Deaths of despair are related to questions of meaning and the psychological conditions for social malaise.
Book Reviews
Fresh commentary on some of the most important books in law, politics, and culture.
Dictators used sycophantic biographers, influential artists, and press agents to spread their cults and create the illusion of invincibility.
No polity, whether Israel or America, will be healthy if it blurs together God and nation.
Fish contends that free speech as a concept must be “flexible” and “malleable” in order to allow for its application in a variety of real-world situations.
Past Reviews
Right-wing radio broadcasters were a crucial, but now mostly forgotten, element of the Republican Party’s rise in the South.
Irrationality offers all manner of human peculiarities and follies but no clarity on the exact attributes making something irrational.
What happens when an author writes brilliantly but seems utterly unaware of his prejudices?
In 2020, a famous novelist offering a tale about love in the midst of disaster is a prophet of hope
The liberal arts are valuable only insofar as they are transformative, redemptive, and central to human flourishing.
Hitz reminds us of a way out of the dark woods we find ourselves in, a journey that draws us upwards and out of our isolated selves.
The life of the mind needs firm anchors lest it become unmoored from reason and prudence.
How America's Political Parties Change represents the culmination of Michael Barone’s 60 years of experience examining American elections.
Vocation’s lost meaning is the real mystery.
For Piketty, the Hayekian turn in the 1980s was a long planned ideological triumph, but his narrative omits certain crucial details.
Jefferson remains indispensable to the American story, the wordsmith of our most noble ideals and symbol of our most awful paradoxes.
The difficulty is that APA originalism runs up against the constitutionalist position at every turn.
Reilly not only vindicates the founders, he provides arguments that are so strong that a competent grand jury would not even allow the case to go to trial.
Even with (literally) a lifetime of experience under our belts, human beings are not fully transparent—even to ourselves.