History
The Canadian Historical Association’s Fake 'Consensus' on Canadian Genocide
Last month, the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) issued a public “Canada Day Statement”—described as having been “unanimously approved” by the group’s governing council—declaring that “existing historical scholarship” makes it “abundantly clear” that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples amounts to “genocide.” The authors also claimed that there
The Subversive Simone Weil—A Review
A review of The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, by Robert Zaretsky. The University of Chicago Press, 181 pages. (February 2021) “How much time do you devote each day to thinking?” That’s a strange question to ask a nurse from one’s hospital bed,
The Philologist, the Iraqi Girl, and Me
I hadn’t bargained on the climate, especially not in the summer and especially not on the coast. That didn’t stop me from going ahead and doing what every self-respecting American college kid visiting Israel, such as Bernie Sanders, did back then—a stint of physical labor on a
The Ear Whisperers
Advisors to rulers, wrote Machiavelli in his Discourses, would achieve their best results by “putting their case with moderation instead of assuming responsibility for it, and by stating one’s views dispassionately and defending them alike dispassionately and moderately—so that, if the city or prince accepts your advice, he
A Toast to Randolph Bourne
The pandemic has taken from us a bold and gifted writer, just 32 years old—only not this pandemic but the one that swept the world in 1918. The story of Randolph Bourne confirms that history perpetually forgets what it perpetually remembers. Every decade rediscovers Bourne and every decade loses
Historical Racism Is Not the Singular Cause of Racial Disparity
Even before the crescendo of Black Lives Matter last summer, the operative view among progressives was that historical racism is the overriding cause of racial disparities between black and white Americans today. The progressive ethos on race is neatly conveyed by the novelist William Faulkner’s remark: “The past is
The Strange Rehabilitation of the Black Panther Party
Isn’t it a little late for the rehabilitation of the Black Panther Party (BPP)? After all, the organization that first caught the public’s attention in 1969 was already in its death throes by the early 1970s, beset by internal splits, criminal prosecutions, and violent faction-fighting. Yet,
Blessed Are the Sense-Makers
Years from now, if anyone looks at a line graph (in the OED or Google dictionary) tracking the frequency with which a word is mentioned in print, they may notice the current affinity for the word “narrative.” An already overworked word (by virtue of its abstractness), it is now almost
