In Bob Dole’s remarkably inept campaign for the presidency, he could nonetheless count on one surefire applause line to rouse even the most dispirited audience: an attack on “the liberal media.” (He made a particular target of the New York Times.) Dole obviously enjoyed sticking it to the . . . . Continue Reading »
This last term of the Supreme Court brought home to us with fresh clarity what it means to be ruled by an oligarchy. The most important moral, political, and cultural decisions affecting our lives are steadily being removed from democratic control. Only Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas . . . . Continue Reading »
Sacred Music of the 20th Century LAL-2001, Life Art, Ltd. 129 Frandview Terrace, Box 300, Lakeside, MT 59922 The most unexpected classical music recording I’ve run across recently is Sacred Music of the 20th Century, a compact disc chiefly devoted to a cantata by John Boyle called Requiem for the . . . . Continue Reading »
Once we’ve denounced the balderdash that all too often passes for teaching in contemporary American colleges, there still remains the question of what we ought to teach instead. Indignation is an insufficient alternative to the brutal secularization of the college curriculum. But some conservative . . . . Continue Reading »
It is common in some circles to say that our legal system worries too much about rights and not enough about responsibilities. The complaint is a fair one, as far as it goes. But the real problem with rights—and with what Mary Ann Glendon calls “rights talk,” a kind of talk that dominates . . . . Continue Reading »
Last year I saw two truly vile movies, Pulp Fiction and Kids. The first turned my stomach. The second filled me with shame for having sat through it: leaving the theater, I felt unclean. Those movie experiences reminded me of the depths to which popular culture has sunk, a reminder . . . . Continue Reading »
Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist by peter berkowitz harvard university press, 313 pages, $35 A consensus about the meaning of Nietzsche’s philosophy continues to elude us. One might have thought, for example, that a man who praises cruelty, denounces pity, and entertains the idea of mass . . . . Continue Reading »
Chinese astronomers Hi and Ho were put to death for failing to foretell the solar eclipse of 2169 B.C. I myself was taken by surprise in 1979. A sifting of light pulled me away from my baby’s morning nap and onto the edge of the porch. A line in the west, the leading edge of shadow dividing light . . . . Continue Reading »
When the Editor-in-Chief of this journal invited me to come East to work with him and his colleagues some six and a half years ago, it was in almost every way an offer I could not refuse. It meant doing work I wanted to do in the company of people I wanted to work with. I had not previously thought . . . . Continue Reading »
Mencken: A Lifeby fred hobsonrandom house, 650 pages, $35 H. L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor.edited with an introduction by jonathan yardleyknopf, 450 pages, $30 H. L. Mencken, Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work . edited by fred hobson, vincent fitzpatrick, and bradford . . . . Continue Reading »
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