The Editors
Articles by The Editors
The Journey Home
If you had told me, a happy and professionally satisfied D.C. lawyer living on Capitol Hill, just over a year ago, that I would be back someday soon living in…
The Wonder of Liberal Education
Having had a day off last week in honor of the past presidents, I am loathe to disagree with former presidents (in this case, of the American Historical Association). But…
Life Under Compulsion: The Itch
Thee let old men, Thee let young men, Thee let boys in chorus sing; Matrons, virgins, little maidens, With glad voices answering: Let their guileless songs re-echo, And the heart…
Ways to be Wicked
Via Reason, my review of Amy S. Greenberg's A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico: http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/05/americas-war-with-mexico.
Women at War
Women are now cleared for combat positions in the American armed forces, and for all the ladder-climbing that now allows. On January 24th, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the direct…
Life Under Compulsion: The Dehumanities
Imagine a new father looking into the eyes of his child. A wisp of blond hair curls about the scalp. The fingers, wrinkled like those of an old man, curl…
It’s the Rights Culture, not the Gun Culture
As President Obama contemplates the political obstacles looming before the gun control agenda he announced on Wednesday, he might look closer to home for their cause. It is not the…
The Learning and Limits of Libraries
Three articles recently caught my eye, all of which having to do with scholars' fame, only two having to do with their libraries. The bookless one involved a professor of…
Glenn Beck Gives Utopia a Bad Name
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] So Glenn Beck has proposed his grandest scheme yet: the construction of separate planned community, literally built around (in terms of architecture and overall design)…
The Twenty Seven
Marbledale, Ct. I was travelling back from a meeting in the Hudson Valley when the news of the Newtown Rampage reached me. The shell-shocked radio disc jockey tearfully announced the terrible…
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and the Ground on Which Communities Are Built
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The final sentence in Behind the Beautiful Forevers--Katherine Boo's wonderfully written, devastatingly detailed narrative of several fascinating, despairing stories that took place over the period…
Ken Myers Profiled by Andrew Ferguson
Andrew Ferguson has a very nice profile of Ken Myers, editor of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, in the most recent Weekly Standard. The interviews and commentary featured on Myers's…
From Culture to Party Wars?
Among the various postmortem evaluations of the November election, R. R. Reno's at First Things ("The New Secular Moral Majority," December 2012) caught my eye: The Democratic party is very…
Life Under Compulsion: Bad Universality
I had not thought that the tsars of education could possibly have come up with another idea as inhuman or stupid as have been their many innovations in the past…
Of “That Great Furnace, the Heart of Dickens”
A perennial question in this season: which version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol to watch? Somehow I can’t seem to muster much interest in any of them but one. After viewing…
The Culture of Guns? What About the Culture of Narcissism?
It is predictably American for Americans to obsess over an object used to perpetuate a crime, rather than examine the perpetrator and consider the people surrounding the perpetrator. The massacre…
Continuing to Argue Against Abortion
“Yet because the decision will not allow the question to remain silent, and yet sounds an ambiguous note as to how it would be answered in terms of our contemporary…
Do Conservatives Need to Belong to A Minority to Get an Academic Job?
Jonathan Zimmerman thinks the answer is yes (thanks to John Fea): At Columbia University, 650 employees wrote checks for the Obama campaign, while only 21 made donations to Mitt Romney.…
Life Under Compulsion: Curricular Mire
In my last essay, I took issue with the inescapable computer, that costly thing on the student’s desk in “good” schools, inducing the itch for instant “information” at the expense…
Excluding Religion from Public Life is Tricky
Protestant conservatives of the Religious Right variety may be surprised to know that the strongest arguments for undressing the public square (of religious garments) came from Protestants. Whenever Roman Catholics…
Do You Have to be Old to be Conservative?
Most readers know the line (attributed to Winston Churchill, I believe), if you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. And if you are still a liberal at…
The New Domesticity
This is a highly confused article on the turn, particularly among women, to forms of "new domesticity." Its author, Emily Matchar, appears eager to deny that there is anything good to…
Social Science and Human Liberty
At about the same moment I was reading David Brooks's third "Social Science Palooza," which is a summary of some recent, interesting findings in the study of human behavior, I…