Culture, High & Low 728

The automobile squared perfectly with a distinctive American ideal of freedom—freedom of mobility.

It is a reminder that our own personal winter is coming. When you are daily reminded of your own bones by pains in your joints, seeing a skeleton dangling from…

For those of you who were not able to be in Emmitsburg on Saturday, you missed a wonderful day. The rain stopped sometime in the night and the early morning…

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…

Today we can easily forget how dark things looked in the 1970s and how much people feared that they might be living in the sunset years of our nation and…

During my brief foray into public education, I taught a group of seventh-graders a typical lesson from a standard middle school literature textbook: we read a chapter from Ramsey Ullman’s…

If you must lie, measure it against your own self-interest and make sure it is legal, and if at all possible try not to do it under oath.

A proper remembering requires more than telling the facts or chronicling the plunder, rape, murder in Nanking; it requires that one explain the event.

Our hero, Harry, demonstrates an attitude towards death that very few of us actually hold.

The vacation, far from being a treatment for a serious illness, is instead a symptom of it.

Overall, the key corrolations are clear: functional families are strong and large; strong and large families are function-rich.

(What follows is the text of the remarks that I delivered at the recently concluded I.S.I. Honors Program. The conference was entitled "The Language of Liberty"). Fells Point, Baltimore.  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.

Perhaps the tension will be useful when it comes time to make something of what is. Just be sure you make it in a place called home.

In Bingo-land it is not appropriate to talk about yourself until you have found some shared link. In general it is more acceptable to talk about who you are (your…

(Or, Fix Your Darn Windows)

In this hitherto unpublished 1995 lecture, Wilson Carey McWilliams sought to persuade a conservative audience (at the University of Dallas) for an arguably "conservative" case for government support of "decencies"…

Alexandria, VA In the wake of the "not guilty" finding in the Casey Anthony trial, large numbers of outraged individuals have begun a campaign for the creation of various State…

The habit of questioning, of civil debate, of negotiating, and compromise are the habits necessary for a thriving democracy.

With three children raised and fledged, we managed to avoid their seductive pox and the kids are actually grateful for it. All three of them are engaged in creative professions.…

This lecture by Wilson Carey McWilliams was delivered at St. John's College in New Mexico on April 1, 1995. It is heretofore unpublished. While a number of its specific political…

In this 2000 lecture, Wilson Carey McWilliams prophetically pointed to the deepening of existing trends in higher education toward detachment and mobility. He described his task in this lecture thusly…

Devon, PA. As my latest pair of essays on FPR scrolled across the screen, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was keeping the family legacy alive of undermining the obligations of…