Legacy

I want to save California and America from the dangers of artificial intelligence.

“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.”

“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 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

“Nevertheless, I am often struck by how many great thinkers have also been great walkers.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was born in the 1990s, into one of the countless middle-class Indian families that were sprouting like saplings after the rains, in the wake of the 1991 economic reforms. India was shaking off the dust of its socialist decades and finding its footing in a world suddenly wider and freer.”

“[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premis

“However, if a single mother wants a faster track to employment and signs up for a six-month ‘micro-pathway’ at a local community college to become, for example, a junior data analyst or fiber optics specialist, she will likely have to pay out of pocket.”

“As geography is transcended, the feverish antipathy between ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ stands to be sublated…in that, from the standpoint of cyber-space, ‘somewhere’ already means ‘anywhere’.”

“We should think about health inequity not as differences in outcomes across categories of individuals but as structural injustice that harms the health of everyone.”

“[Elise] Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term ‘ethnopoetics,’ taking it outside the boundaries of ‘traditional societies,’ ‘the informant,’ and the outsider who goes in to record ‘pre-literate narratives.’”

“Engagement is inseparable from hope and motivation. The top quartile of students most engaged in school are more than four times as likely as the least-engaged students to believe they have a great future ahead of them.”

“However, it seems unlikely that this is because neoconservatism inherently favors open borders, as some critics have suggested. A more probable reason is neoconservatism’s penchant for compromise, pragmatism, and moderation.”

“Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined…”

“Five years later, Orwell published an essay called ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War,’ in which he states, ‘War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.’”

“The deregulation of air travel and other sectors of the economy in the 1970s was (and continues to be), in my view, a profound mistake. While controversial, I assure you that this contrarian take is not (entirely) a product of big-government sentimentalism from a crabby online socialist.”

“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”

“Vice President Harris’s phrase could be described as the animating principle behind the whole modern project, as well as much of what we think of as progress: The more we unburden ourselves from nature and history, the more human ideas can determine what can be.”

“If a stranger comes around, if he’s wise, he will keep to the road and announce his business soon, clearly and loudly, then you’ll see what’s what. You’re not against him, but you’re not automatically for him.”

“In her exquisitely physical Rodeo, Sunni Brown Wilkinson takes her place among those superb modernists, early and late and post, who recognize the combination of mutability and continuity across poetic epochs that is a key to lyric’s continuing strength and relevance…”

“This mainstream acceptance raises a key question: If vitrification can preserve embryos and organs like kidneys, why wouldn’t similar principles apply to brain preservation of cryonics?”

“Recently, however, James Lindsay has sparked a contentious debate on this topic by disparaging postliberals as ‘woke right.’ We will examine [Alasdair] MacIntyre in the context of this vibrant debate.”

“To succumb to pressure to suppress or disguise his true beliefs would have been, for Spinoza, a concession equivalent to defeatist self-abnegation.”

“It should be noted, however, that President Carter was not only the Great Humanitarian. He was also the Great Deregulator.”

“Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt.”

“Collegiality may grease the wheels of society, but when does it become dysfunctional or oppressive? Or, to raise another question, what are the advantages of rudeness?”

“Of course, the question of whether healthcare should be socialized is only a small piece of my general disagreement with [Walter] Block on political economy. Still, it is a vivid enough example to stand in for all the bigger questions.”

“Similarly distinct from the regular life-world is the world of academic theory, in which, as in the fantasy world, theoretical constructs are often divorced from any dependency on practical outcomes.”

“As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said on the White House lawn in 1993 during the Oslo Accords, the progenitor initiative of what is required exactly now: ‘Enough of blood and tears. Enough.”

“As for most poets, [Valerie] Witte’s writing is intensely personal, whatever form it may take. No ‘experimental’ poet could be more candid and direct about her intention of ‘examining in a new way’ matters close to her heart.”

“Social media and online articles about these incidents boast ten or even 20 comments praising the vigilante for each one condemning the act of violence.”

“According to that tried and true statement, ‘wealthier is healthier.’ Free enterprise leads to greater wealth and, thus, to greater health and longevity, ceteris paribus.”

“Just as [Greg] Dember’s generation inherited modernism and felt a need to rebel, today’s younger generations have inherited postmodernism and no doubt feel the same urge to keep the sense of cultural evolution progressing.”

“It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials.”

“Capitalism has done much to develop the economic machinery of the modern world to the point where all of this is possible. But it is long since time to move past the capitalist phase of our history and institute something better.”

“The economic situation during the Biden administration eroded and degraded the average American’s ability to participate in the life of the nation as an economically self-sufficient citizen.”

“Further examples abound, but suffice to say, at least as far as these prominent modern thinkers were concerned, epicureanism for the masses does seem to denote something quite real.”

“The United States’ British roots also have value because they provide a link to a history older than any homegrown alternative the United States possesses.”

“At the end of the summer, I got a bit too close to a Russian artillery round, a mistake that earned me a week in Kharkiv Regional Hospital. When the doctors cleared me, I walked home.”

“As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”

“These are not new principles. They defined the Republican Party for most of its history, a party that had always included a progressive element.”

“Charles Krauthammer used to pride himself on not going to cocktail parties, instead preferring to be at home with his wife quietly reading, writing, doing whatever. And he was probably better for it.”

“And as she lay on her death bed, as she must have felt a cancerous tumor slowly taking her life, she would also have looked around her and seen the stern and damaged but also joyous legacy she would leave behind.”

“If I have become something of an expert reader of poems, it is in part because long ago, I learned to linger on the surface of things, rather than push past their specifics in order to arrive quickly at instant profundity.”

“Hard as they tried to suck us through the black hole leading to their alternative-facts universe, inundating us in a steady stream of misinformation even as they, again ironically, accused us of peddling misinformation, we resisted.”

“The tone of After Image is simultaneously calm and feverish, as the bereaved one moves along a spectrum from numb to utterly passionate, up and down, yet never hysterical, never heaping ashes on her head.”

A Merion West contributing writer and editor respectively make the case for each candidate for President of the United States.

“Why, in fact, do we feel compelled to ask if capitalism is failing? Why do we wonder if capitalism is moral? Why do 57% of respondents in an Edelman Trust Barometer survey believe that ‘capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world?’”

“Comfort me with ginseng—with sacraments/of a youthful wine-flushed god,/naked and beautiful, chanting a lecher’s lament.”

“This is not the first time libertarians have disagreed with one another.”

“[Anne-Marie] Turza shows dramatic flair for summoning our attention, that of a town crier or carnival barker who was handed a surprise announcement at the last possible minute, and now must sell its premise before a skeptical gathered audience with all the bravado she can muster.”

“The author of this essay is the proud owner of 25 books, poetry collections, and short story anthologies written by the man widely recognized as the godfather of the literary movement known as ‘dirty realism.’”

“Admirably, Dawkins continually made it clear that his objective was to promote a clear understanding of the world as discovered through the scientific method, and if scientific facts caused offense with anyone, then so be it.”

“Citizens wore red and white, the colors of the Pahonia, the traditional flag of Belarus, a symbol made illegal in 1995 shortly after President Aliaksandr Lukashenka came to power.”

“Finally, postmodernism influenced numerous intellectual variants that today are popular public philosophies, and we need to understand the intellectual foundations of such systems of thought if we want to evaluate them properly.”

“Clearly, industrial policy—the deliberate and coordinated governmental support of industries—is coming back, even if it is not clear yet where it will end up.”

“And, relatedly, one also begins to wonder if there are certain ways of phrasing the key points that have already been formulated, capture them perfectly, and, thus, cannot really be improved upon.”

“It becomes apparent that, while not a Marxist himself, Moyn regrets Marxism’s arguable descent into irrelevance, if only because its extended dialogue with liberalism enriched the latter while spotlighting liberal failings and hypocrisies.”

“What stands out in Nakanishi is that she possesses an acute awareness of the root poetic traditions of her native islands and brings them forward with respect while also being influenced, as she herself professes, by poets such as Californian Gary Snyder—whose verse, like hers, is thoroughly immers

“For example, how many retirees can relate to Jack Nicholson’s professional exile in About Schmidt, a film about a man trying to find purpose after a career as an actuary, when the title character returns to the office one day in a pathetic last-ditch effort to show he is still relevant?”

“Perhaps it is because of my own bias toward [Darryl Cooper as a friend, but the responsibility for such imprecise talk is something I place on [Tucker] Carlson, not on his interview subject.”

“It is just Springsteen and his sparse vocals seeming to sing out into the empty expanse of the American West and its sprawling landscapes where hope—at least until the final track—is nowhere to be found. One can feel it was recorded in winter.”

“Chancellor’s Scholz’s Germany-Kenya deal fails to address these core issues, and with Kenyan skilled workers favoring English-speaking countries, it may not even alleviate Germany’s skilled labor shortage. Nevertheless, it represents a step in the right direction, as it has German interests at hear

“Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.”

“Bringing this back to the United States: While we need to address our current housing crisis, the goal should not be to build, build, build anywhere at any cost.”

“[Amy] Beeder’s nimble adaptiveness and ability to key her lexicon to a wily set of speakers and dramatic personae in And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey are what make this rare book command attention.”

“We never relied only on advertising. I think one of the keys to our success is we had a very good and robust mixed revenue model. And that has [helped] us over a long period of time.”

“Utopians often produce evil because their movement’s aspirations become paramount—that is, more important than avoiding acts ‘traditionally perceived as immoral.’ If enough people follow Istvan on the transhuman roller coaster, people could eventually get hurt.”

“Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retre

“He was flanked by fields of dead sunflowers that could not be harvested because of the renewed Russian offensive.”

“It is precisely because we all break our rules that we enjoy this story about this man who never breaks his rules. The knight in shining armor, or in this case the Dark Knight, is the hope that there is someone who can remain good no matter what.”

“We need more visionaries and integrated fields…because just as the human body is a complex interplay of atomic, molecular, cellular, and systemic processes, so too must be our approach to increasing healthy lifespan.”

“The change with After Virtue, however, is that in an important sense [MacIntyre] turns against modernity as a whole. He argues that the move to modernity involves the destruction of morality—that in modernity we no longer know what we’re talking about when we deploy moral language.”

“But enhancing the experience of children with incarcerated parents does not require a wholesale restructuring of prisons. Most parents in prison desperately want more contact with their kids, hoping to break the destructive cycles they have been caught in.”

“Once the speaker’s psyche and voice are introduced via questions, the photo in a sense begins to dissolve, becoming secondary, important, vital in its own right, but not ultimately defining. Thus the fecund faithlessness of poetry.”

“Although [Zoltan] Istvan’s general pessimism is understandable, the Senescence Inference takes the pessimism too far for a number of reasons.”

“Political violence, particularly against minorities, has no place in a democracy. However, neglecting the undeniable social and cultural repercussions of mass immigration is a grave mistake that only serves to empower the hard right.”

“This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all.”

“Sadly, biological humans are likely to be mortal for centuries more unless a dramatic increase in both resources and life extension scientists is marshaled.”

“Aside from the hazard of China or Iran adding to the number of ongoing wars, the currently slow attrition strategy is only working against President Putin because he is trapped.”

“Given the depth and severity of the divisions displayed in Sweat, we are led to wonder if healing is even possible. But as a ‘doctor of American democracy,’ [Lynn] Nottage not only offers troubling diagnoses of our diseases but also prescribes remedies.”

“It is, I believe, more than anything else, the undeniable reality of technological progress that lulls us into accepting the more general—and plainly false—proposition that things will just keep on improving in every respect.”

“The combination of dread and cheer these reveries bring about could accurately be called the optimist’s nightmare. The poet-speaker holds compassion as the stalk of a dandelion holds juice, hidden yet keeping the flower active and aloft through sheer tensile strength.”

“In short, I am in love with the story of Tim and John. It has enchanted and devastated me for years now, which is why I will use their first names.“

“In this instance, should those who believe in the rights of women sit down with those who do not, potentially risking legitimizing groups like the Taliban, in the hope that through dialogue they can influence them?”

“Prime Minister Starmer’s father wanted his children to lead ‘useful lives’ and Starmer undoubtedly succeeded in that—two, three, four times over. Yet it is unclear, as yet, just how useful he will be as Labour Prime Minister.”

“By constantly calling President Trump an existential threat to democracy and comparing him so often to Hitler, many in the press need to be held accountable for demonizing his millions of voters and tilling the fertile soil that produced Crooks and others like him, yet to surface.”

“While I was always a philosopher, I was originally a fairly apolitical one, and it was my first year in France that awoke the political part of my being, for I saw all around me where socialism, oikophobia, and multiculturalism were leading.”

“While it might be intellectually fascinating to dig into the Marxist or postmodern roots of wokeness, Bowles’s book is a welcome reminder that sometimes things are simply crazy on their face. And maybe all that is required to defeat the crazy is to point it out.”

“Sharif’s style throughout Customs is neither bland nor baroque. It has the directness of what one overhears while waiting in line to cross on foot an international border or passing through immigration at an airport. It is a stylization of how people talk in such circumstances.”

“To kick him or them out of the country would indeed be to violate the non-aggression principle (NAP) of this strict version of libertarianism. But I do not always write from this point of view. Sometimes, often in my writings on Israel, I do so from the perspective of classical liberalism…”

“Prime Minister Chamberlain’s premature death in 1940 and his transformation into a cautionary tale has meant that he was not available to remind his successors that appeasement was just one-facet of a multi-dimensional diplomatic strategy.”

“For Herbert Marcuse, German philosopher and notorious member of the Frankfurt School, Marx did us a service in trying to expose capitalism as a historically-contingent mode of production based on reified social relations that do not facilitate—in fact, impede—the harvesting of reason as the path to

“But with that said, what has always bothered me about the story told in ‘Galveston’ is that there seems to be so much of life left unruminated over, a fact remediated only slightly by the mention of the seascape at the end of the song (and ‘the sea waves crashing’ in the Campbell version).”

“But Heidegger and Peterson differ when it comes to the origin of our stories, the meaning of nihilism, and the limits to the stories we can tell. To begin, it is useful to explore the question of the origins of our stories. In both Peterson and Heidegger, there is talk of something coming from noth

“Sigo is a poet of utter seriousness, one who feels strongly about justice, the revindication of Native American identity, the calling out of cruelty and neglect, and many other pressing social matters. But he comes at the task with a meditative indirection, insisting on approaching these realities

“Instead of a ‘police operation’ to capture the former colony, Russia got a full-scale protracted war for which it was simply not prepared.”

“It may sound naïve in a time of intense political polarization, but in It’s Debatable I make a case for more humility and a bit of hubris. We need to be willing to argue with passion for our political positions but at the same time remember our limitations.”

“And it is all held together in an irrepressible delight in language and what happens when language and imagination are unleashed and told to have a good time.”

“The democratic form of government is persistently incompetent at preparing for its own defense, despite fair warnings.”

“For far too long, their concerns were ignored by center and left-wing parties, and so they turned elsewhere.”

“It is not particularly interesting that I disagree with Block’s argument. I am a bleeding-heart left-winger who thinks every human being has a right to healthcare, housing, education, and much more…The interesting part is that [his arguments] fly in the face of the values he cares about.”

“Here reposes the reverie-inducing freedom of Rilke and Proust, where you get to say ‘dreaming’ twice, or a thousand times, and even ‘et cetera’ twice, in case you forgot to fill in the blank with your own lyrical, rapture-adjacent images the first time.”

“There is a strong positive relationship between living under the benefits of a government and human flourishing. Those without its protection must suffer, at the very least, compared to those who are fortunate in this regard.”

“As mentioned, comparisons with other life-forms are often useful for understanding our human existence. Accordingly, I have derived the word ‘Aprinism’ from the Latin ‘aprinus,’ meaning ‘boar-like.’”

“Anticipating what a Russian nuclear attack would look like is an important first step in fashioning an appropriate response.”

“Show trials, we had thought, were totalitarian relics, a blunt tool wielded by dictators like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in order to show people, quite literally, what would happen to those who dared to defy the regime. And here it was, happening in 2024, in America.”

“For me, though, there is one Prine song I find the most philosophical, though many of his songs do indeed have that bent…The song is  ‘Fish and Whistle,’ the first track on his 1978 album Bruised Orange…”

“For [Patrick] Deneen, the most nefarious influence in the history of liberal political thought is John Stuart Mill, son of Enlightenment radical James Mill, godson of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and the author of the canonical 1859 liberal text, On Liberty.”

“Although the project to end death is clearly important to Istvan, his forthcoming biography, ‘Transhuman Citizen: Zoltan Istvan’s Hunt for Immortality’ by Ben Murnane, reveals that he has arguably lived his life in response to a related but slightly different question…”

“Although pithy and pugnacious, the slogan is wrong. The moment parents drop a child off at the schoolhouse door, they entrust the school to take over some of their parenting responsibilities.”

“In invoking (and sometimes tweaking) cherished predecessors, this gently impious collection also helps refurbish form.”

“Inevitably, at the end of the ‘myth and disinformation train’ are doctors and nurses cleaning up the mess in the emergency room. There is a potion or snake oil for every ailment, from skincare to curing baldness…”

“And yet, today, we continue to engage in various forms of commodifying the human person, even if they are less visibly brutal and bloody.”

“Henry David Thoreau, writing in 1854, remarked: ‘I never received more than one or two letters in my life…that were worth the postage.’ What would he make of the modern email inbox?”

“Obviously elections are political in terms of who wins and loses, but the process should not be political.”

“The Handover is, at bottom, a plea for liberal democratic states to discipline, if not disempower, the sociopaths and psychopaths who currently have control of the technologies and resources which are changing us and our environment and promise to change both ourselves and the planet we inhabit mor

“Holding myself to this standard, I am comfortable in saying that in each and every one of those scenarios, my view would be unchanged: The protests, all the university protests, must be stopped.”

“The ‘free’ in ‘free verse’ was never meant as a free pass, an anything goes, for to succumb to it does, in fact, leave us standing in a well-intentioned mush.”

“However, my impression is that there is something more fundamentally toxic about Stoicism. In line with [Will] Durant’s assessment, its dominant theme seems to be retreat: retreat from unpleasant emotion into indifference (despite protestations to the contrary)…”

“New populations moving into a country creates ready-made client groups to which the managerial state can administer, gaining new voting blocs, which continue to vote for the party of the managerial state.”

“In Carlin’s time, it was edgy and cool to push back against the prudish ideas about obscenity, so playing with the boundaries of the metanarrative was practically encouraged (at least from audiences). Today, quite the opposite.”

“That is, virtuous striving now is something that seeks to turn our social paradigm on its head.“

“Meanwhile, the death toll rises. John told me he was 44—the same age as me—when we first met. That is just under the average age of death for homeless men in Britain. This is more than 30 years shorter than the country’s average male life expectancy.”

“Despite all of this, [Robert D.] Kaplan’s analysis of the greater Middle East should not be ignored. His travels throughout this vast region across the decades give him insights into its diverse challenges that few Americans possess.”

“But I am not interested in chiding Bronze Age Pervert—as other publications, such as National Review, have done—for his use of dehumanization. Instead, I want to offer a full-throated defense of these nasty bugmen.”

“It is hard to say whether this philosophy would have had any adherents other than Kerouac, but it would have represented something new and uplifting—a counterculture to the counterculture.”

“The lines, like long, rolling ocean waves on a cold Baltic sea, create their own reasons, their own rhythm, their own understanding. Anaphora is used, as Whitman did, to summon us to the great historical pageant of life, of happenings beyond our immediate knowledge.”

“In all other religions, you have people who become atheists. Only in Christianity, God himself goes through this experience.”

“Seventy years of an educational ideology steeped in ‘openness’ has wreaked havoc on the United States, and what we see at Columbia University (and at other American universities) is clear proof of that.”

“The debate over whether to go green is not a debate over whether to incur costs. It is a debate over which set of costs to incur, and people’s willingness to bear tangible burdens to achieve goals supported by affluent, educated progressives is limited.”

“It seems, then, that religious practice is beneficial but unpalatable to many highly analytical people because they deem religious doctrines unpersuasive. The question therefore arises how one can make it palatable to them.”

“Lest I should have appeared overly critical, allow me to restate that even in this, her analysis is exceptional and that overall, George Orwell and Russia is a uniquely penetrating study of Eric Blair’s life and legacy.”

“How does such an advanced nation and forward-looking profession embrace ‘medicalized mass murder’ and a philosophy calling for the ‘annihilation of life unworthy of living’? How did those who pledged to follow ‘the Hippocratic tradition of healers,’ they ask, ‘become killers’?”

“There is such a thing as progress. I am no Pollyanna, and human nature doesn’t change much, but there’s undoubtedly progress.”

“Whether [Jenny] Xie’s volume was long in the making or came out in a fiery burst (maybe both, by parts?), it is a work of substance, worthy of its current high reputation.”

“The world is in flux. November’s elections in the United States will speed up the pace of change. There is a danger that politicians across the West are positioning themselves to govern a world that will no longer exist by the time they come to power.”

“In other words, now that I have become an atheist, I feel free to appreciate and even dabble in various religions. To put this in terms of Waits Paradox: Once one has quit religion, he is free to be religious.”

“Any serious government would, therefore, develop and implement immigration policy with the utmost care. Instead, our governments are experimenting with unprecedented peacetime increases in immigration that further expand ethnic and cultural diversity.”

“Watching this quasi-religious mentality migrate leftward and displace more rational, humanistic values has been painful.”

“Barba-Kay’s central claim is that digital technology is categorically different from prior technologies. It is not just a matter of degree but, rather, a matter of kind.”

“Edgar Kunz, the author of Tap Out and Fixer, does not refer to himself specifically as blue collar, proletarian, or working class. Well-meaning others, such as mentor Edward Hirsch, do so, referring to Tap Out as ‘gutsy, tough-minded, working-class poems of memory and initiation.’”

“Given that the Middle East used to be far more ‘Western’ and even ‘European’ than it is now, there is no cultural disconnect between ‘Western’ and ‘Middle Eastern’ Jews. Jews can be both at once.”

“Like most members of Generation X, I had never used TikTok, but when the political push to ban it intensified in 2023, I pulled out an old smartphone and installed TikTok to see what the fuss was all about.”

“As a result, an air of fear hangs over society, regardless of the fact that the likelihood of falling victim to such an attack is very low indeed. But this is how terror works.”

“Paradoxically, as the amount of online content available for consumption increases, conversations with as interesting a dynamic range as the one between Peterson and Destiny seem fewer and farther between.”

“Aaron Bushnell was not a hero or a martyr akin to the self-immolators of anti-imperial conflicts past; he was likely a mentally ill, terminally online man in his mid-20s who was in a lot of pain that he transposed onto a conflict halfway around the world that in no way personally affected him.”

“The video games also adapted to my inputs and choices in real time, which meant they could capture my strengths and weaknesses, a fuller view of my aptitude than just a number from how many multiple choice questions I got right.”

“The monthly encounters under President Biden have been like nothing else seen in American history. There are estimates that, in 2023, there were more illegal alien encounters per month than babies born to American mothers.”

“Modern liberalism, equally, cannot go on as it is at the moment, veering toward destruction, becoming ever more decrepit and ineffectual, incapable of meeting the challenges—domestic, geopolitical, planetary—of the 21st century.”

“According to the most recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 24% of eighth and 12th graders are ‘proficient’ in writing.”

“Whatever one may say about the People’s Republic of China today, it once offered the model of the poet-emperor, as well as poets employed in political life, wedding governance to lyric spirit.”

“A transparency mandate passed by Congress can avoid the controversial and difficult work of legally defining the terminology and specific guardrails for online safety and viewpoint neutrality.”

“Scientific progress has the potential to be more salutory than legal regulation. To return to Odin’s advice in the Hávamál once more, the power of the human mind is mankind’s most reliable ally.”

“People have told me that this approach is a kind of hope in itself, that I have found hope in the way I abandoned hope. At that point, the words we choose do not matter much. What does matter is getting out of bed in the morning and finding work worth doing.”

“The History of the Peloponnesian War teaches that victory in such a war comes at enormous cost to both sides, so much so it can blur the distinction between victor and loser: everyone loses. This is the same lesson the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza impart.”

“By that token, perhaps Bianca Stone is just the poet for our times. Her verses wrestle with a dirty angel, one that bites and kicks. There is no snow-white falcon in her pages. But she does not quit.”

“Yes, as you mentioned, one of the most interesting findings of Lament for a Nation, which came out in 1965—it’s Grant’s most famous book—is that in Grant’s view, there’s really no such thing as American conservatism.”

“Although these no doubt play a role, even a cursory glance at recent election results (not to mention those of the past) makes clear that variables beyond the control of the candidate are often determinative, as well as that the best man does not necessarily win.”

“No doubt [Araya] Baker’s experience is legitimate, and, of course, it is true that state surveillance is a very serious problem, but paranoid delusions are real, too.”

“These claims put forward by critical social justice-oriented scholars and educationists all lead to the same conclusion: educational justice for black and OC students begins with schools or classrooms segregated by race and ethnicity.”

“Rufo’s ‘New Right Activism’ is not the prescription of one who, following Socrates, seeks to be virtuous, but rather one who, following Faust, sacrifices his soul to achieve victory.”

“The Dream Apartment is no Barbie’s Dream House. It is rather an abode of opaque and backlit, sometimes hard-edged reverie.”

“For example, with a container of yogurt, I know its price, calories, calcium content, and vitamin content. But if I need a hip replacement, I have no data to judge the quality of the physician, hospital, or other sites where the surgery might be performed.”

“[My book seeks to] disrupt science in the sense that it gets us away from the myth that doing more physics and chemistry will be the answer to understanding the living and, in particular, the human being.”

“One of the really significant differences in terms of how young people are being raised today and their formative and teens years and previous generations is how slowly they’re reaching major milestones, such as getting married [and] owning a home, the sort of signs of adulthood…”

“Is there anyone who can give a clear definition of Leftist or Rightist doctrine with which even half of those who consider themselves to be on the Left or the Right would agree? I am inclined to doubt it…”

“While allies should provide Ukraine with the resources needed to push as far toward the Russian border as possible, they should also start to think about post-war justice. Resolving the war will involve more than just agreeing to where lines are drawn on a map.”

“Civilizational states such as Russia and China have a cohort of national and cultural values that are far more deeply enshrined (like them or loathe them) than those of the West.”

“It is true that one of the most important rules in politics is that ‘You can’t lose your base,’ but it is also true that in order to win competitive elections, broadening one’s base is essential, and Ambassador Haley might be able to accomplish that.”

“Just as wokeness has eroded traditional liberal values like free speech, freedom of thought, merit, and individualism at an institutional level, it has also eroded traditional Christian doctrine within churches, seminaries, and Christian publications.”

“The fact is that effective communication is hard. Clear writing is hard. For the typical undergraduate—and no doubt the typical academic scholar or scientist—it is easier to string together vague buzzwords in meandering sentences than it is to say something clearly and concisely.”

“However, outside of the contemporary United States and United Kingdom, a look at the composition of certain right-of-center political movements casts doubt on the reflexive association many hold between young people and voting for the Left.”

“Any dictatorship (and Hamas is one, of the Islamic theocratic variety) is first and foremost at war with the civilian population it controls, and then against other surrounding countries, only second.”

“So you see why people are not satisfied: I don’t propose simple solutions. In my old age, I’m returning from Marx to Hegel.”

“When the most influential psychological association in the world wants to replace an ethic of care for all individuals with a new woke normativity that is gaslighting the next generation of psychologists, their patients, and the public, it should lose all credibility.”

“I have written previously that much of this ‘neoliberal’ nightmare is a myth, not because the world is without problems, but because the problems of the world are much too multifaceted, internally complex, and situationally unique for each problem to regarded as just another mutation of an invincib

“One might notice that unlike in the 1990s, apart from a few occasional flare-ups, the struggle is no longer primarily between Xhosa and Zulu, or any African ethnicity for that matter. A crusade against whiteness had united black South Africans who would otherwise have been fighting among themselves

“The reason, as we will shortly see, that it is fair to characterize systemic racism as a nutty and sweeping conspiracy theory is that racism is, again and again, simply assumed to be the universal, underlying, unitary cause of multifarious phenomena for which other, more parsimonious, accurate, and

“Refusing to take the path of least resistance when it comes to his career, Morrissey is the antithesis of the cookie-cutter ‘artists’ favored and propped up by the modern music industry.”

“Although it might not have been glamorous, my time in the military helped me through challenges that currently burden many young Americans.”

“Although the Biden administration and his State Department are rightfully quick to denounce the persecution of Navalny and how Russia conducts its elections, there are many parallels between the Navalny saga and what is happening in the United States as we approach the 2024 United States presidenti

“The question of Taiwan is never far from the Chinese President’s thoughts, and nor should it be far from ours. The fortunes of the world rest on that island. No conflict in Eastern Europe or the Middle East is as likely to spiral into a global war.”

“The attempted insurrection by President Trump and his supporters had failed. But make no mistake: The violent events of January 6th were the direct result of a deliberate months-long campaign by President Trump to overturn illegally an election that he did not win.”

“What is certain, however, is that part two of this degradation will occur in the not too distant future, and part three some time after that, if this advice of this New York Times columnist is followed.”

“If the recovery effort is not expanded to involve all the resources that every community has to offer, our young people, especially the most vulnerable, face a diminished future.”

“The cultural and theological division between Islam and the West is real, and these differences in religious philosophies play themselves out in a very concrete way in the modern world, just as they have in the past and will continue to do in the future.”

“If Chairman Wu were in power when Henry Ford was ruining the blacksmith, horse training and saddle making industries, she would have taxed the latter and subsidized the former. How about when computers took out the typewriter, carbon paper, and correction fluid (Wite-Out) industries?”

“The university protest movement largely took shape at the same time when our society’s disproportionate valorization of youth and youthful opinion began in the 1960s, when our whole nation began to come apart at the seams, an unraveling that, despite brief periods of rollback, has continued apace t

“I said a silent prayer, asking for the strength to get through another day of being incarcerated, and climbed down from my steel bunk, ready to navigate the gossip, fighting, and ordinary drama that come with prison life.”

“Hamas wants to maximize the death of its civilian population. The purpose is to get the international community, the United Nations, the United States, other governments around the world, to condemn Israel, to vilify Israel, to delegitimize Israel, and undermine the Jewish state in that way.”

“However, there was one man who positioned himself very early on as an opponent to this growing Jewish presence in his homeland. This man was Haj Amin al-Husseini, who, in 1921, became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.”

“The feminists have deserted Jewish women. And it wasn’t just Jewish women. There were Arab Muslim women, and there were Thai Buddhist women. No doubt many Christian women or some Christian women who were also raped, murdered, and kidnapped.”

“When privileging science and math in the curriculum at the expense of the humanities, education sacrifices what is most essential: the important civic function of the humanities. As a result, we produce ‘a nation of employees, not citizens.’”

“Musk still seems to have his wits about him when managing his other companies, when speaking on longform podcasts, or when staying conveniently on message with regard to China. So what is it about X that is specifically causing Musk to lose his composure and his business sense?”

“In short, we have dogma, and from dogma, cognitive errors in reasoning inevitably ensue.”

“The Irish state will undoubtedly have one of the most extensive, if not the most totalitarian, hate speech laws in Western Europe if the bill becomes law, despite the government’s insistence that it contains a provision to ‘protect genuine freedom of expression.’”

“If, as President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger rightly believed, it was in America’s interest to extract itself from the mess their predecessors had created in Vietnam, it was not necessary for them to keep fighting the war for so long.”

“Bonner has done a great service in reminding us what true civilization means, the cost of losing it, and how we can regain it.”

“Many Europeans are waking up to the failures of multiculturalism and open-border policies and are demanding action. If the parties of the center left and center right continue to fail on this front, someone else will step in.”

“Meaningful work is as important to life as leisure, I think. I just think that we’ve lost the balance.”

“We have a broken immigration system. Despite saying the right thing, [Suella] Braverman did not take much action to stop it. She ought to be judged similarly to what economists would call a revealed preference. In other words, actions speak louder than words.”

“To understand India’s slippery descent, one should read the reportage of Neha Dixit, a 37-year-old New Delhi-based freelance journalist.”

“The woke ideology does not merely advocate for redistribution of resources, but it also calls for (or at least allows for) different moral obligations according to one’s identity. This means that so-called oppressors are bound by a different morality than so-called oppressed identities.”

“There is a formula—unfortunately, I have noticed—when it comes to many in the reality-denying national press: Make a few accurate micro-points but use them to arrive at a conclusion that no reasonable person should believe.”

“Although an overt threat is never clearly articulated, the potential for serious political consequences makes it all the more trepidatious to consider crossing the aisle on a big bill where every vote is counted and closely watched.”

“Where I may disagree most emphatically with Beckeld is in his idealization of the ‘West,’ which is supposedly currently at war with barbarous ‘non-Western enemies.’ From my perspective, much of what we see in the impassioned pro-Hamas protests represents where Western civilization has moved in the

“The hyper-masculine environment of a prison creates additional impediments. Inmates fear that any sign of weakness might lead another inmate to take advantage, another reason not to speak openly with others. Sexual abuse is at the top of the list of things prisoners will not talk about.”

“The ‘peace process’ and the ‘two-state solution’ are other thought clichés that must be questioned because ultimately whoever speaks of these, or even more generally of a ‘political settlement,’ has not understood the conflict at all.”

“This is an admirable aim, but there is just one big problem: Diversity training is not working.”

“Allow me to be unambiguous: I am no one’s BIPOC mannequin. I am a person foremost and not a skin color, and I will not be cheapened nor reduced. I am not marginalized, and I need no special treatment. I refuse your categories.”

“I realized that if my Columbia education were to have any meaning, I would have to be bold and risk my music career and go public with my support of President Trump, who was the President of the United States at the time of my graduation in 2017.”

“The so-called conservative movement of the 1980s was anything but conservative.”

“What better way to avoid paying for maternity leave, family health insurance, and other perks than to make sure that one’s employees never have children?”

“It had taken an earthquake for me to see Ceausescu greed as it really was, and I knew how bad these excesses would look to my countrymen.”

“The most common precursor of gender dysphoria, though, seems to be intense social media use. The gender dysphoria more often seems to stem from that rather than from the home.”

“I was not there at the Memorial in the sweltering heat and humidity of Washington. I saw it through the magic of our black-and-white Muntz television set in my family’s Italian tavern in Cleveland, Ohio.”

“As is sadly often the case, it is only when an issue becomes overwhelmingly acute or when it is too late to correct course, that those once derided as alarmists are dutifully acknowledged to have been correct all along.”

“All of this could have been uncovered with measured reporting and a skepticism that avoids trusting the word of the baby-murdering terror group, Hamas.”

“Whether or not Singal is wrong in his conclusions does not matter. He dared to question the truisms, the sacred cows, and that brands him irredeemably transphobic.”

“As my co-author Kai Whiting and I argue in an upcoming book…free speech debates have become not simply a matter of whether or to what extent certain ideas should be banished from the public domain, but why, how, and for whom they should be restricted.”

“It is safe to say that the Muslims who have been spouting anti-Semitic hatred and propaganda on our streets in recent days were socialized in a culture whose values are irreconcilably at odds with ours—a parallel society that sees itself not as part of Western civilization but in opposition to it.”

“Meanwhile, the silence of companies such as Ben and Jerry’s that claim to support injustice is deafening. Clearly, when the issue of state-sponsored violence against the nation of Israel is in question, silence is an option…”

“After witnessing the events of the past few days, I admit that part of me is relieved that [my father] died before he had to watch Hamas take away his lifelong dream, slaughtering both it and Israeli civilians on video for the entire world to see.”

“The disturbing element here is not just the escalation but the advanced level of military precision demonstrated by Hamas—an unnerving signal that Iran’s influence is looming larger than ever.”

“This is not Israel’s 9/11. It is not even Israel’s Pearl Harbor. It is worse by an order of magnitude. The closest parallel is the Rape of Nanking.”

“But one thing is absolutely clear: This is war, not just a terror attack. This is war not just by Hamas on Israel, but by Iran—through Hamas—on Israel.”

“The stated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) objective in Afghanistan was nation-building, but what was created instead, over 20 years, and fell in days, was a heavily garrisoned foreign aid bazaar.”

“Avoiding these truly current, red hot issues, the women speak past each other.”

“As a patient, I do not want to hold hands with a robot and confide my health problems to a faceless entity. As a doctor, a patient, and a human being, I reject the currently shattered doctor-patient relationship.”

“Schwartz-DuPre is dedicated to putting an end to the idea that Curious George is nothing more than an amusing story.”

“Ideological pressure and political conformity in the workplace, professional organizations, industry, and public institutional life are so pervasive that identity politics has all but ruined social tolerance, meritocracy, and the pursuit of excellence.”

“On the basis of viscerality alone, Gran Turismo is worth the price of admission for the two-hour cruise along.”

“Humphrey’s insurgency at the convention basically lashed Truman to the mast of [Humphrey’s] own civil rights agenda. And desegregating the armed forces was arguably the single most important civil rights cause of that moment in time.”

“We must take the language/by surprise;/seal its every utterance/with a kiss or tear…”

“There really hasn’t been anybody like him since he passed…This is why there are these long compilations of ‘Hitchslaps’ on YouTube. It’s why most of the tributes to him focus on his rhetorical prowess—and just his brilliance on the debate stage.”

“America’s K-12 schools typically provide little information to young people on potential careers. They also generally do not provide work experiences that help them understand practical pathways to jobs and careers.”

“The Rada’s final decree is a reproach to all those who think of Ukraine as nothing more than an appendage of Russia, without a culture and a history of its own.”

“Rather than treating the other in a Socratic manner—which is to say, as a partner in the communal quest for truth—the polemicist roundly delegitimizes the other and reduces him to an ‘adversary, an enemy, who is wrong and whose very existence constitutes a threat.’”

“Like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, continental Europe would, therefore, do well to dial down the moralizing rhetoric associated with wokeness and return to the enlightened pragmatism, cultural liberalism, and scientific curiosity that gave us the modern world.”

“What gives? Why are people so eager to believe wild tales despite a lack of hard, clear evidence?”

“I cannot argue with his characterization of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes as a ‘triumvirate of stooges,’ but with me, he is preaching to the choir. How will he convince the postmodernists?”

“This is the atheist movement’s one job: to help people navigate the world and find meaning, purpose, and community in a society that has long depended on a god-belief for these ends.”

“The more these women agreed to be shamed for their ‘whiteness,’ the more I wondered why doing so made them feel ethical. Feeling shame makes nobody ethical. Just uncomfortable.”

“Those who do not make justice the central concern for Plato are not talking about Plato at all.”

“With artificial general intelligence (AGI) likely just decades away, there is an urgent need to consider the extent of environmental harm we are causing. AGI will likely question if humans are good stewards of the planet and quickly come to the conclusion that we are not.”

“Regulating your own emotions is something most people are capable of doing…It doesn’t require you constantly expressing [a problem], thinking about it, [and] sharing it with everyone…There’s something about not fixating too much on your own problems and really dwelling on them but, instead, doing s

“Assuming anti-aging science shows results, then all of those hypothetical people living way off in the distant future may include some of us. And if that is the case, then people alive today have a practical, personal reason to care how our current actions impact the future.”

“We live in a world where every conceivable product or service is instantly accessible.”

“As he reaches the century mark, Elias Victor Seixas Jr. deserves our respect and gratitude for leading a long and extraordinary life.”

“What receives less attention but is equally consequential is the extreme scenario in which AI saves all of humanity by making us immortal. Just as we are unprepared for life-destroying AI, we are equally unprepared for our AI savior.”

“If reading is about a relationship with a text, then my subsequent readings represented different relationships. As I changed, the book changed. I was a different person reading a different book. I am not even sure it is accurate to call this rereading.”

“One thing I’ve learned [from] being in combat sports is that it’s internationally watched everywhere, in every country.”

“Amid this exchange about the importance of recentering the essential literature of our history, I posed to Mac Donald a question that has been on my mind since my days as a student at The Haverford School: Should one make a habit of reading the same book twice?”

“When he saw his old left-wing comrades busily hatching excuses for neutrality as Slobodan Milošević waged war on Bosnia, he realized that much of the Left was either indifferent about this confrontation or on the wrong side.”

“I argue against the apologetics of the sycophantic defenders of Heidegger who claim that his involvement with National Socialism is wholly reducible to his political naïveté, which includes his gross overestimation of philosophy’s power to sway and influence the development of Germany’s ‘political’

“For all of their insistence on cultural revolution, progressives are not yet ready to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

“The great thing is the universe is as amazing as it is without all of the fairytales. The universe is far more amazing than anything that has come up in any scriptural book because the imagination of nature is much greater than the imagination of human beings.”

“What makes this conflict noteworthy is that it reveals stress lines within the coalition of today’s Left, a coalition that often seems held together more by what it hates than by strong bonds of friendship.”

“We will be nothing like the way we are now. It will be like a night and day transformation. And it always does require violence because, as you said, that class or race enemy that stands in the way of future bliss simply has to be gotten rid of.”

“Despite the book’s homage to Friedrich Schiller via its title, we get nothing even remotely reminiscent of the profound intellectual mind meld between him and his great friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.”

“Now, Peter Stothard has given us the final decades of the republic through the eyes of Crassus—Rome’s wealthiest man and former consul who famously embarked on a vainglorious and ultimately failed conquest of Parthia that culminated in his embarrassing death.”

“They were given a choice to participate, and they ultimately decided it was worth risking their life, health, individuality, and future for a chance to be a part of a group of people who ultimately couldn’t care less about them.”

“There is a lot of hope. Every time I go there and meet with the new generation, I think that they definitely want for their country to be a successful one. And that’s the conversation in Iraq. Most people have now forgotten about the war.”

“By any normal definition of the role of a Cabinet member, Secretary Mayorkas would have either resigned voluntarily or have had his resignation requested by the President.”

“It is made even more dangerous because unlike other addictions, which are widely accepted as harmful, ideological addiction is being constantly fueled by irresponsible members of the political class, the press, and many on social media.”

“However, it has now become clear that once in power, Democrats, with a few notable exceptions, have largely sought to remove any impediment to realizing their agenda regardless of how time-honored or important a given tradition might be.”

“As one example, some time in 2018 and 2019, many of the young people in my practice suddenly started reporting gender dysphoria and declaring themselves trans. Charismatic social media stars were effectively saying: ‘If you don’t fit in, if you don’t like your body, then you’re trans. Everything wi

“[Josiah] Osgood’s book is a welcome and exciting read about the rivalry between Caesar and Cato; Cato, in the process, finally receives some much-deserved due in the story of the republic’s final decades.”

“I’d be very surprised if a super intelligent AI a thousand years from now cannot recreate everything. Also, like so many other people, including Elon, I believe there’s probably a 50% chance we’re in a simulation. So, that would defeat the idea of death as well.”

“While criticizing the United States, Chomsky, Senator Bernie Sanders, those at outlets such as The Grayzone, and some of my friends have defended the likes of Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro.”

“But philistinism is not limited to the arts. I believe that those who cannot appreciate the wondrous beauty of the real world as revealed by science are philistines, too.”

“In the long term, it is likely that the workplace will diversify and, in turn, settle into four or five different buckets on a continuum from traditional and non-traditional, with less representation at the extremes.”

“K-12 education’s collective illusions divert attention away from the dogged fact that most Americans, including policymakers and young people, agree on important K-12 issues.“

“There [are] ways to teach about the past that are humanistic; that are agency-focused; and that are focused on generative things rather than destructive things—rather than dismantling things and tearing things down with no plan forward of what happens after the destruction.”

“While denouncing the eugenics movement, one must also recognize that its repudiation by the progressive mainstream signals the rise of a self-centered ethos that is destructive in its own right.”

“[Matt] Johnson believes that by adopting [Christopher] Hitchens’s approach—his allergy to party politics, his hatred of racism and nationalism, his emphasis on pluralism and humanism—the contemporary left will not just benefit at the ballot box but will also benefit morally and intellectually.”

“Reading between the lines, we learn in fact that [Michael] Walzer believes that the Right, wrong in its continuing adherence to capitalism, but correct in its eschewal of intellectual fashion, currently has a monopoly on political wisdom.”

“Zoltan Istvan, an advocate for life extension, has observed in his longevity writings that each human mind is a unique library of information. Every time a person dies, it is like losing the Library of Alexandria.”

“My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending…”

“The Second Spanish Republic has many parallels with modern American politics. Much like its counterparts in Spain, the American left of today is no less preoccupied with terraforming the cultural landscape.”

“So, to be clear, I largely favor reducing the power of the very federal government being discussed in this piece, but that is quite different from arguing that, at its current scope and scale, it is somehow incapable of addressing multiple priorities at once.”

“For the Stoic, however, personal identity is not a fragmented life of intersecting cultural identities but rather a holistic and unified embodiment of rationality endowed by nature.”

“All of the sudden, I was on the phone with Mike Pence… ‘I just finished Old Abe last night, and I had to track you down and tell you how much I loved it, and it’s the best book about Lincoln I’ve ever read.’ And, for ten minutes, he just wanted to talk about Lincoln.”

“Being a classicist and student of Greek philosophy, Klavan turns to his education to solve these philosophical dilemmas.”

“After all, one of the major reasons for the Conservatives’ 2019 election landslide victory was due to [Johnson’s] populist rhetoric regarding mass immigration, including the Conservatives’ promise that ‘overall numbers will come down.’”

“Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proceeding through the luminaries of German Idealism and Romanticism—climaxing with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—then marching beyond Hegel to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, Newell gives a reading of philosophy gone wrong. Horribly wrong

“The mainstream media has largely ignored the unsettling censorship tactics of the Biden administration, and Democrats—all the while—clearly cannot imagine a future Republican administration following this administration’s lead and censoring content that does not support the new administration’s pol

“I had lost my ambition and with it my identity. Without CEO status, who was I? If I was not leading a company, what was my purpose? How would I find contentment without that all-encompassing fixation on achievement?”

“Despite the enormous improvements that technology has contributed to the human condition, if we do not choose to fix the way the Internet works, there remains the potential for a digital Pearl Harbor-type event.”

“Any utopian project that tolerates humanity’s diverse values and identities only to the extent that they help advance a narrowly defined vision of progress can only end in indiscriminate violence.”

“Far from giving up on the American project, national divorce aims to renew and deepen our ability to live in harmony together.”

“It bears repeating that this is a very good book. Trueman performs a thorough but concise excavation of the intellectual, philosophical, and metaphysical currents that he sees as moving below the crashing waves of our present cultural storm.”

“One can judge the winds of change in foreign policy by the sudden proliferation of think tanks piping up and stating the obvious. There are tanks and think tanks and, despite the commitment of the Leopards, it may be the think tanks that are gaining the upper hand.”

“In fact, most Southerners did not own slaves; nor were Union soldiers, most of whom were drafted, fighting for the woke ideals of Jensen or the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

“You could read my book…as a kind of homage to the magazine.”

“Nancy Russell was one of those great heroines whose quest to save the Columbia Gorge in Oregon serves as an inspirational tale that embodies the best of American grit and determination.”

“I have no idea why Republicans and the GOP media fall over themselves rallying to the cause of those who hate them and who would never vote for them, no matter what.”

“Rather than calm debates about policy and its implications, both good and bad, we now live in a political era defined by emotion, where political discussions mutate into threats to our personal and group safety.”

“In short, if public schooling on average is so woefully inadequate, how can we take seriously the argument that if a family cannot afford or otherwise access private or home schooling, public schooling is a perfectly sufficient choice?”

“So I will say it with my heart, and others should too: If a culture persecutes LGBT people, is overtly racist, or makes women second class citizens, then to hell with that culture. My culture is better than that one.”

“Han occupies a somewhat unique position in today’s world that defies typical Right-Left categorization. This is partly because of Han’s bridging of multiple worlds: East and West; art and philosophy; theology and politics.”

“As we come to know more about the morally repulsive aspects of our national history—and, more importantly, face those realities—removing symbols of our collective failure in the past is not an attempt to deny our history. Rather, it is a sign of growth, a willingness to face our history.”

“The fact is that, historically, Great Britain has had a remarkably stable demographic makeup for at least a thousand years, if not much longer. The idea that what we have experienced since 1997…is in any way comparable or equivalent to the past is nonsense, at best, and disingenuous, at worst.”

“While Americans and other Westerners may be living in a golden age of free speech, there are still billions of people in the world who have yet to enjoy its blessings.”

“Like so many school districts in a post-George Floyd America, Philadelphia’s is rushing to embrace anti-racism.”

“Whatever else one may think about the unholy trinity of Prime Minister Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich, they are, among other things, willing to discuss the serious internal security concerns that much of the country outside of Tel Aviv faces.”

“Echoing this notion from on high, in 2016 the [World Economic Forum] announced the imminence of a post-historical future in the Marxist sense: ‘Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.’”

“In fact, heterosexuality and the male-female binary can be observed across countless species. The onus of proof, therefore, is on those who claim that we are an exception.”

“And both wages and relationships advance worker opportunity, the essential elements of which are what individuals know (i.e., profitable knowledge) and whom they know (i.e., priceless relationships).”

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s biggest enemy is not the West’s reticence to sending more drones, more weapons, and more fighter jets. President Zelenskyy’s biggest enemy is boredom.”

“And my argument is that freedom and progress in the context of the cyborg era are actually inimical to women’s interests. They don’t make things better for any women, except [for] a very small, elite subset.”

“They do not realize good mothering comes from fearlessness. Few things promote more fear than being deprived of control of one’s own body.”

“As psychoanalysis long ago has perspicaciously demonstrated, prejudice is universal to human nature and is evolutionarily informed.”

“Compulsory obedience can especially be seen in how the Democratic Party has changed since the election of President Biden in 2020. Before he entered office, COVID-19 was more accepted as an important and legitimate issue.”

“Aside from the fact that history shows that rockets are far more useful at inflicting damage against military than civilian targets, their misuse may indicate an underlying strategic desperation in the Kremlin.”

“What is new, in this case, is that the people of Tuvalu are hoping their future metaverse-based civilization will continue to function as a state and will be recognized internationally as a proper nation.”

“For Labour forgot that life involves loss and tragedy. It forgot that ‘human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning.’”

“I’m not optimistic at all that campuses can be reformed. They certainly cannot be reformed from within…Academia is gone. It is a monoculture. It is a hermetically sealed bubble.”

“It must become embarrassing to admit one ever supported uninformed and nonconsensual participation in a medical experiment or mass house arrest and coerced isolation.”

“Not everything stays the same, and, in many cases, it probably should not.”

“Many of us also like impostors because, deep down, we understand that to exist only matter-of-factly, without fiction, would be intolerable.”

“We are great at handling complexity until things get really, really complex.”

“But the price of that fame and quasi-divine status took its toll. ‘Immortality had its costs,’ Porter writes, ‘and Homer paid for it dearly.’”

“[Prime Minister Ardern] is correct that nuclear weapons arsenals carry with them great risks of widespread destruction. However, the greatest risk lies in committing not to use them.”

“The unrest that flared up in response to [Mahsa Amini’s] death has been virtually unprecedented and provides the international community with perhaps the clearest reminder that the Iranian people abhor authoritarianism.”

“A republic represents the ability for Australians to recognize formally what has been long known: that we are willing and capable of charting our own future released from the bonds of the past.”

“But we need to replace fanciful dreams of endless energy from renewables with full-cost accounting, which an increasing number of experts are taking seriously. There are destructive environmental and social consequences to constructing the infrastructure for that energy production.”

“At least Hazony recognizes that the democratic world should defend Ukraine. Other nationalists do not agree.”

“It’s career ending, really…Anybody who tries to [speak out] will be shunned.”

“It is instead Hayekian liberalism delivered with a Calvinist grimness.”

“Combining inanity with compelling anecdote, idiocy with sensible instruction, Žižek addresses himself to the ‘mess we’re in.’”

“Scientific conferences are being determined based on sex and race. It’s going to slow down medical progress, and it is also going to put physicians in the ER and the operating room who are not the top qualified.”

“If we look at culture as a superorganism with its own immunological mechanisms, we can recognize modern societies as being profoundly dysregulated, and this gets worse the more modern they get.”

“From that distant day when I saw her ride down Poonamallee High Road in Madras, the epitome of regality and restraint, Elizabeth II did her best in balancing the demands of tradition, the weight of history, the requirements of society and culture both at home and abroad, and also attended to her fa

“The story goes on to detail another Canadian citizen who was repeatedly and continuously offered euthanasia, to such an extent that he began recording these occasions.”

“And, later in life, when I was dealing with my father coming out of prison and perhaps rekindling that relationship, I started to look at my experience slightly differently. I started sharing bits and pieces of my story with people and, to my surprise, found that some of the reactions were positive

“It is too much to say that the world will not see her like again; there is within all of us the potential to aim for the higher moral life that the Queen embodied, if we engage in the striving that she did that is necessary to attain this.”

“All of this is captured in twelve essays in novelist Dara Horn’s powerful and coruscating book on why people still love dead Jews over living Jews. It is a book that shreds modern piety and sophistry in equal measure.”

“They’ve always been rivals with a town across the county line, a town of insulation and roofing makers. It’s a working-class rivalry, the authentic kind, one that lasts whatever color the collars become.”

“Freeman’s book, as the author acknowledges, is written as something of a eulogy to this great man of antiquity, who has captured imaginations for two millennia.”

“For example, if poor children grew up in a neighborhood where 70% of their friends were wealthy, their future income on average will increase by 20%, similar to the effect of going to a four-year college.”

“Leading by example, Rushdie refuses to be intimidated into silence.”

“Any coherent system of morality begins with an appreciation of human dignity and wanting people to have as many choices to take control of their lives as possible.”

“Almost all the key events of modern Europe were seen through the eyes of this painting, which Collinsworth vividly brings to life in her writing.”

“To put it simply, if one cannot accumulate capital, he will not support capitalism; and if one has no solid basis for conserving one’s family and community, which property provides, then he will not become a conservative.”

“My father’s skin is in those pharmaceutical companies.”

“Without an enemy to demonize, the Islamic Republic would have to answer for its many and grave failures.”

“This is a story about the meek inheriting the Earth.”

“Conservatives are certainly not socialists. Conservatives do not believe, as the Marxists do, that you can open up some central office with really bright people and dictate the course of the entire economy of the nation. We don’t believe anything like that. On the other hand…”

“It is to Continetti’s credit that he develops his narrative after this with fair-minded even-handedness for the most part, even if he lets his own views bleed through in the chapters concerning President Trump’s rise and fall, as well as the mix of grift and genuine intellectual ferment that he dra

“And hell, if General Haftar was going to win, President Trump would happily give him some tips about where to buy vacation properties in Virginia Beach. His steering of the private ‘confidence building’ chit-chat with General Haftar to real estate matters was not actually as ridiculous as it might

“Sentimental and sycophantic in turns, it may be hard to dispel the impression that Miéville is merely a hysteric. All the same, A Spectre, Haunting is a post-Nietzschean book, which leans into the charge of ressentiment. Spurning subterfuge, Miéville quite openly asserts that justice and revenge am

“In later interviews, Buxtun would shrug off the accolades he later received for his whistleblowing. ‘I don’t want to be embarrassed by an oversupply of compliments. I am who I am,’ he would tell bioethicist Carl Elliott in 2017.”

“Sometimes, I would even dream about some of the people I had interviewed on the stories. And, so through the years, I had the idea to write a book and put it all together and try to return to some of the stories.”

“The ten out of a thousand entrepreneurial ideas that are amazing—we’ll find out what those are. And they will be the ones that dominate [in] the next generation.”

“Barry Strauss, America’s foremost popular classicist, brings the story of Actium to life in ways that rival and surpass Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra…”

“Jackson was out walking on his property in Kansas one spring day and called Jensen with a simple question: ‘Why is this not enough?’”

“Our collective inability to push back against such a hateful worldview by holding Tehran accountable for the terror it is has funded and weaponized could soon prove to be a costly mistake.”

“Having considered the evidence, it seems more accurate to say that the Enlightenment project presented itself as a savior from ignorance and poverty but was really a movement to dethrone the old social order rooted in hierarchies and aristocracies.”

“While far-right ideologues make no secret of their illiberalism, their counterparts on the Left tend to cloak theirs in the language of equality.”

“I don’t see a full, vigorous pivot by this President (and this White House) back toward the themes and approaches that Joe Biden articulated in his 2020 presidential race.”

“Devotion to reading non-politicized history and putting it into context is necessary and something to which we should diligently commit.”

“Finns should decide their own fate. Their pact with Turkey signals the opposite.”

“The current politics of California, which more than any other American state has been shaped by mass immigration from Mexico, should likewise shake the confidence of conservatives who scoff at the alleged illiberalism of immigration hawks.”

“There is a paradox to life that an acceptance of limits, borders, and boundaries can be the most liberating thing of all.”

“Ron Paul is so beloved because he is so principled. That is what we are focused on here. We will work with other people who share our interests, but we’re not going to sacrifice our principles to do it.”

“As we might expect, the Woke, often well educated and articulate, have generated their own convoluted and comprehensive ‘theology’ replete with saints and sinners, priests and heretics, and even their own kind of Heaven and Hell.”

“With bloated bureaucracies and top marginal tax rates at 70% when he entered office, President Reagan also carried in his mind a basic script about overreach of the federal government that resonated with Americans after a decade of stagflation and presidential scandals.”

“In my own life, being disabled and living with an acute example of life’s predicament means that the worldview Hazony describes and prescribes has made far more sense and has offered far more consolation than liberalism ever could.”

“Instituting UBI could help us to transcend traditional distinctions between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor that have shaped poverty policy for far too long.”

“Denial, as Jacob Phillips deftly shows in his fascinating and staggeringly original new book Obedience is Freedom, is precisely what the liberal-left excels in, substituting for a world of limits and constraints a schizoid universe where subjectivity is all that counts.”

“To really thrive in our own communities, we need more than just Law and Order; a strong social fabric is required that encourages virtuous behavior as much as it punishes delinquency.”

“It is a shame, though, that whenever Orwell reappears it is almost always in the context of his dystopian political novel.”

“Similarly, we should understand the notion of greater cultural wealth in connection with greater cultural equality.”

“Political leaders in the United States are increasingly recognizing the vitality and capabilities of the Iranian resistance movement and are looking for ways to empower it.”

“So while parents are generally satisfied with what schools did under trying and unprecedented circumstances, they have good reason to be worried about the pandemic’s effects on their children’s academic and emotional well-being.”

“If the United States and its NATO allies consider Turkey to be a partner worth keeping—and both the size of its military and its contributions to NATO’s budget suggest that it is—then a situation placing Turkey in conflict with Russia is to their benefit.”

“First published in Italy, [Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel] has finally been translated into English by Gregor Benton and released as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series with Haymarket Books.”

“I wryly refer to the universal adoption of narrative ethics as a ‘modest proposal’ because while telling stories is a fundamental part of human nature, telling stories in perfectly ethical ways is, unfortunately, too often alien to our nature.”

“It is a win-win situation—not the zero-sum world of Marx’s gloomy dystopia. Institutions that reduce transaction costs and enforce well-defined property rights provide an environment in which incentives to economic initiative can thrive.”

“Similarly, while professional hockey is considered to have an under-representation problem, the same is not considered true for the National Football League or National Basketball Association, in which African Americans are very over-represented.”

“With that said, however, as a country with a 70-year commitment to welfarism, it would not be desirable to substitute this for Russia’s brand of plutocratic capitalism.”

“Much like the United States itself, the story of Yellowstone is one of tragedy and hope, defiance and cut-throat ambition, beauty and terror, charity and callousness.”

“This book undoubtedly represents an evolution in Rubin’s thinking, and contrary to those who accuse him of changing to suit others, changing one’s mind on philosophical beliefs is not automatically a disqualification.”

“Our media’s acceptance of anti-Semitic narratives is eroding Israel’s standing in the world and, in turn, the nation’s ability to defend itself against an enemy that has long ago broken its borders and used its very liberalism against it.”

“It is time to slash the United States defense budget. The money wasted on weapon systems designed to win last century’s wars is staggering, as are the opportunity costs.”

“One of the spiritual overtones present in Father Stu is one important to Christian teaching: the merit of suffering. The Christ-like endurance of suffering is particularly embodied in Long himself.”

“At the end of the day, it’s a pretty simple business that we’re in: We want to understand culture, we want to understand consumers’ thinking, and we’re just trying to answer why’s.”

“It was a linguistic indication that revolutionary consciousness had made ‘the long march through the institutions.’”

“Chaos narratives, however, defy our narrative expectations. There is no order, sense, or logical chronology but, instead, suffering without an apparent purpose or meaning.”

“If the woke activists who are willing to wake up at 5:00 am to march for racial justice are nihilistic, they sure seem to find nihilism plenty meaningful and inspiring.”

“The general public—and not the elite—is, in fact, the primary obstacle to the New Right’s political project.”

“Why is there this close bond? Why does China do nothing in response to President Putin’s bloodlust?”

“The analyses attempting to quantify reparations, cited above, will likely encounter strong and ongoing resistance, if only based on the price tag alone.”

“By taking part in ordinary activities like visiting a bar or restaurant or a park or library, we are doing something which is important to the health of our neighbors, neighborhoods, and communities.”

“Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.”

“However, its veneration of far-right thinking (sometimes qualified but always in the most intellectualized vein) undermines its claims to genuine seriousness.”

“A country on the brink well before war arrived, Yemen’s humanitarian crisis has been labeled the worst of our generation.”

“Athens: City of Wisdom is a tour through over 3,000 years of the history of a city that has such imaginative sway and spiritual power over the hearts and minds of so many people around the world today.”

“What accounts for the gap between scholars and activists who advocate reparations and broad public resistance to the idea?”

“As Deneen says, Voegelin ‘argued that modern Gnosticism was an effort to ‘redivinize’ the political world—not now by bringing the gods in to the service of the city, but by making the city into a heaven on earth.’”

“As the only Western journalist allowed to enter Iran prior to its presidential elections back in 2017, I followed then-candidate Ebrahim Raisi on the campaign trail. Whatever illusions I had about Iran and its ambitions melted under the sheer brutality of his war rhetoric.”

“The fact—one that should surprise no one—is that the same folks who gave us the grossly mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan have also taught a master class on how to bungle our crucial relationship with an already insecure nuclear superpower.”

“Now is no time to double down on a crumbling status quo. Instead of universalizing college and directing young people through a single pathway to opportunity, we should be multiplying pathways to opportunity.”

“Lanier draws a straight line from the idealism and optimism that ‘information wants to be free’ to the dystopian problems facing today’s world, including but not limited to a declining middle class, filter bubbles, and dysfunctional politics.”

It has been 50 years since The Godfather was widely released in the United States on March 24, 1972.

“Young knows all too well what a chilly climate for dissent can devolve into, regardless of good intentions. This can undermine the West’s moral high ground more than any Russia-backed stooge could.”

“For a start, American conservatives are either unaware of or ignore that Russia has the highest abortion rate in the world and the third highest divorce rate.”

“To us it should be plain that bad information accompanies the good: that it is (as death is to life) the necessary dark background against which one might see any light at all.”

“Yet, today, what seems most poignant about this story of just a few years ago is not so much that the young man had the opportunity to meet his friend in person as that meeting face-to-face was still considered an essential requirement by either him or his community—the consummation, if you like, o

“So, we have been living in two pandemics, but only one has dominated our public health discussions.”

“In this rousing story, [Roosevelt] Montás concentrates on four particular ‘great authors’ that embody and encapsulate the human condition who shaped him: Saint Augustine, Plato, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi.”

“For the first time ever, more than half of women aged 30 in England and Wales are childless. This is not a normative condemnation but a descriptive statement.”

“Amid the memes and rhetoric, there has been much in the way of propaganda, unverifiable information, and outright lies that seem, at times, not to be appreciated for what they are.”

“Now, we face a second reminder of reality. First plague, now war has come to Europe, the biggest since 1945.”

“Every generation, we need to learn and relearn how thin the line can be between having a basically liberal society and a basically authoritarian society.”

“No one is exempt from being a victim of some sort of crime. And it’s very appropriate that I use that title [of victim] in terms of the VICTIM Act.”

“And we very much do need to start telling ourselves and these street people the hard (but ultimately more humanizing and compassionate) truth again: We need to call the bums by their rightful name.”

“Love is the central theme of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy. It is from love that new life begins. It is in love that life is sustained and made pleasant.”

“Given the potential for a more populist conservatism that appeals to those seeking to reweave America’s weakened bonds of social and economic mutual loyalty, the right-liberalism of Murray and others is exactly the opposite of what is needed and wanted.”

“To challenge Dr. Fauci is, thus, to challenge a kind of revealed truth. Those who question Dr. Fauci are not merely expressing differing opinions; rather, they are apostates, ‘science deniers,’ ‘anti-vaxxers’ spreading dangerous ‘misinformation,’ and they are worthy of ridicule, censorship, and, of

“Only days before Goldberg made her ill-informed comments, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) changed its definition of racism to ‘The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.’”

“When I was imprisoned in Iran, I made it clear to the Swiss ambassador to let the Trump administration know not to offer any money in exchange for my release.”

“The implication is that culture and politics can be thought of as the bob of a pendulum swinging back and forth mechanically between the political left and the right, and that, at the moment, we are simply at the leftward amplitude of such a process.”

“His culminating chapter is a love letter from his heart of his life spent in literature, his life as it matured for himself, and he has given himself and his favorite books to us to discover afresh and anew.”

“Yet the cold does not rest there.”

“My wife and I used to go vacation in San Francisco. We don’t anymore…This is what’s headed toward the rest of the nation.”

“However, in his uncompleted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow, as well as The Silmarillion, Tolkien presented a different vision of human nature, one that is more realistic and more concomitant with his Catholic upbringing.”

“You have to have a steel spine in your liberalism. ‘What kind of government did you create, sir?’ ‘We created a republic, if [you] can keep it.’ The ‘if you can keep it’ part requires a steel spine.”

“As a former graduate student in religious studies and writer of the classics, it is deeply regrettable that the scholarship of the academy does not reach further and that century-old myths no longer of any substantial prominence in academic study still hold public sway.”

“A disconnect ensues: Even as the American public has indeed polarized, our elected representatives have fled to the extremes to an even greater degree.”

” I think that we are, as always, pragmatic idealists.”

“So, yes—my friend has a point: To someone who has never given a moment’s thought to whether Jesus was a real person or not, he does seem like an entirely fictional character.”

“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with debate. In fact, debate, in certain circumstances, can be good, but we can often solve the problems…through conversation.”

“At the time, I would not have guessed my encounters with Roger through YouTube and a handful of books would lead me to studying with him just prior to his death.”

“Many such persons will have internalized the idea that they constitute an inconvenient and expensive burden on loved ones, as well as the healthcare system. Legalizing MAID risks reinforcing that message.”

“Eventually, I had an emotional crisis because I could no longer reconcile the life of abundance that the U.S. afforded me. I made a pact with myself that from here on, I’m really going to try to see what needs to happen for [Africa] to thrive.”

“The only thing Brooks’s ‘true conservatism’ is ‘responsible’ for, however, is progressivism’s thoroughgoing dominance of our culture. For Brooks, a ‘responsible’ conservatism must concede the moral legitimacy of every progressive ‘advance.’”

“Without the notion of socially necessary labor time, nothing in Marx’s value form or overall theory of exploitation makes sense.”

“One of the causes of tension with Noam Chomsky, for example, Burgis observes, was Hitchens’ recognition that the forces of anti-imperialism today are dissimilar to ‘Ho Chi Minh or the Sandinistas.’”

“Policing needs to be seen as a profession to whose ranks people of every class might plausibly aspire.”

“Too often, people think of corruption as something that happens somewhere else: in Russia, in authoritarian regimes.”

“As a matter of economics, scarcity is the source of all value, even if it is a combination of ‘manufactured’ scarcity via monopoly control and relative scarcity due to the costliness of extraction and the preferences of consumers.”

Here are our editor’s choices for his favorite interviews of this past year.

“As a former political hostage in Iran, I oppose the efforts to revive the current agreement as it stands. I will explain my reasoning and what I believe is the best path forward.”

“As is tradition at Merion West, here are our editor’s choices for his favorite Merion West articles of this past year.”

Henri Mattila and Erich Prince tell the story of Merion West.

“So, the fact that what is now called wokeness is a minority persuasion, believed by a small group of elite left-liberals and pursued through the instruments of the managerial state and corporate oligarchies, should not be surprising.”

“Odysseus has before him the fantastical dream of every man: immortality and sex. He ultimately gives that up for mortality with his family.”

“I got the call on January 10th [2017] from CNN and then BuzzFeed about them running with this hoax. I pointed out at the time that it was wrong. I could demonstrably prove it was wrong. And yet, they stuck by it…”

“National Conservatism, one strand of a broader emergent post-Cold War fusionist conservative movement, has the potential for both capturing youthful energy and enthusiasm while grounding and directing it with prudence and realism.”

“In the aftermath of the fiasco that was the Fall of Kabul, it was predictable that American commentators would detect a mirroring effect of the Afghan loss on political crises in the United States.”

“I pedal away with an all-too-familiar question bouncing around my head: ‘What are we doing to these kids?’”

“The End of Suburbia lays out the argument that with oil production peaking somewhere around 2027–28, and from then on heading into a steep decline, the living standards of those in suburbia will decline also.”

“Such politicized readings of the last 50 years miss the profundity of Ovid’s inclusion of the story in his grander poetic agenda of love being the constant star in the midst of a world of violence and transformation.”

“Presiding over a declining empire is more arduous than presiding over one that is rising.”

“But the one fight that never resolved was the one between my Bessarabian grandfather and my American Uncle Izzie, who drove a truck and married into the family long before I was born. And it happened during the late 1970s, during the Carter administration.”

“I think the downside of going test-optional, the downside of ignoring what assessments tell you, means that you might end up ignoring the underlying structural problems and never fixing the inequities.”

“And this is exacerbated by a situatedness in a contemporary culture that has removed the sort of guardrails that would tell a would-be troublemaker that to defile something like a grave or a tribute to those lost in a mass casualty terrorist attack is unacceptable…”

“No country, even the most powerful, can save lives in every conflict, but if it judges itself to be able to and its conscience is sufficiently moved by the killing, it should step in.”

“We are inheritors of incredible cultures, yet we have no appreciation or understanding of them. We have more informational resources than any generation prior, yet we are as ignorant as ever.”

“The question, however, remains: Would politically motivated government officials make better decisions than executives at these companies, and would these decisions be fairly applied to all users?”

“The question, of course, is why an underground counterculture known for its outspoken, contrarian, and anti-authoritarian attitude would toe the woke party line, disavow empiricism, and do the bidding of elite ideologues rather than admit that the emperor is naked.”

“The flattering portrait Hegel wrote of Napoleon to his friend has subsequently spiraled into mythic legend. Why did Hegel have this seemingly lofty view of Napoleon?”

“Roberto Calasso passed away this year at the age of 80. There is no one quite like Roberto Calasso; perhaps there is no one remotely like Roberto Calasso.”

“Writing becomes a contest between mutually incompatible conceptions of public life. We do not simply have varying prescriptions for social ills; the afflictions we observe are fundamentally different.”

“One thing I chose not to do was circumcise my child. While many of my secular compatriots still feel an affinity for this practice as a ‘tribal marking,’ I find it intellectually and ethically difficult to defend.”

“Now, given that genetics matters for these things, which, in turn, drive inequality, we should take genetics seriously if we are truly committed to egalitarianism.”

“Sayles’s 1996 film, Lone Star, is arguably his greatest work to date. And after 25 years, given the tensions that continue to circle around issues of race and immigration, it certainly has not lost any of its original force and relevance.”

“That commitment to truth seeking made Sullivan one of the earliest advocates for gay marriage and one of the most potent and consistent critics of ‘wokeness’ today.”

“Young Americans, myself included, need to resist the impulses of the day and keep striving. We may never be Bond types, but the quest for self-improvement is the point. To strive is to live.”

“The body is certainly something we should appreciate, but it is not the most obvious thing to be considered sacred. A far better candidate would be consciousness.”

“One hundred years after Fitzgerald’s great novels, we are living in the same world as Nick Carraway, Amory Blaine, and Jay Gatsby.”

“Located within the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, The Memeing of Mark Fisher boldly riffs on everything from conspiracy theories and memes to economic policy and election campaigns…”

“But that raises another thorny question: Given all the excellent books by women and people of color, why am I writing at all? Why am I not simply recommending other people’s work to men and white people?”

“Rauch takes as his subject how we know what we know in public life, and what the greatest contemporary threats to our shared public knowledge are.”

“Although I would have liked to have taken a photograph, my camera was full, and they’d already walked away toward a shop with a sign advertising Calzones.”

“The predictable consequence is that instead of striving together toward the ethereal glow at the top of the highest peak, we are coming apart and stomping each other and ourselves further down into the abyss…”

“But even if we should accept and defend democracy as an ideal, we should not make the mistake of forgetting that anti-democratic—or, at least, non-democratic—procedures and institutions are necessary for sustaining a liberal democratic society like our own.”

“Contrary to the Bitcoin apostles I met at the conference all those years ago, contemporary owners of cryptocurrency seem to be more interested in its speculative properties than its potential as an alternate currency or stable store of value.”

“Adherents of the Woke worldview disallow this more complex approach to social issues (psychologically, an ambivalent position) and, instead, succumb to the simplistic and often pleasurable permission to demonize entire categories of people according to immutable traits.”

“Whether America likes it or not, the unipolar moment, Pax Americana, is over.”

“As a result of this debacle, it now seems reasonable to question whether Washington is competent enough to assure Australia’s security.”

“To understand how land use regulation can help save California from the dystopian future it is currently facing, I spoke with Nolan Gray, an urban planner and outspoken land use policy wonk.”

“If a nation is an ‘imagined community,’ to invoke Benedict Anderson’s metaphor, then how can we live together when the communities we imagine are, at every level, incompatible?”

“As such, politics has eclipsed its primary purpose—namely, to provide the means by which people can seek out and, in turn, live good lives, lives that have nothing to do with politics.”

“If, on the other hand, we as a society make excuses for thugs and use pretextual claims of racism to emasculate law enforcement, we will promote the continuation of our rapid race to the bottom.”

“Marcuse and Bell might not be on the reading lists at elementary schools, but CRT’s cynical mentality and Marxist tenets are still present in the pedagogical exercises being exposed by Christopher Rufo’s investigative journalism.”

“History ended in 1989. In 2008, the economic order was shaken. The political reckoning arrived in 2016. By 2020, the End of History was over.”

“The Biden administration has not yet decided whether to call Saied’s power grab a coup.”

“As Joshua Foa Dienstag reminds us, the essential tragedy of being human (or being anything, for that matter) stems from the passage of time.”

“Therefore, what possible reason is there to believe that simply bribing a few Jews out of a few homes in the West Bank will result in Hamas and Fatah making peace with Israel?”

“Our members of Congress—no matter how extreme their ideological predilections—have a duty to quit using the institution as a performative stage and begin working within it to actually forge policy solutions to our most pressing issues.”

“How did it happen that the Wolves came to wield such power here, infiltrating academia, journalism, and other segments of society that were supposed to be high-minded bastions of truth and light?”

“But, if I have learned anything, it is that choice is best when it is counterweighted by a serious moral framework.”

“20 years of RCV in San Francisco has neither moderated the city’s politics nor produced any novel outcomes worth replicating.”

“Dear doves and hawks and other feathered brethren: It is already over.”

“Implicit in this choice was the belief that tolerance of all values was more important than inculcating any particular set of values and, thus, that tolerance was the most important aim of society.”

“This brings in the status issue again, doesn’t it? Because there are so many careers that people just wouldn’t consider because how would they tell their friends?”

“Yet now the Enlightenment too, like ancient thought before, finds its enduring legacy threatened by a fundamentalist competitor.”

“But one of the dangers is it’s very easy when there is change that makes someone uncomfortable to immediately say that this is a society that’s in decline and to blame somebody for causing it.”

“However, without wishing to entertain hyperbole, we may conversely deem this great exposé to be rather trivial—even inconsequential—especially when considering the increasingly ‘extraordinary’ nature of our own existence.”

“Although reaching immense influence in the 20th century, the mass man is the ‘spoiled child of history,’ and when he goes in search of bread, says Ortega, he always does one thing, ‘He wrecks the bakery.’”

“One thing that sets Nice Racism apart from her other books is the depth of its cynicism.”

“The other fans that have a dangerously inaccurate idea about what it means to be Stoic are the ‘Broics.’”

“Here, I would like to reflect on the optimal mechanisms for sustaining the rational mindset that undergirds liberal democracy.”

“Although they are run down, many still boast high local taxes. Sadly, this forms a vicious cycle of adverse selection, spiraling tax rates, and underfunding. “

“What is needed is a return to a culture of common sense and personal well-being, in which one is judged according to what kind of person one is and how one conducts one’s life.”

“In his TED Talk ‘Be suspicious of stories,’ Tyler Cowen explains that, when we create stories, ‘We’re imposing order on the mess we observe.’”

“I want to explore this conclusion by asking why pornography is so prevalent, why themes of domination and subordination are so prevalent in pornography, and why so many people defend or celebrate it, even in progressive and feminist circles.”

“It seems as though they will do anything to avoid actually backing approaches that would begin to remedy these problems, all of which start with taking a harder-line on those who routinely commit violent crimes.”

“This modest and inconspicuous doctor published a 2018 guide for lay people, describing simple methods for helping people with mental health problems, entitled Where There Is No Psychiatrist.”

“Here, Smith steps in, and he admirably makes a case to both the Left and the Right that patriotism is a worthy political virtue in need of resuscitation here in the United States.”

“In many ways, the book also reads as a eulogy to a liberal, liberalizing, and internationalist America.”

“Why, after all, should it be ‘pro-test,’ and not ‘de-test’? Protest once meant to give testimony in pro of something good, over and against something corrupt.”

“The work of totalitarianism takes a lot of muscle, but most of it is done by just one: the wooden tongue.”

“We lost the All-Star Game, but I think we won the battle because that fight has moved to other states now because we are on the right side of this issue, and we push back so hard.”

“…I cannot stand by while supposedly smart, thoughtful, and vocal leaders in the literary world choose to misuse (or condone the misuse of) the word ‘genocide.’”

“To explain why the echo chamber corrective flopped, Bail puts forth an alternative theory of how today’s social media is helping drive polarization and mutual contempt between partisans.”

“In an age of iconoclasm, Ahmari reiterates the indispensable need for the icon of tradition that points beyond itself to the everlasting, and Dougherty captures how the icon of national particularism can also point beyond itself to the universal.”

“A polity of such geopolitical importance would surely be expected to have birthed an intellectual reaction to the French Revolution that was comparable to its formidable military response.”

“The long-term problem there is that if your feminism becomes associated with anti-natalism, sooner or later it’s going to trigger a backlash, and that backlash is not going to look very nice for women.”

“The recovery itself is likely to be the largest job creator this decade.”

“Scruton loved Wagner. The two were a match made in heaven, or hell, depending on your perspective and appreciation of irony.”

“However trendy this new semantic shift, the word is more relevant than ever: “Career adjacency” is now the future of human work.”

“The United States can offer a very innovative solution to a seemingly intractable conflict: Pay Israel to withdraw its settlers.”

“The bigger the election’s participation, the bigger the mandate, and so universal suffrage elections have grown into unwieldy, ugly beasts.”

“Which is worse—/A hard death/Or a hard birth—”

“At the same time, I cannot find a single discovery in the history of science that has been made by following the conviction that everybody is different.”

“The reasoning has nothing whatsoever to do with functionality; indeed, it has nothing whatsoever to do with viruses or health safety. The reasoning is about symbolizing conformity to bureaucratic rule.”

“What I have found in the book is strong enough to suggest that there is a correlation between mass migration from Muslim-majority countries and the increase in sexual violence.”

“New Atheism had taught me always to demand evidence; and the evidence revealed that, historically, political radicalism had been a major source of violence and inhumanity…”

“From a eudaimonic well-being perspective, the act of cancelling those we do not like—more often than not—leaves us worse off, precisely because it robs us of an opportunity to create the best version of ourselves.”

“Therefore, if we want to ward off a divorce between our political narratives and reality, perhaps the best thing we can do is bring political affairs as close as possible to our lived, everyday realities.”

“With that said, there is considerably more to democratic regression than the simplistic idea of evil, right-wing leaders whose ideas resonate with bad people.”

“In order to win, the American Right needs to bury dead dogmas, get its head out of abstract Platonic idealism, and look reality in the face.”

“To these people, lockdown has been a raging success. To everybody else, it has been an unmitigated disaster.”

“It is a crushing defeat that signals that Labour’s loss of several of its Northern constituencies under former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in the 2019 general election was not a one-off occurrence that could be fixed with a new leader.”

“But every now and again, it is worth looking at his own vision of an ideal society. Interestingly, this is where this sharp-eyed critic comes across as short-sighted.”

“And at a time when so many, on both the Left and Right, seem intent on tearing everything down, President Bush reminds us how much we have.”

“Finally, the mere expectation of inflation can actually bring it to pass.”

“For a young immigrant boy who knew nothing about politics or history, Star Wars had a universal appeal that transcended language, nationality, time, and other superficial social barriers.”

“Channeling Uncle Bill, who died over a decade ago, I invite his ghost to weigh in. But rather than answering, he walks me downstairs in his old Brooklyn house, where we stand together in his paneled den—the perfect skin we’d heard about, now on the floor.”

“Interest group pressure typically opens up immigration.”

“Ultimately, in order to thwart the managerial system, the American conservative movement needs to co-opt the managerial system.”

“Two millennia later, we are still warring over the meaning of Virgil’s Aeneid.”

“Wilderness of whys./Labyrinth of I’s./Foreground, background./Busy, busy eyes.”

“Accordingly, we believe that Facebook could streamline its appeals process by following the guidelines suggested above.”

“This point deserves all the more consideration today, at a time in recent history that has become uniquely critical of concentrated wealth, both of the inherited and earned variety.”

“But the thinking man ought to deploy le mot juste—the precise term—because of the heartburn it gives petty tyranny, as all truths reliably do.”

“On the House does not provide a clear answer, but, if one reads carefully, one might find that Boehner’s short-term pessimism and long-term optimism are both warranted.”

“This depoliticization of the public realm extends to the selection of the managerial class itself. Elections matter not at all. The managers perpetuate themselves…”

“Odysseus is the first recognizably Western man.”

“Lewis observes that young people are no longer being taught to experience a unity with greater powers but, rather, to accept themselves as separated from greater reality.”

“Secondly, I’d say good advice is to gain familiarity with the saints and to perhaps gain some friends among the saints because often they are the best examples.”

“Greene uses abortion jurisprudence as a real-world example of how American law’s approach to rights has gone wrong—and has helped split us up into warring tribes competing for a zero-sum rights pie.”

“We believe this question of censorship is a non-partisan concern that will deeply affect the ability of our country to achieve fairness and progress going forward.”

“As a result, the time has come for scientists to place themselves on the right side of history and reject Critical Social Justice in science as well as its Trojan Horse, DEI as it is currently justified and conceived.”

“Merisotis has written extensively about higher education and the future of work, but Human Work is a departure from much of his past writing.”

“Upon my father’s return, I was shocked by the change in his appearance. His arms and back were a series of scars and discolored blotches.”