Black War Cinema and the Representation Paradox The Right - “For all of their insistence on cultural revolution, progressives are not yet ready to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” Guzi He 6/8/2023
Confessions of a Beautiful Soul The Right - “Despite the book’s homage to Friedrich Schiller via its title, we get nothing even remotely reminiscent of the profound intellectual mind meld between him and his great friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.” Michael Weyns 5/28/2023
Review: “Crassus: The First Tycoon” by Peter Stothard The Center - “Now, Peter Stothard has given us the final decades of the republic through the eyes of Crassus—Rome’s wealthiest man and former consul who famously embarked on a vainglorious and ultimately failed conquest of Parthia that culminated in his embarrassing death.” Paul Krause 5/26/2023
Excerpt: “Heal Your Daughter” The Center - “As one example, some time in 2018 and 2019, many of the young people in my practice suddenly started reporting gender dysphoria and declaring themselves trans. Charismatic social media stars were effectively saying: ‘If you don’t fit in, if you don’t like your body, then you’re trans. Everything will get better after you transition.'” Cheryl Green 4/30/2023
Review: “Uncommon Wrath” by Josiah Osgood The Center - “[Josiah] Osgood’s book is a welcome and exciting read about the rivalry between Caesar and Cato; Cato, in the process, finally receives some much-deserved due in the story of the republic’s final decades.” Paul Krause 4/29/2023
On Literary Science and the Bounds of Knowledge The Left - “But philistinism is not limited to the arts. I believe that those who cannot appreciate the wondrous beauty of the real world as revealed by science are philistines, too.” Daniel Sharp 4/27/2023
Do They Really Believe in Eugenics? The Right - “While denouncing the eugenics movement, one must also recognize that its repudiation by the progressive mainstream signals the rise of a self-centered ethos that is destructive in its own right.” Guzi He 4/13/2023
Review: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left” by Matt Johnson The Left - “[Matt] Johnson believes that by adopting [Christopher] Hitchens’s approach—his allergy to party politics, his hatred of racism and nationalism, his emphasis on pluralism and humanism—the contemporary left will not just benefit at the ballot box but will also benefit morally and intellectually.” Riley Moore 4/12/2023
Review: “The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective” by Michael Walzer The Right - “Reading between the lines, we learn in fact that [Michael] Walzer believes that the Right, wrong in its continuing adherence to capitalism, but correct in its eschewal of intellectual fashion, currently has a monopoly on political wisdom.” Seamus Flaherty 4/11/2023
Prelude to War: Lessons from the Second Spanish Republic The Right - “The Second Spanish Republic has many parallels with modern American politics. Much like its counterparts in Spain, the American left of today is no less preoccupied with terraforming the cultural landscape.” Guzi He 3/21/2023
Would Socrates Be Anti-Woke? A Stoic Critique of Identity Politics The Center - “For the Stoic, however, personal identity is not a fragmented life of intersecting cultural identities but rather a holistic and unified embodiment of rationality endowed by nature.” Jonathan Church 3/19/2023
Review: Spencer Klavan’s “How To Save The West” The Right - “Being a classicist and student of Greek philosophy, Klavan turns to his education to solve these philosophical dilemmas.” Tyler Hummel 3/14/2023
Review: Waller Newell’s “Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger” The Center - “Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proceeding through the luminaries of German Idealism and Romanticism—climaxing with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—then marching beyond Hegel to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, Newell gives a reading of philosophy gone wrong. Horribly wrong.” Paul Krause 3/8/2023
Marxism Has Been No Deliverer from Ethnic Strife The Right - “Any utopian project that tolerates humanity’s diverse values and identities only to the extent that they help advance a narrowly defined vision of progress can only end in indiscriminate violence.” Guzi He 3/4/2023
Review: Carl Trueman’s “Strange New World” The Right - “It bears repeating that this is a very good book. Trueman performs a thorough but concise excavation of the intellectual, philosophical, and metaphysical currents that he sees as moving below the crashing waves of our present cultural storm.” Henry George 2/21/2023
From Tanks to Think Tanks The Right - “One can judge the winds of change in foreign policy by the sudden proliferation of think tanks piping up and stating the obvious. There are tanks and think tanks and, despite the commitment of the Leopards, it may be the think tanks that are gaining the upper hand.” Brian Patrick Bolger 2/18/2023
Review: Bowen Blair’s “A Force for Nature” The Center - “Nancy Russell was one of those great heroines whose quest to save the Columbia Gorge in Oregon serves as an inspirational tale that embodies the best of American grit and determination.” Paul Krause 2/10/2023
How Enmity Imperils Liberal Democracy The Center - “Rather than calm debates about policy and its implications, both good and bad, we now live in a political era defined by emotion, where political discussions mutate into threats to our personal and group safety.” Sam Mace 2/8/2023
The Value in Reading Byung-Chul Han The Right - “Han occupies a somewhat unique position in today’s world that defies typical Right-Left categorization. This is partly because of Han’s bridging of multiple worlds: East and West; art and philosophy; theology and politics.” Josh Pauling 1/22/2023
The Case for Retiring “Confederate Heroes Day” The Left - “As we come to know more about the morally repulsive aspects of our national history—and, more importantly, face those realities—removing symbols of our collective failure in the past is not an attempt to deny our history. Rather, it is a sign of growth, a willingness to face our history.” Robert Jensen 1/19/2023
Multiculturalism Is Madness The Right - “The fact is that, historically, Great Britain has had a remarkably stable demographic makeup for at least a thousand years, if not much longer. The idea that what we have experienced since 1997…is in any way comparable or equivalent to the past is nonsense, at best, and disingenuous, at worst.” Henry George 1/19/2023
Free Speech: An Eternal Struggle The Center - “While Americans and other Westerners may be living in a golden age of free speech, there are still billions of people in the world who have yet to enjoy its blessings.” Aaron Tao 1/16/2023
Philadelphia Schools Have Replaced Critical Thinking with “Criticality” The Center - “Like so many school districts in a post-George Floyd America, Philadelphia’s is rushing to embrace anti-racism.” Christopher Paslay 1/11/2023
We Are All Socialists The Right - “Echoing this notion from on high, in 2016 the [World Economic Forum] announced the imminence of a post-historical future in the Marxist sense: ‘Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.'” Michael Weyns 12/21/2022
What Is a Human? The Center - “In fact, heterosexuality and the male-female binary can be observed across countless species. The onus of proof, therefore, is on those who claim that we are an exception.” Gerfried Ambrosch 12/21/2022
The Boredom of War The Right - “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s biggest enemy is not the West’s reticence to sending more drones, more weapons, and more fighter jets. President Zelenskyy’s biggest enemy is boredom.” Brian Patrick Bolger 12/12/2022
Review: Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good” The Right - “For Labour forgot that life involves loss and tragedy. It forgot that ‘human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning.'” Seamus Flaherty 11/30/2022
No, Let’s Not: Perpetrators of Pandemic Authoritarianism Cannot Be Forgiven The Center - “It must become embarrassing to admit one ever supported uninformed and nonconsensual participation in a medical experiment or mass house arrest and coerced isolation.” Allen Farrington 11/7/2022
No Easy Answers: Facing Ecological Crises Honestly The Left - “But we need to replace fanciful dreams of endless energy from renewables with full-cost accounting, which an increasing number of experts are taking seriously. There are destructive environmental and social consequences to constructing the infrastructure for that energy production.” Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen 10/8/2022
The NatCons v. Ukraine The Center - “At least Hazony recognizes that the democratic world should defend Ukraine. Other nationalists do not agree.” Matt Johnson 10/6/2022
Jordan Peterson’s “A Conservative Manifesto” Is Not Conservative The Right - “It is instead Hayekian liberalism delivered with a Calvinist grimness.” Henry George 10/4/2022
Review: Slavoj Žižek’s “Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed” The Right - “Combining inanity with compelling anecdote, idiocy with sensible instruction, Žižek addresses himself to the ‘mess we’re in.'” Seamus Flaherty 10/3/2022
The Joy of the Knife: On Autoimmune Responses in Politics The Right - “If we look at culture as a superorganism with its own immunological mechanisms, we can recognize modern societies as being profoundly dysregulated, and this gets worse the more modern they get.” Michael Weyns 9/24/2022
The Second Elizabeth, a Life Appreciated The Center - “From that distant day when I saw her ride down Poonamallee High Road in Madras, the epitome of regality and restraint, Elizabeth II did her best in balancing the demands of tradition, the weight of history, the requirements of society and culture both at home and abroad, and also attended to her family.” Vishwas Gaitonde 9/22/2022
Canada and the Many Problems with Euthanasia The Right - “The story goes on to detail another Canadian citizen who was repeatedly and continuously offered euthanasia, to such an extent that he began recording these occasions.” Jake Scott 9/19/2022