As a college student I would buy copies of The New Yorker to sample the sparkling prose of James Thurber and S. J. Perelman and to appreciate the clever cartoons that graced each issue. Despite the magazine's veering toward the trendy left thereafter, I could still find material in it worth reading ...
In response to a speech by President Obama at Ohio State on May 5 criticizing those who warn about "tyranny," there was a lively exchange last night by the Fox All-Stars about allowing the "state" to micromanage our lives. Kirsten Powers defended the Obama Administration's interest ...
As a child during the 1950s in the factory city of Bridgeport, CT, I constructed a social hierarchy that corresponded to where I thought the town's ethnic groups belonged. I doubt that I arrived at these rankings on my own. More likely, I absorbed them from my parents or schoolmates. My ...
In a solemn 2010 convocation of well-heeled feminists in Long Beach, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shared her hope for an all-female Supreme Court. Although in the bad old days there were only "nine men serving on the bench," explained Ginsburg, now with the appointment of Elena Kagan and ...
Having spent over half my life in the professional company of academics, I can state with certainty that gender-neutral societies suck. Admittedly the university is not yet antiseptically free of gender references. It continues to offer the kind of BS known as "Women's Studies," a ...
After the recent electoral debacle, Republican journalists and neocon news pundits have been discussing the roads to recovery for their battered party. One path that I"m sure will never be taken is trying to win back the libertarian and/or traditionalist right, both of which Romney managed to ...
A detailed report in The New York Times tells about a hearing taking place in the Russian Parliament emphasizing alleged American human-rights violations. Among the featured abuses are the American practices of waterboarding suspected terrorists, historical abuse of minorities, and the mistreatment ...
George Will recently complained about the "cognitive dissonance" characteristic of our ideological self-descriptions. According to Will, "Twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative as opposed to liberal," but many of them vote differently from the way they describe ...
Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years. (Vienna, Virginia: FGF Books, 2012.) Recently I received the galleys for the anthologized essays and book reviews by the late, great Joe Sobran (1946-2010). The anthology pieces come out of the period when Joe was working at National Review, a relation ...
Sometimes seemingly insignificant events dramatically affect the course of human history. The failure of a struggling young artist named Adolf Hitler to pass a drawing test at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907 changed world history decisively. Instead of becoming a certified representational ...
