Diamond is the most valuable, not only of precious stones, but of all things in this world. ~Pliny The Elder Loving someone, and having them love you back, is the most precious thing in the world. ~Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook At age 11, I first glimpsed the bewildering anthropologic spectacle
At the American university where I teach, one of my assigned tasks is to advise undergraduates—mostly freshmen and sophomores. This essay describes a conversation I had in 2017 with one of those advisees. I will call him Daniel. Daniel was a sophomore at the time. He had been an
The thing about PJ O’Rourke, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 74, was that everyone wanted to be around him. By “everyone,” I don’t just mean the right-wingers I hang out with, most of whom share PJ’s classical-liberal politics, but also neoconservatives like Bill
In January, as reporters were celebrating the first woman—and also the first transgender person—to win more than a million dollars on Jeopardy!, I was reading up on the discrimination still faced by biological women who toil away in my own fields of endeavor: anthropology and archaeology. This discrimination
Dear Reader, This week's dispatch focuses on the unfolding situation in Eastern Europe. We have three pieces for you on the subject, one from Chris Miller, a Grand Strategy expert, analysing Putin's strategic intentions in What Putin Really Wants, another from regular Quillette contributor, Brian Stewart,
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with David Paisley and Jay VanderWier, two of the many ordinary working-class Canadians who’ve assembled in Ottawa to protest restrictive government COVID policies.
The current crises in eastern Europe reflect more than just Kremlin mischief-making—they reflect the first fruits of an emerging world order that spans the vastness from Beijing to Berlin. Unlike the longstanding liberal status quo, with its roots in classical civilization and the Enlightenment, this emerging alternative draws upon
As I write this, Vladimir Putin has moved more than 100,000 troops to Russia’s Ukrainian border, and has strongly implied that he will invade absent an ironclad guarantee that Ukraine will never be permitted to join NATO. Although the Biden administration has rejected that demand, a chorus of
On Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desk sits a bronze statue of Peter the Great, the tsar who spent his four decades in power waging war on neighbors to establish his country as a great power in Europe. Peter would have understood the nature of the current conflict in Eastern
As a skinny, unathletic nerd, I had no desire to play high-school football. Fortunately, no one compelled me to do so. Even if I could have become an adequate player by expending massive effort, much of the time I spent playing would have come at the expense of learning things
For decades, it has been common to call authoritarian new laws, norms, or government actions “Orwellian.” In 1984, George Orwell so brilliantly portrayed a nightmarish future that his name became synonymous with almost anything one wishes to describe as oppressive. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, meanwhile, provided a rather
The rise of ultra-progressive ideologies and the decline in patriotic sentiment are two broad cultural trends that worry American conservatives. Some may be tempted to imagine that these two phenomena are connected to immigration and the resulting ethnic and racial diversity—especially since opposition to immigration is common among conservatives
While Joan Didion felt compelled to write about Latin American culture and politics because everyone else was doing it, she didn’t understand them very well.
How many trans-identified children “desist”? That is, how many identify as transgender for a time, and then eventually stop doing so, prior to medical intervention (as distinct from detransitioners, who return to identifying with their natal sex after undergoing some form of medical transition)? The answer is that no one
One of the early signs of trouble for the British anti-racism movement was a tweet sent by Lee Jasper in April 2013, in which he declared that black people are incapable of being racist, and offered to publicly debate anybody who disagreed. I offered to debate him, as did a