Thomas Sowell: Tragic Optimist
In his 2000 memoir A Personal Odyssey, Sowell recounts a parable that was read to him as a young boy and which he never forgot.
Samuel Kronen
· 29 min read
Books
A collection of 203 posts
Mailer and the Second Wavers
“The Prisoner of Sex”—in both magazine and book form—was largely a baroque riposte to Kate Millett’s bestselling feminist polemic Sexual Politics.
Charlotte Allen
· 31 min read
Fifty Years of Fear and Loathing
Finding out the truth about any aspect of Hunter Thompson’s life is frustrating given his propensity for self-mythologising.
David S. Wills
· 14 min read
Sex, Drugs, and Antiquity
The underlying assumption of The Immortality Key is that the human need to reconcile itself with death is a core element of religion.
Clifton Ross
· 10 min read
The Enduring Relevance of Czesław Miłosz’s ‘The Captive Mind’
It is into such pathologies that The Captive Mind delves, and why it has such application to our time.
Robin Ashenden
· 11 min read
We Can Revisit (And Even Replace) the Classic Books We Teach Children—Without Cancelling Them
Allan Stratton
· 15 min read
Before 'Groundhog Day': The Time-Loop Novel that Started It All
On March 4th, the Ringer, a website that covers pop culture, featured an article entitled “We’re in a Time Loop of Time-Loop Movies.” Similar articles have appeared in many other pop-culture venues of late. Suddenly, time-loop stories seem to be everywhere. This month Hulu began streaming director Joe Carnahan’
Kevin Mims
· 11 min read
The Problem With Linking Censorship to Incitement
In any case, I do not share the view that to restrict speech necessarily diminishes the spread of ideas.
Claire Lehmann
· 11 min read
Against Dilettantes
The reason these books endure and will be read long after the writers of littérature engagée harping on a string of fashionable social trends are ridiculed and forgotten, is their aesthetic impact.
Elena Shalneva
· 9 min read
Beating Up Boomer
Reviews of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney, Hachette, 465 pages (March 2018) OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind by Jill Filipovic, Atria/One Signal, 336 pages (August 2020) Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom
Kevin Mims
· 16 min read
Why We Should Read Martin Amis
Amis is in love with English, and the marriage is a healthy one.
Riley Moore
· 10 min read
Ray Russell's Incubus: A Lost Gem from America's Twentieth Decade
Hard as it might be to believe, the years that stretched from roughly 1967 through the bicentennial year of 1976 brought even more foment, outrage, unrest, and upheaval to America than the most recent decade has managed. The escalation of the Vietnam War, the student protests against that war, the
Kevin Mims
· 15 min read
"I Was Never More Hated Than When I Tried to Be Honest"
Allergic to narrow-mindedness, poor taste, and moral arrogance, Ellison detested any kind of racial essentialism, separatism, and determinism.
Samuel Kronen
· 26 min read
What Is #DisruptTexts?
The disrupters rely on rhetorical devices such as replacing the passive “under-represented” with the active “marginalized,” “erased,” and “excluded.”
Lona Manning
· 9 min read
The Hustler and the Queen
NOTE: This essay contains spoilers. The surprise success of the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit has brought me a great deal of delight—I’m a longtime fan of both the novel and its author, Walter Tevis. Just this summer, I wrote an essay about all the great American
Kevin Mims
· 14 min read