American Politics
A selection of recent articles on this topic
To My Daughter, Turning Ten
Beacon’s Riverfront Park looks different today, as if we’d been away for years, though it has only…
Twin Peaks Revisited
In the fall of 1946, Mary McCarthy wrote a letter objecting to a New Yorker essay by…
Abraham Lincoln, Matchmaker
What if Abraham Lincoln had sent a young socialite to meet an injured soldier, without telling her…
Civility, Consensus, Constructivism
Incivility, President Obama told his audience at the 2010 National Prayer Breakfast, is a disease of public…
From Hippo to Nashville
In lectures over the last couple of years, I have frequently mentioned Philip Rieff’s Psychological Man as…
Superheroes? Stardust? Or Vessels of the Incarnation?
When I was first introduced to the fascinations of the DNA double-helix in a biology class at…
The Pope and the President
The past summer has seen no shortage of controversy in Washington. Until the catastrophe in Houston, the…
How the Media Promote (Some) Suicides
I began my work against assisted suicide in 1993. The emotional zeitgeist at the time focused intensely—and…
Michael Cromartie Rides On
The first time I saw Michael Cromartie, he was riding a bike. We were in the middle…
The Self-Delusion of a Conservative
Arizona Senator Jeff Flake is fighting to protect conservative principle from the white identity politics of Donald…
Political CEOs
It was in a speech before the Society for American Newspaper Editors that President Calvin Coolidge uttered…
It’s a Culture War, Stupid
Those who persist in denying that the Church is engaged in a culture war, the combatants in…
Into the Swamp
In the 1990s, journalist Lawrence Wechsler began teaching college courses on “Settling Accounts with the Prior Regime.”…
Let’s Use Pigs as Organ “Donors”
There are approximately 120,000 Americans on the organ transplant waiting list, about as many people as live…
