In my second year as a high school teacher, my school district rolled out its “iPad Initiative.” Each of our district’s five high schools issued an iPad to every student. Within a few years, students at the middle school and the elementary level would have them, as well. Like
"In this time, party hatred was far more bitter than in our day.… In those almost forgotten days the same theatre could scarcely hold certain Royalist and Liberal journalists; the most malignant provocation was offered, glances were like pistol-shots, the least spark produced an explosion of quarrel.… There were
Land ownership has shaped civilizations from their beginnings, with a constant interplay between great powers—the aristocracy, the state, the Church, the emperor—and those below them. History has oscillated between periods of greater dispersion of ownership, and those that favored greater concentration. Today, we live in an era of
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A Review of Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama. Profile Books, 178 pages (March 2022) Liberalism is in bad odour. In the third decade of the 21st century, it is an ideology with few friends. Derided with equal vigour by populists on the Right and “progressives” on the Left,
On April 14th, Elon Musk, billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, made an offer to buy Twitter. He wants to take the publicly-traded social media platform private, purchasing 100 percent of the company at $US54.20 per share, an $US8 per-share premium over the stock’s price on April 13th.
Over the years, Le Tartuffe ou l’Imposteur has been one my favorite Molière plays to study and direct with my undergraduate students at Princeton University. I find it to be the best point of origin from which to discover his body of work. As often with Molière, the plot
Conservative anti-interventionists buy into an authoritarian narrative that ignores the clear choices made by the people of Ukraine.
Starvation will push and pull human psychology in unusual directions—it is one of the few things that can overcome fear of the authorities. When famine came to China 400 years ago, it made Chinese peasants receptive to the preachers of class war. When the government failed to provide crucial
I have been a Russophile for as long as I can remember. Or, to put it more exactly, since I was eight years old, when I attended a school play performance of Gogol’s The Government Inspector. I loved Gogol’s sense of humour, the long names with their patronymics—
Roland Fryer Jr.’s life is a movie script: A man abandoned by his mom and raised by an alcoholic dad became the youngest black professor to ever secure tenure at Harvard University. After ascending to the academic elite, Fryer didn’t resign himself to irrelevant technical puzzles; he put
Editor's note: this is the first in a three part series on how we can get clean energy. Part I details Fuel and Human Progress, Part II answers the question "Is Nuclear Power Safe?" and Part III provides an answer to "What Needs to Be
Former Mount Royal University professor Frances Widdowson describes the political, academic, and journalistic taboos surrounding the fate of Indigenous residential-school students in western Canada. Transcript of the Introduction: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m Jonathan Kay. This week, we’re going to be talking about the issue of unmarked
The late literary critic and social democrat Irving Howe once quipped that when radicals fail to build a movement, they start a magazine. Howe knew what he was talking about—his own magazine, Dissent, was one of them. The latest example of this truism is a new webzine called Compact,
Dear Readers, I hope this email finds you well. This week we feature a stimulating roundtable discussion between four of Quillette's contributors from the field of psychology: Chris Ferguson, Bo Winegard, Allen Buchanan and Cory Clark. Together they weigh The Costs and Benefits of Tribalism. We've