Considering the rest of the developed world, it is a miracle that the First Amendment continues to reign in the United States. Tracing the precarious history of free speech in the country, legal scholar Eric Heinz writes that shifting bipartisan attitudes are placing it under threat.
Dear Member, Fresh off the digital press, Merion West's second issue has been published and is available by clicking below: ▷ Read COLLECTION II Sincerely, Henri & Erich
Published October 3, 2025
At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, a pair of believers envisioned an investing firm whose goal was not limited to maximizing returns, but to make the world better. Founded before ESG came into vogue on Wall Street, the company manages billions today and shows no signs of slowing down.
Across boardrooms from Bangalore to Delhi and inside Western corporations staffed by an increasing number of Indian employees, caste continues to influence who advances and who does not. Ignoring this reality, writes Indian scholar Disha, makes all other efforts at fostering inclusivity ring hollow.
Tom McDonough argues that Governor JB Pritzker’s recent appeal to “state sovereignty” misreads the Constitution. Revisiting the works of Orestes Brownson, McDonough warns that treating the Constitution as a tool of convenience risks reviving old errors about sovereignty and federal authority.
Education expert Bruno Manno argues that when educators present social and ecological problems as intractable, this can foster hopelessness in students. This school year, he urges, we should teach students that problems can be solved, not merely bemoaned.
Writing from across the Atlantic, Gerfried Ambrosch condemns both the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the disturbing celebrations that followed, ending with a forceful defense of free expression.
Who commands intellectual authority between believers and secularists? Rather than dismissing faith as irrational, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies invite readers to consider whether atheism itself withstands logical scrutiny.
In this, his 57th book, the legendary law professor presents a framework he's been working on since his 20s that grapples with the trade-off between infringing liberty and preventing harm.
Our editor-in-chief argues that reckless driving must be treated as the urgent social ill that it is. Driving is dangerous enough already, and those who wantonly flout traffic safety need to be consistently held accountable.
Europe’s turn from austerity to rearmament recalls an older pattern: economic stagnation broken by military spending. This essay traces the parallels—and the risks—for the European Union’s future.
Mark Vernon, the author of a recent book on William Blake, urges us to rediscover the wisdom contained in the writings and artwork of the great British polymath.
British writer Seamus Flaherty, channeling Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's new book, dissects the Machiavellian approach British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has brought to his political career and now premiership.
Walter E. Block and Alan G. Futerman's book, which was published in 2021, has taken on ever greater import since the October 7th attacks. In this essay, historian Paul Gottfried questions some of the book's assumptions and its use of history.
Law professor Eric Heinze reminds us that for all the rhetoric about free speech, demonstrations and protests often impose on the public costs of millions of dollars.
Once the realm of ivory tower thought experiments, the trolley problem is increasingly relevant in the real world as algorithms replace the human behind the wheel, argues philosopher Jimmy Alfonso Licon.
An unconventional love story, but a love story just the same.
Returning to a night in Omaha that rattled the nation, Matthew Chabin presents another side of an old friend in the middle of the tragedy. An intimate meditation on the fragility of friendship in a black-and-white age, Chabin calls for understanding over condemning one's enemies, including his own.
How does a French filmmaker best ivory-tower experts and global intelligence agencies? In this interview spanning both geopolitics and moral reckoning, Pierre Rehov shares the insights—and warnings—that led him to anticipate Israel’s surprise strikes on Iran in June.
In this essay, Alexander Zubatov traces how the stories that fill the boundless canvas of Western canon are, in essence, reflections of two contrasting Homeric archetypes. Venturing beyond the literary, the motifs offer the frames through which one can interpret existence itself.
In an interview with our editor-in-chief, the senator advocates for the uniquely American ideal of individual agency amid increasingly many citizens looking to Washington, D.C. for answers. Additionally, he shares lessons from the Capitol and thoughts on the President's first 100 days.
As a challenge to conventional advice about rest and recovery, poet Nada Faris explains the importance of working amid suffering for those who derive meaning and inspiration from their craft. Shakespeare, Woolf, and Orwell did some of their best work in times of despair, after all.
Sadhika Pant revisits the 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a book recently targeted for cancellation by certain activists. Pant suggests that Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes represent two dueling approaches to living, and this dichotomy invites nothing short of civilizational questions.
Perhaps there truly is nothing new under the sun. Robert Rich revisits the writings of Friedrich List, whose pragmatic views on economics were eclipsed by classical orthodoxy but, amid today’s debate over free trade and American exceptionalism, prove surprisingly resonant.
Professor Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, an expert on artificial intelligence, provides a four-point framework for thinking about whether or not to employ new AI technologies in day-to-day life.
Jonathan Church, a long-standing critic of the excesses of the critical social justice movement, examines how a recent ruling dismantles the legal double standard that required some Americans to meet a higher burden of proof in discrimination cases.
The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’
David Byrne, the author of a recent biography of the mid-century conservative intellectual James Burnham, traces the thinker's influence on Goldwater, on Reagan, on Musk.
A new book by Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace explores the letters of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, including many previously left unpublished. These letters provide insight into the mind of the French thinker, a man whose ideas influenced revolutions and political thinking the world over.
Johnny Payne questions the idea of manifestos in poetry, preferring his own mantra: “Write poetry first with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind.”
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
Rinzen Widjaja, a writer in Australia, wonders if for the children of the wealthiest Americans, it is almost too hard to fail.
Merion West arts editor Johnny Payne reflects on why Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” endures over the centuries as one of the finest works written in English.
Most know that drug costs are high, but can they also be too low? Paradoxically, increasingly many observers of the generic drugs complex are saying "yes." Tracing the origins of the system that exists today, the authors examine the forces behind the status quo and show what reform may look like.
Joe Weil, a poet, professor, and Catholic, reflects on the death of Pope Francis, what he loved about the man, and what he hopes the late Pope sees differently on the other side of this world.
Originally published in late 2020—a year when many called for a national "moral reckoning"—this personal essay by Alexander Zubatov draws on his family's journey from the Soviet Union to New York in the 1970s to illuminate why America, to him, remains exceptional.
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
Discover Tony D. Senatore’s provocative new dialogue on free speech and moral courage.
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
I want to save California and America from the dangers of artificial intelligence.
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
“With Vice President Vance as President Trump’s heir apparent, it is difficult to envision a restoration of principled conservatism any time soon. Meanwhile, the country’s political class is plagued by general senescence and by kakistocracy among the younger politicians (think Congresswoman Alexandr
“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given t
“However, for me, as a lifelong runner who has logged 10,000 miles on American roads in the past 10 years and who has competed in dozens of races from the 5K to the marathon since 2004, I disagree with Fedorowski. Adding a non-binary category to road racing is misguided and counterproductive.”
“It has published on a range of topics that perhaps seemed controversial to someone at some time (specifically, academics in the early 2020s) but certainly not to the broader culture in 2025.”
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
“British cultural and political life is governed, accordingly, largely by emotion and instinct.”
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
“The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excrucia
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
“Nevertheless, I am often struck by how many great thinkers have also been great walkers.”
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
“What our country needs is a long-term, multi-pronged rediscovery of the true Constitution and a commitment to live by it. The thought of Orestes Brownson can help us in this rediscovery.”
“the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship”
“And so things continue as before, because in a post-historical era, sprinkled with German-Hegelian state worship and a view of oneself as the summit of civilizational development, there is no need to move from the spot one has occupied.”
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
“No, not everyone on the Left supported these tyrannies, yet what progressives cannot escape is that much of the Left lent political legitimacy to regimes that destroyed and damaged tens of millions of lives, leaving festering wounds that still bleed today.”
“It was Christianity that became Europe’s unifying ideology and inspired figures from Charlemagne to Columbus.”
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
