Our Electronic “Life”

by Micah Harris

The internet has undercut the market for real-world experience. While the price of experience has held steady—or nearly so—the internet has drastically reduced the price of information. Continue Reading »

21 Jul 2016

William Giraldi and Civilization’s Unraveling

by J. L. Wall

William Giraldi’s Hold the Dark, its jacket copy proclaims, is “an Alaskan Oresteia.” The comparison is perfectly calibrated to grab and hold this failed Classicist’s attention, and I found myself puzzling over it as I read. Soldiers come home from war, Continue Reading »

17 Nov 2014

The Enemies, and Friends, of the Humanities

by Mark Bauerlein

A funny thing happened when Michael Novak brought Herbert Marcuse to lecture to his students. It was the early-1970s when campus rebellion had entered its darker phase, and Marcuse was an idol of the Movement. His theory of “repressive tolerance” served as an essential touchstone for protest, and his volatile mix of Marx and Freud seemed an edgy, relevant style of intellectualized activism. Continue Reading »

21 Aug 2014

Greeks Bearing Debts

by Peter J. Leithart

Classics is no longer seen as a cutting-edge discipline, but two centuries ago German scholars devoted to the “cult of the Greeks” created the modern university when they developed new methods in philology and installed Altertumswissenschaft, the science of antiquity, at the center of the curriculum Continue Reading »

18 Jul 2014

Who is My Friend?

by Gilbert Meilaender

Among the “first things” of life in the classical world of Greece and Rome was friendship. As an intimate, affectionate, and loyal bond between two (or a few) persons, a bond unlike those of kin or tribe in that it is not simply given with birth, friendship will always have about it something a . . . . Continue Reading »

1 May 1999