There is a lot to be learned from conceiving of people as vehicles of ideas. For ideas, whether right or wrong, good or bad, well understood or misunderstood, guide our conduct and therefore have enormous consequences in the world. Certainly ideas are more powerful than people tend to realize. ...
Last year Tom Nichols, an ardent Never Trump Republican, published a popular book called The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Expertise and Why It Matters. “Americans have reached a point,” argues Nichols, “where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual ...
Equality has become one of the most insidious ideas in the language. I do not mean, of course, equality before the law or equal pay for equal work, things that are more accurately described as fairness, since the word “equality” produces so much confusion. I mean that vague and lazy sense of ...
Our elected representatives, including many judges, more and more refuse to comply with federal immigration law. They do not conceive of themselves as disinterested agents of a system that it is their duty to serve and, by serving, bring into being. Rather, they themselves are the effective ...
If, as many geniuses have believed, civilization depends on individual restraint, then in order to maintain restraint, we require certain outlets for the primordial feelings of anger, aggression, and resentment that we experience throughout the course of life. Premodern societies, with their ...
A few weeks ago, Aly Raisman came to public attention for doing a brave and noble thing: testifying in court against Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor who, over two decades, had sexually abused her and more than 160 other girls and women. Thanks in part to ...
If you wanted to write a satire of leftist journalism, you could hardly do better than the sincere Sports Illustrated article on Meek Mill by DeAntae Prince. It concerns the friendship, meant to seem rather touching, between Sixers co-owner Michael Rubin and the jailed black Philly rapper. Much of ...
Nations throughout the West have come to view loneliness as an epidemic, for it is increasingly a source of anxiety and unhappiness, and is widely believed to exacerbate health problems. Since there’s not a problem a government can’t fix, according to human hubris, England has even gone so far ...
Last Saturday we saw women protest “gender inequality” throughout the nation. As ridiculous as they may have looked and behaved, all the carrying-on served a vital purpose: Like a religious ritual, it enabled women to think they are doing something important, something to improve their lives. ...
Far more than any other animal, the human being is able to gain some control over nature. It is an extraordinary accomplishment. Worship of the natural elements—so fearsome to our primitive ancestors—has given way to airplanes and spaceships, man navigating the skies and space in triumphant ...
