[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
As Christmas and the end of 2011 approaches, I find myself thinking gratefully about what Leroy Hershberger has enabled my students and me to learn this year, and what that learning has meant to me.…
Economics & Empire
Devon, PA.… We face only two feasible policies in America’s engagement with the world. We can seek to be a bomb-throwing hegemon until the money, and the credit, and the bodies, run out, and can identify American national interest with our sitting
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has proved to be significant in its appeal – a majority of Americans support the movement, even though it has been less than articulate in delineating its positions. Why is that? I suspect it’s because…
…
Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is appropriate that Robin Rogers begins her informative essay on the state of philanthrocapitalism with a very large number — the 600 billion dollars in charitable
The automobile squared perfectly with a distinctive American ideal of freedom—freedom of mobility.
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
Wichita, KS…
A couple of weeks ago some fine intellectuals, political figures, journalists, and activists associated with this blog gathered together to talk about localism, and specifically how one might discover in our local communities
Alexandria, VA … On Monday night of this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks spoke at Georgetown University at the invitation of the program that I founded and direct, “The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy.” A large
Until then you’ll welcome into your homes the talking heads who, loving an abstraction, spread a pestilential hatred.
Alexandria, VA… September 11, 2001, we are frequently told, is the day that “changed everything.” For the 3,000 people in New York City and Washington D.C. who were killed on that blue-skied day, and for their families, that 9-11 “changed
After reading David Brooks’ “The Rugged Altruists,” which romanticizes the “giving” zeal of contemporary Americans who engage in overseas missions and relief-work, one wonders about the appropriate limits for American internationalism and charity. Many of Brooks’ anecdotes about Americans who experience…
The underpopulated farm and the crowded casino remain for me the enduring emblems of hope and despair, respectively.
Maybe you are the kind of donor who supports nonprofits in your community. Like many Americans, you give or tithe through your church or temple. You support local human-service organizations that provide direct aid to the needy, infirm, and down-and-out.…
The federal courts’ extraordinarily broad interpretation of the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause has long posed a problem for localists — which is to say, for community self-governance. That has never been more true than in the past two decades, when…
Could the United States radically change via another constitutional convention, experience a new civil war, split into multiple confederacies, and/or engage in a massive foreign war in order to preserve its cohesion?[i] According to conventional thought, such possibilities are improbable.…
In “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot famously predicts that Doom will come subtly, rather than dramatically: “This is the way the world ends[,] This is the way the world ends[,] This is the way the world ends[,] Not with a…
But that is not so with computers, for no matter how many doctorates one holds in computer science, at some point the system disappears into a world of magic.
