Something is wrong. Throughout the West, people are angry, anxious, and discontented. Paradoxically, the ill temper arises amid wealth unimaginable to our recent ancestors. (But perhaps this is not a paradox after all. Recall 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”) . . . . Continue Reading »
The Palo Alto suicides started in 2002, when Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto High School class of 2007 and author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, must have been in middle school. I, a year ahead in the class of 2006, was adjusting to the awkward realities of the . . . . Continue Reading »
We live in paradoxical times. Over the last two generations, college students, especially at top-ranking universities, have been educated to believe that there is no transcendence. Human beings are a bundle of instincts, they’re told, or software in meat hardware, or some other reductive . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m becoming an N. S. Lyons fan. “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” is the latest installment in The Upheaval, the mysterious author’s Substack. (He writes under a pseudonym.) This extended essay provides an arresting account of the deepening crisis in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Algis Valiunas joins the podcast to discuss the brilliant and short life of Giacomo Leopardi, a poet still widely ignored in English-speaking circles. Continue Reading »
When a man proclaims nature malignant in all its parts and professes to hate life itself, one’s first suspicion is that something is profoundly wrong with him. The man’s grievance against creation must be the effect of some personal deficiency in body or soul or both, rather than a sound . . . . Continue Reading »
When Stephen Sondheim died in late November at ninety-one, the eulogies, tributes, and bouquets from critics and tastemakers were entirely expected. The Broadway composer and lyricist left the Earth having earned multiple Tonys and Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize, an Oscar, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a . . . . Continue Reading »
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who comprised the most consequential partnership in the history of American musical theater, were brought together by chance. It happened in the early 1940s, when each on his own cottoned to the idea of adapting the play Green Grow the Lilacs into . . . . Continue Reading »
According to the Talmud, the demons are more numerous than we are. “They stand over us like mounds of earth surrounding a pit.” Rav Huna teaches that “each and every one of us has a thousand demons to his left and ten thousand to his right.” Abba Binyamin tells us that “if the eye had the . . . . Continue Reading »
If in truth we find human dignity, then the reverse is also true: Where truth is cast aside, so also is human dignity. Continue Reading »
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