“Schwartz-DuPre is dedicated to putting an end to the idea that Curious George is nothing more than an amusing story.”
Tag: Essay
Incurious: George and the Postcolonialists
The Russo-Ukrainian War: A Very Simple Conflict
“The Rada’s final decree is a reproach to all those who think of Ukraine as nothing more than an appendage of Russia, without a culture and a history of its own.”
What Socrates Can Teach Us about Political Discourse
“Rather than treating the other in a Socratic manner—which is to say, as a partner in the communal quest for truth—the polemicist roundly delegitimizes the other and reduces him to an ‘adversary, an enemy, who is wrong and whose very existence constitutes a threat.'”
Plato and the Pursuit of Justice
“Those who do not make justice the central concern for Plato are not talking about Plato at all.”
Excerpt: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left”
“When he saw his old left-wing comrades busily hatching excuses for neutrality as Slobodan Milošević waged war on Bosnia, he realized that much of the Left was either indifferent about this confrontation or on the wrong side.”
Heidegger and Nazism: The Philosophy of Being and the Politics of National Socialism
“I argue against the apologetics of the sycophantic defenders of Heidegger who claim that his involvement with National Socialism is wholly reducible to his political naïveté, which includes his gross overestimation of philosophy’s power to sway and influence the development of Germany’s ‘political’ history.”
Black War Cinema and the Representation Paradox

“For all of their insistence on cultural revolution, progressives are not yet ready to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”
Confessions of a Beautiful Soul
“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.”
Review: “Crassus: The First Tycoon” by Peter Stothard
“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.”
Excerpt: “Heal Your Daughter”

“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.'”
Review: “Uncommon Wrath” by Josiah Osgood

“[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.”
On Literary Science and the Bounds of Knowledge
“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.”
Do They Really Believe in Eugenics?

“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.”
Review: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left” by Matt Johnson

“[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.”
Review: “The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective” by Michael Walzer

“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.”