World War II. He asked me if I knew Gerhart Niemeyer’s story. I told him that I do, from Gerhart’s son Paul’s loving and very competent biography of [...]
The Oracle of Delphi foretold countless fortunes, futures, prophecies, and mysteries over many centuries and is the same ancient fount of wisdom who declared Socrates to be the wisest man in the world. A great sign above the entrance to the Temple at Delphi exhorts all who enter her sacred halls to “know thyself,” for without [...]
We live in very mean-spirited times. In spite of all the hypocritical cant about “love” and “tolerance” it can be shown that there is little real difference between the superciliousness of “progressivist” snobbery and the most pernicious forms of racism. If, for example, we were to visit a village in a remote corner of Africa [...]
Speaking about The Conservative Mind on the book’s sixtieth anniversary, Gleaves Whitney explains why Russell Kirk chose Edmund Burke as his book’s central figure. Kirk believed that Burke understood the fragility of civilization and knew that free peoples will have both parties of innovation and conservation. How our culture appropriately balances the will of the two will dictate [...]
Two-hundred and forty years ago this spring, Edmund Burke delivered one of his most important as well as one of his most meaningful speeches to Parliament. It is, rhetorically considered, perfect. He delivered it on April 19, 1774, in an attempt to calm down the anger and passions of a Parliament still grappling with the [...]
Lone Survivor, the new film recounting an ill-fated search and rescue attempt in Afghanistan, has a tragic connection with my school, St. John’s College in Annapolis. Lt. Cmdr. Erik S. Kristensen, the Navy SEAL who led the bold mission and who died bravely along with many others in the daring operation, received a master’s degree from [...]