Stefan McDaniel

Elaine Lafferty, pro-choice feminist Democrat and erstwhile editor in chief of Ms. magazine, thinks Sarah Palin is a brilliant woman : Now by “smart,” I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect . . . . Continue Reading »

Halloween is just around the corner, and we know many readers’ chief preoccupation will be finding an original costume. Who better to go to for ideas than Bob Dylan , one of our greatest purveyors of weird and wacky images? . . . . Continue Reading »

“They agree on little else, but the heads of Northern Ireland’s four main parties are united in their determination to deny their countrywomen access to free abortion at home.” So says an outraged correspondent for The Economist , reporting on the failure of an initiative to . . . . Continue Reading »

Why does a man who describes the French left as a “great backward-falling corpse” continue to associate himself with it? This is the question Fred Siegel tackles in his review of Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism by Bernard-Henri Levy. Even at its most exasperatingly . . . . Continue Reading »

In addition to being a compelling indictment of the “addiction bureaucracy,” Theodore Dalrymple’s Romancing Opiates is probably the most wryly funny book-length discussion of heroin addiction you’ll read all week. Here’s a characteristic digression: Cold turkey is so . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert Royal reflects here on the limited importance of book-learning: [We should get rid of the idea that] a superficial understanding of sacred things is an advance over longstanding practices that directly confront the evils we find in ourselves and in a fallen world. On the very first page of . . . . Continue Reading »

Last week Public Discourse published the modified text of an address delivered by Archbishop Chaput speaking as a private citizen about the responsibilities of the Catholic voter. It contains a stern rebuke directed at Prof. Doug Kmiec: In his own book [ Can a Catholic Support Him?: Asking the Big . . . . Continue Reading »

These clips, if you haven’t seen them, are really pretty funny . I’m not sure that Obama was as sincerely amused by the wisecracks as he was obliged to seem. But it’s possible that he was—graciousness is a luxury clear front-runners can well afford. . . . . Continue Reading »

Well, here we go again. The markets stumble after fifty years of astonishing prosperity and the wild-eyed Marxist prophets immediately emerge from hiding. Now I’m not going to indulge in vulgar polemics against Marx, whom I consider an epochal genius, but I think The Guardian ends on just the . . . . Continue Reading »

The excellent team of scholars working under the auspices of The Witherspoon Institute has just launched an online publication called Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good . Public Discourse is an interesting hybrid of the blog and journal formats. According to the introductory letter . . . . Continue Reading »