The Editors
Articles by The Editors
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…
The Pickup Truck and the Tommy Gun
During the Republican primary, Newt Gingrich joked that “you can’t put a gun rack on [Chevy] Volt.” Newt was, of course, trying to identify himself with a rural culture while…
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…
Is America Too Big?
Is the United States dysfunctionally large, and thus destined to go the way of the giant radioactive ants once seen in old sci-fi movies? That’s the question raised by this video…
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…
Conservative Wisdom from an Original Radical
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Last Friday, Tom Hayden, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society, principal author of 1962's Port Huron Statement (or, if you Big Lebowski fans…
God and Country
The splendid university where I’ve been privileged to spend the past semester proudly proclaims its commitment to “God, Country, Notre Dame” and means what it says. If not identical, God’s…
Benedict XVI – Porcher
From an address calling for a renewal of agricultural work by Pope Benedict in November, 2010: "To this end, it is essential to cultivate and spread a clear ethic that…
Why Isn’t Romania Rich?
An address to the Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, June 22, 2012 It is puzzling to note that somewhere between 4 million and 8 million Romanians have left the country.…
Still on the Line
In which I attend a Glen Campbell concert. As a Christmas bonus, two tunes from the displaced Arkansan's haunting valedictory album: here and here.
Fleeing the Fearful Loneliness of Thought: Our Post-rational Age
Berwyn, PA. In the first weeks of FPR, when we authors dared commit to writing one essay a week, as if we could all be either as drunk or logorheic…
Life Under Compulsion: Human-Scale Tools and the Slavish Education State
When he was governor of Maine, Angus King made sure that there was a computer on the desk of every middle-school child in the state. As I write these words,…
On ‘The Fall’ and That Obama Video
Yes, yes. I know the election is over and, as a third-party voter myself, I don’t believe I’ll smell like sour grapes here regarding the results, but still there’s something…
