How Trump Missed His, and America's, Best Chance on Coronavirus
There is another world out there. There is another world, with another President Donald J. Trump. There is another world in which President Trump saw coronavirus sweeping through China and grasped how powerfully and elegantly his claims about the authoritarian and deceptive nature of the Chinese state had been illustrated.
The Decadent Society—A Review
A review of The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, by Ross Douthat. Simon & Schuster (February 25 2020) 272 pages. Writing about decadence can be symptomatic of the condition. How many conservatives—this reviewer included—have eased out article-length moans about sclerotic institutions, falling
Grooming Gangs and Indifferent Police: What Have We Learned After Rotherham?
Victoria Agoglia was reported missing 136 times between February and September 2002. Whenever she returned to her residential care home she was thought to be drunk or to have taken drugs. Staff at the home were aware of a “pimp” who appeared to be in his mid-twenties and who was
'For the Love of Men'—A Review
A review of For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity by Liz Plank, St. Martin’s Press (September 2019) 336 pages. “There is no greater threat to humankind,” Liz Plank announces on the first page of her book For the Love of Men, “Than our current
The Globalisation of Ethnonationalism
In Reading Lolita in Tehran, the Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi discussed her experiences teaching the novels of Austen, Joyce and Nabokov to Iranian students as the Islamic Revolution transformed the country. Nafisi related their themes of empowerment and resistance to the oppression and the censorship she saw around
Deepfakes and the Threat to Privacy and Truth
You just crossed into the twilight zone. “Photographs furnish evidence,” wrote Susan Sontag in On Photography. “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.” Sontag went on to write of how photographs can misrepresent situations. But do they even have to show real objects? When you open
The Right Needs To Grow Up On Environmentalism
Mentioning the environment to a conservative is liable to elicit a similar response that mentioning political correctness would from a left-winger: a slight raising of the eyebrows, a slight exhalation of breath and, perhaps, a folding of the arms or tapping of the feet. It smells—it positively stinks—of
In Defense of Male Stoicism
I dealt with the most stereotypically feminine of mental illnesses in the most stereotypically masculine way. After acknowledging that I was anorexic, and deciding that I had no wish to be, I put my head down and tried to recover with the minimum of fuss. I told almost nobody about
