History Matters
A restoration of history, in all its complexity, is critical to escaping the polarized, rigid, and often insane political environment we now inhabit.
Joel Kotkin
· 16 min read
Art and Culture
A collection of 726 posts
A Kiss Is Just a Kiss
The uproar over a fleeting outburst of uninhibited joy is ludicrous.
Heather Mac Donald
· 9 min read
A Cartographer for the Ages
In the eleventh instalment of his series on the history of Canada, Greg Koabel describes how Samuel de Champlain fundamentally redirected France’s transatlantic colonial project
Greg Koabel
· 22 min read
Israel’s Everywoman at War
Helen Mirren’s Golda Meir offers a profile of greatness in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Michael Oren
· 16 min read
Our Lost Classical Learning
The Western canon was not an unchanging set of texts, but an ongoing conversation that lasted thousands of years—enabling each generation to build on the intellectual heritage of the past.
Brian Kaller
· 7 min read
But is it a Bernini? A Tale of Contested Identity in the Art World
How the bronze crucifix in the Art Gallery of Ontario got from seventeenth-century Rome to twenty-first century Toronto is an intriguing tale, but it is a narrative filled with gaps.
Jonathan Salem-Wiseman
· 11 min read
Remembering ‘Exodus’
A perennially controversial bestseller turns 65.
Kevin Mims
· 18 min read
Misreading Middle-Earth: Tolkien and the Contemporary Reader
Fantasy is more popular than ever, and this is the direct consequence of Tolkien’s success. But the genre has survived by adapting, and in an age of secularism, that process has involved evaporating the religious themes Tolkien cared about so deeply.
Josh Allan
· 10 min read
On Marriage and Happiness
It is easy for a successful writer to advise that career success isn’t that important. Would a failed writer agree?
Kevin Mims
· 9 min read
‘New France’ Stumbles Out of the Gate
In the tenth instalment of an ongoing Quillette series on the history of Canada, historian Greg Koabel describes the early—and tragically unsuccessful—French efforts to create a permanent colony
Greg Koabel
· 20 min read
‘A Dream Deferred’ Revisited
Shelby Steele’s masterful second book invites black America to reject redemptive liberalism and the helplessness it demands for a humanistic politics of advancement.
Samuel Kronen
· 17 min read
The Quest for Pelts
In the ninth instalment of an ongoing Quillette series on the history of Canada, Greg Koabel describes how the late 16th-century fur trade developed amid a disrupted Indigenous geopolitical landscape
Greg Koabel
· 24 min read
Rock of Ages
The musical legacy of Robbie Robertson is a monument to the possibilities of American song.
Benjamin Kerstein
· 12 min read
On Sontag
A new collection of essays from the mid-70s offers a frustrating glimpse of the author’s strengths and weaknesses.
Riley Moore
· 11 min read
In the Spirit of the Lord
Menacing, exuberant, eccentric, and ambitious—Dylan’s first evangelical record turns two-score and four.
David Cohen
· 16 min read