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Articles
The Spymaster
A Legacy of Spiesby john le carré viking, 272 pages, $28 Last December, while most of us were watching the presidential election lumber toward its disastrous conclusion, two aged...
Lamb to the Slaughter
George Frazier had a story about the first time he met John O’Hara. The journalist and clotheshorse Frazier was introduced to the novelist O’Hara while hanging out at a...
The Losers’ Elegist
Russell Kirk: American Conservativeby bradley j. birzerkentucky, 608 pages, $34.95 Drive up Route 131 from Grand Rapids, veer east of the Manistee National Forest, and you come to the...
Harvard and the Humanities
n Harvard professors do a bad job of holding on to freshmen. In the last eleven incoming classes, the percentage of aspiring humanists has dropped from 27 to 18...
Divided We Stand
The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences? by david cannadine ?knopf, 352 pages, $26.95 n The history of the French Revolution would prove that many of the revolutionaries were...
Rawls: A Partial Defense
Ralph presents his case against Rawls below. Although I agree with much of it, I think he goes too far. Here are a few rather disordered suggestions intended less...
Of Parties and Populists
Over at The American Conservative, Larison uses the NY Times/CBS News poll to argue that the Tea Partiers aren’t populists but rather “base” conservatives . He echoes Peter Beinart,...
Dutch Courage
A brief item of self-promotion: PoMoCon readers who happen to understand Dutch may be interested in a new volume, Conservatieve Vooruitgang recently published by Prometheus. It’s a greatest-hits tour...
Alphabet City
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz emerged from semi-retirement to express his approval for Sarah Palin . No, I don’t propose to revisit the Sarah, pro- and con-...
A Sprawling Debate
In a recent post, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute takes on Austin Bramwell’s argument that suburban sprawl is t he result of government planning . How can this...
New Grub Street
The Awl points out this interview with Tina Brown . At about 19:40, Brown asks: “Are we building this new sort of subculture frankly of impoverished, living in garret...
Wild Hearts, Blue Jeans, and White T-Shirts
As we continue our discussion of popular music and its discontents , I opened up the paper this morning to find a charming tribute to the place and milieu...
American Exceptionalism Revisited
Ponnuru and Lowry respond to their critics . I’m the sure the sphere will be all over this within hours. But a few particularly egregious points are worth noting....
Why is there no Jewish Narnia?
That’s the question Michael Weingrad asks in the inaugural issue of The Jewish Review of Books. The article has taken heat from fans of the many Jewish fantasy authors...
Two Concepts of Exceptionalism
In the current issue of National Review, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru try to develop a respectable argument that President Obama is un-American . They dismiss the literal version...
