Return to the Story
Stories are our way back into the possibilities of individual and collective imagination, no matter what happens.
The Culture
How To Ruin Your Kids
The great self-esteem experiment mistook the pedals for the steering wheel. Here's the result.
The Jolly Green Giant and the JFK Mystery
Nearly a quarter century after Jim Garrison’s conspiracy case fell apart, Oliver Stone demonstrated that a fraud can have a second life in fiction, if not in the universe of fact.
Our Mundane Comedy
The Democrats have nothing on Dante Alighieri. But ours is a laughably different sort of Purgatory.
The War on Humor
Laughter is an expression of our pleasure in the revelation that others, too, are flawed. That may explain why those who believe they can perfect human nature have a severe aversion to humor.
The Waste of Our Ignorant Age
America has problems, cultural, economic, and political, that cannot be addressed, let alone discussed, in the current climate of hysteria, irresponsibility, and ignorance.
Prigs Might Fly
On the perpetually haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Are We a Population or a People?
A population is easy to control so long as they are fed but a people must have a culture.
Fakers, Frauds, and Fools
It’s important to know the difference between a person who is trying to live authentically and a person who is a fully willing fraud, peddling in lies that masquerade as truth.
What Difference Your Ephemera Makes
In a world full of AI and ChatGPT, save your Playbill.
The Case for Great American Hagiography
We have to once again pay tribute to our best and let Hollywood fester with the rest.
A Massive Effort at Moral Rebuilding Is Necessary
Our cardinal institutions are sickly, incompetent, or perverse and in need of total reform. Yet what we must do, we must do. So let us begin to do it.
Read Something Other Than Current Politics
When you get away from the fury of your own political issues, you have a chance, born of leisure and human sympathy, to think about complex matters in a mature, even-handed, and impartial way.
An American Awakening
Conservatives who have battled the incomplete religions of the French Revolution and Marxism have little understanding of what is now upon them. Their weapons are useless against this new enemy.
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
Wassail! Christmas food and drink explained.
The 1980s on Trial
Before iPhones and the internet and Twitter and outrage culture, there was an understanding that beneath the veneer of civilization was something wild, dangerous, and joyful.
Soup and Sunflowers
Why are unspeakably middle-class kids throwing soup at paintings and glueing themselves to walls?
Should Terrorists Who Damage Great Works of Art Face the Death Penalty?
Or just life in prison without parole?
What Would C. S. Lewis Say?
Lewis promoted the good actions of responsible individual citizens engaging the challenge of living in a fallen and dark world.
A Just Prejudice
Like Burke, Russell Kirk understood that an affirmation of the customary and conventional is the most reliable safeguard for individuality and fructifying idiosyncrasy.