The Religious Instinct in a Godless World
The religious urge is born into nearly every child. And when we do not inherit a belief system, we build our own temples.
Megan Gafford
· 12 min read
Art and Culture
A collection of 726 posts
How French Intellectuals Ruined the West
Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained.
Helen Pluckrose
· 18 min read
The Paranoid Style in Shakespeare Denialism
Against conspiracist trends, there is an obligation on defenders of a liberal society to uphold the integrity of its intellectual methods.
Oliver Kamm
· 25 min read
Disorder in Heaven
The end of greatness in heavyweight combat sports.
Alexander Blum
· 7 min read
The Wendat World
In the nineteenth instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how Indigenous societies greeted the French influx of the early seventeenth century.
Greg Koabel
· 23 min read
American Carnage
Alex Garland’s spectacular new film ‘Civil War’ is a warning of what can happen to democracies when civil society collapses.
Allan Stratton
· 7 min read
Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part II: Fanaticism and Failure (1966–2022)
After half a decade of critical adulation, Godard’s career slumped into doctrinaire Maoism, bitterness, incomprehensibility, and irrelevance. It never recovered.
Charlotte Allen
· 36 min read
Desire and Ambition
Today, most of John Braine’s work is out of print and forgotten. But he was an underrated writer, unafraid to confront the complexities of masculine sexuality with terse precision, self-deprecation, and emotional candour.
Brad Strotten
· 11 min read
Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part I: Abstraction Hero (1930–65)
A brief five-year period produced nearly all the Godard movies that film aficionados still remember, but even these celebrated works have dated poorly.
Charlotte Allen
· 33 min read
The Delta Variant
John Landis’s 1978 comedy classic ‘Animal House’ is a time capsule from an era when humor and campus politics were very different.
George Case
· 9 min read
Under Attila’s Gaze
In the ninth instalment of ‘The So-Called Dark Ages,’ Herbert Bushman describes a Roman diplomat’s famous fifth-century journey into the heart of Hunnic territory.
Herbert Bushman
· 28 min read
Against Agency
Attending to Shakespeare on his own terms may allow us to reclaim the erotic warmth that is latent in our human condition.
Marilyn Simon
· 8 min read
Sex and Smashed Steel
A look back at J.G. Ballard's ‘Crash’—one of the the 20th century’s greatest and most disturbingly prophetic novels.
Benjamin Kerstein
· 25 min read
Narcissism for All
Forty-five years ago, Christopher Lasch identified what has become a defining feature of modern activism—“the ever-present, neurotic need to be recognized and affirmed.”
Julia Friedman
· 10 min read
Mystic Without a Church
Werner Herzog’s new memoir provides a look back on the magisterial and occasionally maddening career of a cinematic visionary.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 17 min read