Donald Trump on Tuesday confirmed yet again why he is the most robust president since Ronald Reagan. Following up on his brilliant speeches before a joint session of Congress in February, his speech about combating Islamic terrorism before Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia, and his splendid defense of Western civilizational values in Warsaw
Ah, Labor Day! For many, this national holiday is chiefly a bittersweet celebratory marker: a line in the sand (preferably at some winsome beach) between the season of recreation and the seasons of toil. Summer is packing up, autumn and winter are about to schedule their arrival. Yet Labor Day is also something
At Yale, where censorship never sleeps, the Committee of Public Safety—no, wait, that was Robespierre’s plaything. Yale’s new bureaucracy is called the “Committee on Art in Public Spaces.” Its charge? To police works of art on campus, to make sure that images offensive to favored populations are covered over or removed. At the
What’s the highest pleasure known to man? Christian theologians talk about the visio beatifica, the “beatific vision” of God. Alas, that communion is granted to very few in this life. For the common run of mankind, I suspect, the highest pleasure is moral infatuation. Like a heartbeat, moral infatuation has a systolic and diastolic
Back in August 2016, I was pleased to have been able to amaze the world with an important literary discovery: a hitherto unknown manuscript by the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Everyone knows about Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon. In that clever post-modernist exercise, the sanguinary tale of the woodcutter, the bandit, the
At last, I am in a position to help the New York Times. It’s a good feeling. As anyone who has stumbled upon their website knows, our former paper of record, underscoring its insatiable appetite to provide the public with all the news that fits its agenda, prominently features a solicitation for hot
Not the Pope, Francis the anti-American environmentalist Jesuit. No, I mean Alex, the 18th-century English poet. Here’s my question: Is the whole Russia-meddled-in-U.S.-election/Donald-Trump-colluded-with-Putin-to-snatch-the-presidency-from-its-rightful-owner,-H.-Clinton narrative an example of what Pope talked about at the beginning of The Rape of the Lock? What dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs, What mighty Quarrels rise from trivial
I have no idea who wrote the rousing speech that Donald Trump delivered Thursday in Warsaw. But I think I know who might have provided a model: Pericles of Athens. As I noted yesterday, the speech contained the usual quota of diplomacy-speak, freshened up with numerous specific advisories: the US stands behind Article
A couple of weeks ago in this space, I speculated that CNN, the Crackpot News Network, had reached the terminal stage of malevolent implausibility. “[I]t would be a good thing,” I wrote, “were CNN humiliated and sued out of existence. It performs no journalistic function, merely a destructively partisan one.” As usual, I
It often has been observed that philosophy really got going when people started thinking seriously about the distinction between appearance, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. Plato is full of meditations on this theme, from the stick that appears bent when half submerged in a bowl of water to the
