Pat McCrory: How to Get a Handle on the Crime Surge
The Right - “My wife and I used to go vacation in San Francisco. We don’t anymore…This is what’s headed toward the rest of the nation.” 1/24/2022

James Lindsay: “Counter Wokecraft” and Responses to Institutional Takeover
The Center - “You have to have a steel spine in your liberalism. ‘What kind of government did you create, sir?’ ‘We created a republic, if [you] can keep it.’ The ‘if you can keep it’ part requires a steel spine.” 1/19/2022

Finland, Russia, and the NATO Question: An Interview with Risto Penttilä
The Center - ” I think that we are, as always, pragmatic idealists.” 1/16/2022

Peter Boghossian: On the Purpose of Education
The Center - “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with debate. In fact, debate, in certain circumstances, can be good, but we can often solve the problems…through conversation.” 1/13/2022

Magatte Wade: The Power of Free Markets for Africa
The Center - “Eventually, I had an emotional crisis because I could no longer reconcile the life of abundance that the U.S. afforded me. I made a pact with myself that from here on, I’m really going to try to see what needs to happen for [Africa] to thrive.” 1/9/2022

Frank Vogl: Understanding the Kleptocrats and Their Enablers
The Center - “Too often, people think of corruption as something that happens somewhere else: in Russia, in authoritarian regimes.” 12/29/2021

Video: Merion West Co-Founders Speak at Alma Mater
The Center - Henri Mattila and Erich Prince tell the story of Merion West. 12/13/2021

Sean Spicer: The Steele Dossier and “Radical Nation”
The Right - “I got the call on January 10th [2017] from CNN and then BuzzFeed about them running with this hoax. I pointed out at the time that it was wrong. I could demonstrably prove it was wrong. And yet, they stuck by it…” 11/26/2021

Anne Kim: The AP Exam and the Standardized Testing Debate
The Left - “I think the downside of going test-optional, the downside of ignoring what assessments tell you, means that you might end up ignoring the underlying structural problems and never fixing the inequities.” 11/5/2021

Fixing California’s Housing Crisis: An Interview with Nolan Gray
The Center - “To understand how land use regulation can help save California from the dystopian future it is currently facing, I spoke with Nolan Gray, an urban planner and outspoken land use policy wonk.” 8/26/2021

Kay Hymowitz: The Devaluation of Higher Education
The Center - “This brings in the status issue again, doesn’t it? Because there are so many careers that people just wouldn’t consider because how would they tell their friends?” 7/28/2021

Edward J. Watts: Dissecting the Rhetoric of Decline
The Center - “But one of the dangers is it’s very easy when there is change that makes someone uncomfortable to immediately say that this is a society that’s in decline and to blame somebody for causing it.” 7/22/2021

Kai Whiting: Clearing up Misconceptions about Stoicism
The Center - “The other fans that have a dangerously inaccurate idea about what it means to be Stoic are the ‘Broics.'” 7/12/2021

Gov. Brian Kemp: How to Stand up to Corporate Pressure
The Right - “We lost the All-Star Game, but I think we won the battle because that fight has moved to other states now because we are on the right side of this issue, and we push back so hard.” 6/9/2021

Mary Harrington: Family Formation in the 2020s
The Right - “The long-term problem there is that if your feminism becomes associated with anti-natalism, sooner or later it’s going to trigger a backlash, and that backlash is not going to look very nice for women.” 5/28/2021

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Immigration, Islam, and Christopher Hitchens
The Center - “What I have found in the book is strong enough to suggest that there is a correlation between mass migration from Muslim-majority countries and the increase in sexual violence.” 5/16/2021

Antje Ellermann: What Drives a Country’s Openness to Immigration
The Center - “Interest group pressure typically opens up immigration.” 4/29/2021

Elena Thérèse-Rose: Making Catholicism Shareable (Especially on the Web)
The Right - “Secondly, I’d say good advice is to gain familiarity with the saints and to perhaps gain some friends among the saints because often they are the best examples.” 4/11/2021

Nicholas Kristof Discusses “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope”
The Left - “One of the reasons our anti-poverty efforts in America don’t do better is we start too late. We need to help kids early on.” 2/28/2021

Robert Orlando: Bending Genre in Filmmaking
The Center - “If you look through the films, it’s a propaganda machine, where identity politics is always featured. There’s no space there for just a common universal story, which is the appeal to human frailty or common ground.” 2/26/2021

David French Talks “Divided We Fall”
The Right - “Well, the first paragraph basically says it all. It begins with ‘The continued unity of the United States of America cannot be guaranteed.'” 2/17/2021

Wes Jackson: How to Respect One’s Tools
The Left - “I’m Robert Jensen. I’ll be your guide into the restless and relentless mind of Wes Jackson. I first bumped into Wes’ work more than three decades ago, and his ideas have had a profound influence on my thinking about society and ecology.” 2/15/2021

Jonathan Church: Getting to the Bottom of the Robin DiAngelo Craze
The Center - “I go through a whole analysis of that and why—statistically speaking—you’re basically making a very broad statement about white people in general based on one observation in one Jeopardy! episode.” 2/1/2021

Ray Haynes: Why Republicans Should Support the Popular Vote
The Right - “In the battleground states, since 2000, Republicans have won the popular vote four out of six times. In fact, Donald Trump—in 2020—won the battleground states by over 2.1 million votes.” 1/19/2021

Kevin Williamson: How to Improve the Lot of Those Left Behind
The Right - “And he wrote this very famous novel called Infinite Jest, which he described as a very sad book about the pursuit of happiness. And so, I think in some ways, I’ve written a very sad book about the pursuit of happiness as well.” 1/9/2021

Alfie Bown: Where Politics and Gaming Meet
The Left - “I think there’s great potential in video games. In some ways, they are the primary space in which the culture wars are now being fought.” 1/8/2021

Thomas Ricks: Politics, as Seen from Aristotle to Trump
The Left - “And so I remembered from college: When you’re facing a problem that seems deeply puzzling, go back to fundamentals, go to first principles. So I took Aristotle’s Politics off my shelf, my old college copy, and reread it in the context of the election of Donald Trump.” 1/7/2021

H. R. McMaster: How He Sees China, and the World
The Center - “And so I think we have to resist the tendency to try to define a new administration’s foreign policy mainly as an opposition to the administration that came before it.” 12/30/2020

David Gurfein: Advocating on Behalf of Accused American Service Members
The Right - “The UCMJ has some key aspects to it which do not afford military personnel the same degree of presumption of innocence that you’d see in a civilian court.” 12/30/2020

Bill Vitek: In Pursuit of Better Agriculture (and a Better Society)
The Left - “The way we farm and the way we think are connected—that’s our premise.” 12/20/2020

Rep.-elect Carolyn Bourdeaux: Why She Ran, and Hope for the Future
The Left - “One of the big issues was health care reform; my own parents struggled with the cost of prescription medications, using up all of their discretionary income to pay for my father’s insulin and other medications.” 12/18/2020

Mayor Justin Elicker: Lessons from New Haven, CT
The Left - “It’s clear that so many cities are going through a lot of the same challenges that New Haven is facing right now.” 12/8/2020

Grant McCracken: Why We Need to Bring Back Honor
The Center - “I studied Elizabethan England as a graduate student. It was a society governed by ideas of honor, and I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe some of those ideas could be returned to usefulness.'” 12/4/2020

Does Understanding the American Project Begin with William Penn?
The Right - “He was the first to negotiate with Native Americans as a Christian, keeping the Christian-Quaker pacifist traditions in his negotiations. He actually regarded the Native Americans as equals…” 11/27/2020

Congressman-elect Burgess Owens on Issues to Tackle in Office
The Right - “Al Davis used to say, ‘Just win, baby.’ And I tell you that’s what Americans do best. Once we wake up, once we’re engaged, once we know that our culture is at risk, we come together and start communicating. Across-party lines, Democrats and Republicans start to talk, and we rise.” 11/25/2020
