The coronavirus hostilities are increasing, it seems. Last week, I called up Paul Gottfried about something he wants me to write for Chronicles. As soon as he answered the phone, the old scholar launched into a rant about how difficult it’s become for him to get enough brandy—the only kind of ...

On Tuesday, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio personally oversaw the dispersal of thousands of Hasidic mourners who had gathered for the funeral of a rabbi who died of the coronavirus. “Something absolutely unacceptable happened in Williamsburg tonite: a ...

First follow Nature, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same. —Alexander Pope If anything good has come from these hard corona days, it’s the occasion they’ve provided for rethinking education. Parents around the country are homeschooling their children, and ...

If you’ve lived to reach a certain age and looked closely at the world, you’ve probably noticed how full of crap people are. Indignant when others engage in behaviors that they think are wrong, they are quite willing to ignore their own failings. More than that, once such failings are pointed ...

In “Who Wants to Play the Status Game?,” her Jan. 16 column at The Point, Agnes Callard, an academic philosopher at the University of Chicago, makes some interesting observations and claims. Like doctors, lawyers, and indeed the entire range of ambitious human beings, academics often find it ...

From the 19th century up through the early part of the 20th century, European intellectuals such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich Nietzsche, and José Ortega y Gasset expressed grave concerns about the rise of literacy and education among the masses. For these unapologetic elitists, a great ...

Unable to work and, in some cases, ordered to stay at home because of the coronavirus, many Americans are going out of their minds with boredom. What’s funny about this situation, though, is that it differs only in degree, not in kind, from the ordinary course of life. In other words, ...

If you’ve been to a supermarket recently, you’ve probably noticed how quickly people are buying up toilet paper, hand soap, dry goods, meats, and other necessities. More interesting, and disturbing, though, has been the rise in gun sales across the nation. Ammo.com reports that from March 10, ...

“We fall in love so as not to get sick,” wrote Sigmund Freud. It is a brilliant sentence, and an apt example of why the insightful thinker remains well worth reading even though he is full of loony ideas and fabricated (as we now know) a number of his “case histories.” Other people can be ...

According to Alexis de Tocqueville, “when inequality is the common law of a society, the strongest inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on a level, the least of them wound it. That is why the desire for equality always becomes more insatiable as equality is greater.” A ...