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Articles
The Loss of Wonder Leads to Secularism
The God Desireby david baddielharpercollins, 112 pages, $14.99 I almost never read books by atheists—not since the time I spent several days reading Christopher Hitchens’s cliché-ridden God Is Not Great, which...
Existential Slapstick in The Banshees of Inisherin
In his films, director Martin McDonagh takes the kitschified, cliched landscape of Ireland and hands it back to itself, cleansed. Born in England of Irish parents, McDonagh is the...
Tyranny by Numbers
The Psychology of Totalitarianismby mattias desmettranslated into english by els vanbrabantchelsea green publishing, 256 pages, $53.25 In 2018, a Polish academic study called Totalitarianism in the Postmodern Age anticipated...
Elon Musk and the Posthumanist Threat
Elon Musk is typically the object of considerable masculine envy, and so, in the interests of avoiding accusations of green-eye, it would be nice to be able to declare...
Morality in the Age of Machines
The Age of AI:And Our Human Futureby henry a. kissinger, eric schmidt, and daniel huttenlocherjohn murray, 256 pages, $30 This is a book with three authors, which is both...
ABBA Immortal
ABBA was never just a giddy pop band. Well, it was, too—a passable imitation of a giddy pop band, but that was the least of it. They were sorcerers...
Of Mass and Masquerade
On May 10, the Irish government lifted its ban on public worship. Attendance is now limited to 50 people, regardless of the size of the church building, and irrespective...
Freedom Isn’t Just Another Word
Along with my good friend Gemma O’Doherty, I have launched a constitutional challenge to Ireland’s COVID-19 lockdown measures, which the Irish government introduced three weeks ago. O’Doherty and I seek a...
On Loving Thy Neighbor
Recently, while speaking in the Italian city of Bari, Pope Francis mentioned contemporary “populist” politicians—specifically, those who describe recent waves of migrants traveling from Africa to Europe as an...
COVID-19 and the New Death Calculus
When I was a child, my father, who made a point of conveying his respects when someone in the locality died, would send me along to funerals if he...
Books About Next to Nothing
In The Decline of the Novel, Joseph Bottum puts words to something every reader of fiction has long sensed in his bones: The novel is dying, if not dead;...
Don’t Sanitize Abortion
I would like to suggest a seventh rule to add to Mary Eberstadt’s “Six Rules for Pro-Life Radicals.” This additional rule was implicit in several of the six she...
War On the Concrete
The stark divide especially obvious in the world since 2016 has yet to be described adequately. The old, conventional dichotomies are redundant: “right/left,” “conservative/liberal,” “populist/progressive.” There’s a useful insight...
Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Burden
Before I come to my own (unsuccessful) candidacy, let me offer a few takeaways from Ireland’s general election last weekend. Many of the most strident pro-abortionists—from all parties—have lost...
Irish Politics Plays Musical Chairs
The Irish general election currently underway is the strangest Irish election in my lifetime—the culmination of a rupture between people and politicians that has been developing for decades. It...
