In our time, no books, no films, have enjoyed such a dazzling international success as the James Bond stories. But the impact was not instantaneous. When Casino Royale appeared in | Continue reading
Everyone’s world got a little bit smaller during the pandemic. For many, it became a lot smaller. Out of necessity, our varied definitions of what constituted community underwent a rapid | Continue reading
Late this January, the Lehigh University College of Business published a short video about poverty. In the video, professor of economics Frank Gunter sets out to debunk three myths about | Continue reading
Most discussions of nuclear power are conducted in a haze of misinformation: there are few areas of public controversy where so much of what everyone “knows” is not really so. | Continue reading
In Shakespeare's England, a man waiting his turn in a barber shop would take a violin from the wall and entertain himself and his neighbors; in Louis B. Mayer's America, | Continue reading
In the modern era, there have been few more spectacularly bungled attempts to wrest power away from the forces of history than the August 1991 plot to keep the Soviet | Continue reading
I. The Beginning of the Bible and Its Greek Counterparts All the hopes that we entertain in the midst of the confusion and dangers of the present are founded, positively | Continue reading
The battle for the survival of the United States of America is upon us. It has not come in the form of traditional civil war. There are no uniformed armies, | Continue reading
Unhappy is a society that has run out of words to describe what is going on. So Thurman Arnold observed in connection with the language of private property—the myths and | Continue reading
This past September the New Yorker published a long article, "The Greening of America," by Charles A. Reich, associate professor…View Post | Continue reading
"The test of a first-rate mind,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” No one better exemplified that skill than the novelist Ralph Ellison. Of those writers and thinkers who dwelt … | Continue reading
What had been teased as the greatest espionage scandal in American history—a U.S. president conspiring with Russia to steal an election—today should be seen as a cautionary tale about the fallibility of our lawmen and spies, the credulity of our press, and the hubris and hysteria … | Continue reading
The period of geopolitical flux that fracking has unleashed will present its own set of challenges in the next decade, but America will meet them from a renewed position of strength and independence. If the energy revolution of the 2010s has made anything clear, it is that it’s n … | Continue reading
It doesn't feel like much of anything, to be honest. It's just another day ending in "y" in Donald Trump's Washington. | Continue reading
The overall attitude of the mommy-blogger brigade, most of whom were stay-at-home moms, was one of defiance: They might have embraced the trappings of the 1950s Stepford Wife, with their child-centric lifestyle and suburban homes and breadwinning husbands conveniently in the back … | Continue reading
On ‘September 1, 1939’View Post | Continue reading
Review of 'A German Officer in Occupied Paris' By Ernst JüngerView Post | Continue reading
Climate data may be tainted by the fact that almost 90 percent of U.S. weather stations, which do not meet the National Weather Service’s location standards. | Continue reading
Review of 'The Last Pirate of New York' By Rich CohenView Post | Continue reading
I taught there for 18 years, but the details of its conduct as revealed in a recent lawsuit shocked even meView Post | Continue reading
Nelson Algren’s AmericaView Post | Continue reading
Was he the greatest writer of the past century?View Post | Continue reading
He invented realistic theater, and now he bores. Why?View Post | Continue reading
The case for ChopinView Post | Continue reading
How the embrace of other media made New York’s theater district iconicView Post | Continue reading
It’s tedious to encounter a “new atheist” intoning arguments against faith that were shopworn in Voltaire’s day. Sooner or later, he will bring up the Spanish Inquisition. To a Russian specialist like me, that example of undeniable religious cruelty is not especially impressive. … | Continue reading
William Goldman tells of having delivered a script to Sidney Pollack and then coming upon the director typing it out, word for word. Asked what the hell he thought he was doing, Pollack replied: “I’m making it my own.” A startling but not silly answer: Whatever a director finds i … | Continue reading
ifty years ago, New York was home to a pair of world-famous opera companies. Respectively headquartered kitty-corner from each other in the brand-new Lincoln Center ... | Continue reading
When the French artist Paul Delaroche saw one of the first photographs in 1839, he is said to have exclaimed, “From today, painting is dead!” In response to the threat Delarouche perceived, the art of painting underwent a series of radical stylistic transformations | Continue reading
What the purveyors of victimhood culture do not seem to grasp is that in weakening dignity, and in undermining the principles that deem all men and women to be moral equals, they unwittingly destroy the safeguards that prevent bad actors—such as hoaxers and narcissists—from climb … | Continue reading
Friendship, Love, the Philosopher’s Stone, These three things are ranked alone; These I sought from sun to sun, And I found—not even one. — Heinrich ... | Continue reading
f all the Broadway musicals written between the consolidation of the genre in the early ’20s and the start of its decline in the mid-’60s, ... | Continue reading