Warren Buffett’s son Peter has dropped $160 million—and probably a lot more—to turn a county in upstate New York into his personal farm-to-table utopia, complete with its own radio station, music festival, and currency | Continue reading
The publication by Gallimard of the earliest manuscript of what would become ‘In Search of Lost Time’ lays bare the autobiographical origins of Proust’s key themes, including his feelings about his Jewishness | Continue reading
As Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany and then embarked on his program of world conquest and mass extermination, The New York Times’ Berlin bureau chief was busy slanting the news in his favor | Continue reading
As the mainstream narrative about the origin of COVID-19 falls apart, it’s time to put other widely accepted facts about the virus—and the devastating measures they were used to justify—under the same scrutiny | Continue reading
Many have heard the story about the British philosopher who asserted in a lecture that, whereas in many languages a double negative makes a positive, in no language does a double positive make a negative. Instantly, from the back of the room, a voice piped up, “Yeah, yeah.” While … | Continue reading
A visit to Switzerland reveals the coming age of techno-Calvinism, created by the merger of iPhones and the new Puritan America | Continue reading
This story originally appeared in August, 2014. We are reprinting it today to mark four years since Israel and Hamas accepted a cease-fire to end the Gaza War. *** The Israel Story Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of littl … | Continue reading
Discover how selection bias, admissions tests, and education policy keep elite schools 'cult-like' as education becomes more competitive. | Continue reading
The push to decouple skepticism from science turns schoolchildren into victims | Continue reading
Philip Roth’s Czech KGB file | Continue reading
Will the pandemic push America’s greatest city over the edge? | Continue reading
The deal that the American elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta | Continue reading
How to write? With love, says the author. | Continue reading
A new generation of media crusaders clamors for government control over what you see, hear, and read—and for banning their competition | Continue reading
America is now ruled by a single elite class rather than by local patrician smart sets competing with each other for money and power | Continue reading
The age of the machines demands its own samizdat | Continue reading
The American political and legal systems are working just fine, despite a few hiccups. Meanwhile, American corporations are depriving citizens of basic rights and freedoms and destroying our democracy. | Continue reading
Nearing the 20th anniversary of the USA Patriot Act, how did laws ostensibly structured to protect Americans from threats from abroad come to reimagine the legal basis for our freedoms at home? | Continue reading
On the composer’s 250th birthday | Continue reading
Like video game zombies they roam the fields of battle from Armenia and Syria to Iran, India, France, and Israel, engaging in a simulacrum of warfare, without risk | Continue reading
How a respected but peripheral editorial job evolved into a partisan bludgeon for both sides of the American divide | Continue reading
The Drudge Report has become a conformist shadow of its formerly bratty, oppositional self. Why? | Continue reading
How Social Gospel became Social Justice | Continue reading
Political scientist Louis Hartz accurately described the United States’ underlying cultural hyperindividualism. Is the next logical step the dissolution of the centralized federal state to become more like the EU? | Continue reading
What happens when our homes become our employers’ offices? | Continue reading
American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology—one with dangerous implications for Jews | Continue reading
The Tides Network is a powerful instrument leveraged by billionaires working to change America, while shielding their philanthropic dollars from public scrutiny. Here’s how it works. | Continue reading
Inside the CCP’s use of social media bots and other disinformation tactics to promote its own response to the coronavirus pandemic and attack its critics | Continue reading
My grandfather Siegfried was not a sophisticated man. When he bought a car—always the same car, a blue Peugeot 305, replaced every few years with a newer model of the same exact make—he kept the seats covered in plastic to keep them eternally clean. When you asked him for an appl … | Continue reading
Not all mergers are the same. The ones underpinning our biggest Silicon Valley companies are uniquely bad—and deeply un-American. | Continue reading
Its delicious legacy stretches from the corner deli all the way back to Abraham | Continue reading
A startling investigation into how a cheap, well-known drug became a political football in the midst of a pandemic | Continue reading
Years before Trump’s election the media dramatically increased coverage of racism and embraced new theories of racial consciousness that set the stage for the latest unrest | Continue reading
Is the liberal search for truth missing a sense of the common good, and a historically informed understanding of the violence of words? | Continue reading
Why Google, YouTube, Uber and the rest of corporate America are donning the costume of progressivism | Continue reading
Progressive ideas about diversity have taken over the corporate world but they offer a skin-deep version obsessed only with color and conformity | Continue reading
Collective demonization invades our culture | Continue reading
The late scholar Judith Shklar warned that liberalism can degenerate into a cult of victimhood that permits our sadistic desires to be passed off as unimpeachable virtue. Her warning is newly urgent today. | Continue reading
A slew of popularizing science books delve into the basic mismatch between being and human being | Continue reading
Seeing African Americans, or Muslims, or Jews, as part of victimized minority collectives is a toxic formulation that ensures that we are never treated fairly as individuals—and denies us the ability to exercise real power | Continue reading
A fan’s obsessive rummage through the letters and papers of the writer who died two years ago today reveals a playful, funny, brilliant man | Continue reading
Purity and danger: Why some are strangely comforted by lockdowns, fearful of herd immunity, and quick to punish anyone who questions the stark choice between them | Continue reading
The Chinese Communist Party leadership believe they are in the midst of an ‘intense, ideological struggle’ for survival and that to win they must defeat the West | Continue reading
A stolen de Kooning was found in the New Mexico home of a pair of Jewish retirees. It wasn’t their only secret. | Continue reading
No one runs America. That’s the terror and the beauty of American life in a nutshell, the answer to the secret of how 300 million people from many different places can live together between two oceans, sharing a future-oriented outlook that methodically obliterates any ties to th … | Continue reading
In the bad old days of abstinence education, purity pledges, and 7th Heaven on The WB television network, the common wisdom about sex went something like this: guys want to have sex for fun, and girls want to have sex for … well, virtually any other reason but fun. Daddy issues, … | Continue reading
Harvey Klehr, The Millionaire was a Soviet Spy; The Twisted Life of David Karr, 288pps Encounter Books, $25.99 David Karr, born in 1918 as David Katz to a Brooklyn Jewish family, led a life large enough to require the several names to go along with his multiple careers and identi … | Continue reading