Writers & Poets

The Horror of a World without TAC

Keeping alive a print vehicle for independent, thoughtful conservatism depends on us.

Science, Self-Deification, and Gnosticism in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" provides a springboard for reflecting on the problems of scientism, especially the temptation to self-deification and, what Eric Voegelin terms, modern Gnosticism.

The Loneliness of the Long Dissonant Reader

Or, "Can you hear me in the back? Why don't we all move in a little closer..." My latest column in the absolutely essential...

Happy 75th Birthday, Carl Oglesby!

Look around and you’ll see that the seeds planted by the New Left have not all fallen on hard ground. I think maybe they’re ready to flower.

An Homage to Chesterton

For Chesterton the birds of nature were always singing about the rightness of things and so softly correcting modern man’s unnatural despair of the created order and his egregious confidence that he could create by artifice a more perfect order in deliberate violation of the old one.

Up Against the Wall

No one was barred from the conversation back when there was a conversation. No dispatch ever read, “Wingnut Henry David Thoreau today issued a manifesto from his compound near Walden Pond…”

Print Culture and the Fate of the Literary Quarterly

The general continued to pay for the upkeep of the LSU tiger in an airconditioned cage. The amount of money involved was almost precisely the same as the subsidy for the Southern, then the best quarterly in the country by a large margin.

Books and the Hungry Soul

Beautifully and substantially-made books suggest something that deserve to be pored over at length, just as one lingers with friends after a wonderful meal.

A Tenancy of Will

Your body’s yours, just as this poem is mine: to make, destroy—a tenancy of will, for every citizen and concubine.

DON’T SHOOT THAT MOCKINGBIRD!

Besides, the harshest criticisms of any place come from those who truly love and belong to it.