Short reviews of The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield, and Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, by J.W.N. Sullivan.
Post
Books in Brief: May 2024
Short reviews of Bartleby & Me by Gay Talese and Southern Poets and Poems, 1606 -1860: The Land They Loved by Clyde N. Wilson.
Post
Books in Brief: May 2022
Reviews of Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters, by Eric Protzer and Paul Summerville, and BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, by Mike Gonzalez
Post
Books in Brief
How Dead Languages Work, by Coulter H. George (Oxford University Press; 240 pp., $25.00). If, like University of Virginia classics professor Coulter George, you find dead languages an “endless source of intellectual delight,” then perhaps it’s time to explore Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Welsh. Admittedly, that esoteric list won’t help...
Post
What the Editors Are Reading
No one so much as pauses when the mob shouts down reasonable voices during a panic. Just witness the media’s daily performance during the COVID-19 crisis. CNBC hit the ejector button on author James Grant during a live broadcast when he wondered aloud if the government’s civil society shutdown might lead to more harm than...
Post
Singin’ the Publishing Blues
I like a traveling circus. The American Historical Association’s annual conference periodically sets up its tent at the New York Hilton. Since I live nearby, I subject myself to its clown car of characters every half decade. But this year, I saw the confab’s book fair as an opportunity to introduce myself to the editors...
Post
Simple Answers for Hateful Minds
When did Americans become the stormtroopers of irrational simplification? Not a moment passes when a tweet, Facebook post, or Instagram picture doesn’t rip through our amber waves of grain and drive a social justice warrior to attack the nearest deplorable. Take this recent example from The New York Times of a mentally deranged reductionist. In...
Post
NY Cops Retreat From the Heat
The English actor Beatrice Lillie had no inkling of 2019’s sweltering summer heat in 1931 when she debuted Noël Coward’s ditty “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” in the Broadway musical The Third Little Show. The song’s mocking refrain, “Mad dogs and Englishmen/ Go out in the midday sun,” expressed a sentiment normal Americans subscribed to during...
Post
Five Modest Swamp-Draining Proposals
How many times will naive voters fall for the old “when elected I will shrink the federal government” lie? If our Solipsist-in-Chief can’t “drain the swamp,” you can bet your last VHS Jazzercise tape that myriad new laws, middle-class tax cuts, and feeble protests will never stem the federal Leviathan’s metastasis. With that reality in...
Post
Books in Brief
Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey From a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League, by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (New York: Penguin Books; 320 pp., $17.00). I read Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s memoir of his illegal residency in the United States last week while on vacation in Germany, another country arguing about immigration. The book answered several questions...
Post
College Admissions and Other Rites of Fragility
Think of the angst the recent college admissions scandal has caused in wealthy households from Greenwich to La Jolla, and nowhere in between, except maybe Winnetka. After speaking with friends navigating the modern-day rite of passage that applying to college has become, I imagine dinnertime conversations like this: “Sequoia? Sequoia, can you put down your...
Post
Healthcare in a Humane Society
The night had started off great. A few weeks earlier I had agreed to speak at the New York premiere of the American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks’s forthcoming documentary The Pursuit. The invitation came from the think tank Conscious Capitalism, which was founded by Whole Foods founder John Mackey. Although I knew little about...
Post
Borders and Other Silly Concerns
My housekeeper personifies the American Dream. Her journey from rags may not have ended in riches. But she now enjoys a solid middle-class existence after decades of backbreaking labor. Born and raised in the Mexican state of Puebla, Laura married her first and only boyfriend, Daniel, in her late teens. The newlyweds moved in with...
Post
Breeze Over the Border With Me
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that you have just landed at New York’s JFK International Airport after a 15-hour flight from Mumbai. Although you splurged for a business-class ticket, the extra-large seat, constant parade of food, and infinite selection of video entertainment didn’t help you forget you were trapped in a steel tube 35,000...
Post
An Infrastructure of Crumbs and Bananas
The current American cultural and economic transformation, which arguably started in the late 20th century, is now approaching its nadir. Americans will more likely mourn this transition than celebrate it. The United States has regressed in terms of the typical evolution of a country since roughly 1980. Rather than evolving into a higher level of...
Post
Trump’s Razor
Blame everything on Trump. Your car won’t start? It’s Trump’s fault. Your dog threw up in the living room? It’s Trump’s fault. The media have lost their collective mind. That’s definitely Trump’s fault. And the blame game seems to get worse by the day. Every politician who won office this past November won only because...
Post
Citizen Sunflower and America’s Future
Cancer imposes innumerable indignities on its victims. In addition to possible death, the disease, its complications, and its treatment also force patients through the most inhumane gauntlet of our health-care system. When you’re not giving a blood sample, you’re likely hooked up to an IV full of toxins or being zapped with near-lethal doses of...
Post
What Leads to What
Last fall, when they stopped in New York on their way to vacation in Europe, Chronicles editor Chilton Williamson and his wife invited Taki and me to dinner. Before the wine started flowing and Taki’s raconteurial skills became the primary entertainment, Chilton mentioned his desire for more reviews of books of economic history in the...
Post
Double-Blind in Academia
There are many ways to commit suicide in academia today. Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College, opted not to take part in the school’s annual “Day of Absence” celebration. Participation in the racially motivated festivity required white students and faculty to absent themselves from campus for 24 hours in order to reflect...
Post
Selling Them the Rope
The United States recently came under an attack by an activity so insidious that Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his Wisconsin colleague Tammy Baldwin joined forces in an effort to demand it be “reined in.” Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, the Senate’s modern-day firebrand who never tires in her perpetual imitation of the maniacal abolitionist John Brown,...
Post
Uber Über Odor
My wife and I obey a simple rule regarding our leisure travel: She makes the plans; I follow them. Since she enjoys researching hotels and locations, and my tastes overlap with hers, we find it easier for her to do all the planning without any inputs or complaints from me. This system has worked well...
Post
Syria and Our Deaths of Despair
Just two days after the alleged April 9 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, TV host Tucker Carlson asked Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, “What is the American national security interest that would be served by regime change in Syria?” Wicker responded, “Well, if you care about Israel you have to be interested at least in...
Post
Hogging the Guns
Facts ruin bad arguments. So let these facts sink in for a minute. According to the FBI, in 2016 murderers using handguns killed 7, 105 Americans. That same year, murderers using any kind of rifle—muzzle-loading, breech-loading, lever-action, bolt-action, or even the left’s dreaded AR-15—killed only 374 Americans. The FBI’s long-term data also reflects this unsurprising...
Post
Venting Is Not Enough: Nassar and Injustice
Imagine a justice system that functioned as follows. While awaiting sentencing after conviction, the vilest criminals would be put in the public dock, surrounded by angry spectators. At the behest of the presiding judge, victims, along with their friends and relatives, would then unleash all of their verbal anger on the perpetrator. The victims could...
Post
An Unexpected Journey
Physicians of the Utmost Fame Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their Fees, “There is no Cure for this Disease.” —from “Henry King,” by Hilaire Belloc I’ve spent the last few months hobbling around Manhattan, one of America’s last walkable cities. In keeping with New Yorkers’ well-deserved stereotype...
Post
A Patriotic Tax Plan
Aside from its sheer incomprehensibility, the U.S. federal tax code is immoral, by design. Its 75,000 pages exceed its 1917 length 187-fold. Paradoxically, even though the tax code contains more than four million words, the United States effectively has no tax code. At that absurd immensity the tax code says whatever your team of lawyers...
Post
Afghanistan’s Depraved Opportunism
In “Staying the Course in Afghanistan: How to Fight the Longest War,” published in the November/December 2017 Foreign Affairs, retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal and one Kosh Sadat, both employed by the eponymous McChrystal Group, argue for the United States to pursue more war in Afghanistan. Apparently, 16 years of American aggression there hasn’t been...
Post
Weinstein: Who Cares—and Why
Just as America started to recover from Harvey earlier this fall, fate hit the replay button. Harvey the First destroyed property and took lives across Texas and parts of the Southeast. Harvey the Second, the alleged rapist and confessed serial sexual predator moonlighting as a movie mogul, pulled back the curtain on Hollywood’s sordid business...
Post
America Mispriced
Warren Buffett once joked that only when the tide goes out do we realize who’s been swimming naked. Hurricane Harvey’s gale force winds and 50-plus inches of rain will give Houstonians a similarly embarrassing realization. Cable news channels fire-hosed viewers with minute-by-minute coverage of the Bayou City’s destruction, raking in advertisers’ dollars by pandering to...
Post
Core Values and the Kingdom
Saudi Arabia’s national oil and natural-gas company, Saudi Aramco, recently announced plans to go public in 2018. Dating back to the fuel shortages of World War I, Saudi Aramco came into existence largely as a result of Standard Oil’s frustrating search for oil on the Arabian Peninsula. But after a successful 1932 strike in Bahrain,...
Post
Outdated
Albert and David Maysles’s classic documentary Grey Gardens provided a disturbing snapshot of 1970’s American upper-class life, replete with mentally ill dowagers, feral cats, and a crumbling estate. In early 1971, the Maysles brothers started filming the daily activities of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, “Big Edie,” and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, “Little Edie,” the...
Post
Corporate Responsibility: An Indecent Proposal
This past semester a group of bored yet curious students at my university invited faculty to participate in a lunch-hour debate. When the organizers first contacted me they referenced several of my former students who praised my heretical outspokenness as key to my selection. They hoped I might provoke their classmates into actions more meaningful...
Post
A Free Ride to Clown College
Not content to suffer quietly under a $352 billion state debt, a crumbling post-World War II infrastructure, and a $65 billion unfunded pension liability in its largest city, the state of New York hastened its impending financial devastation this spring by announcing the latest Blue State special: free college tuition. Under its preposterous Excelsior Scholarship...
Post
Blowing Bubbles
Between 2000 and 2005 I found myself spending an increasing amount of time scratching my head. I had been researching and investing in financial-services stocks since 1992, but what I saw during that five-year span confounded me. Banks offered “ninja” mortgages—no income, no job, no assets—to any borrower brazen enough to walk into a branch...
Post
The College Bubble
The university graduation season this past spring dumped another seven million job seekers onto the sputtering economy. A June headline in the New York Times painted a dismal picture of their likelihood of finding employment: “Degrees but No Guarantees: Faltering Economy . . . Dims Prospects for Graduates.” In response, the mortarboard horde took to...
Post
Cuba: Distorted History, Different Rules
This past May in Newark, the FBI added former Black Liberation Army mercenary Joanne Chesimard to its Most Wanted Terrorists list at a ceremony held on the 40th anniversary of New Jersey’s most infamous cop killing. Now known as Assata Shakur, the step-aunt of the late rapper Tupac Shakur became the 46th fugitive—as well as...
Post
Keeping Taxes Highest
A Stalinist show trial was held on May 21 by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Their aim was to investigate “how individual and corporate taxpayers are shifting billions of dollars offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.” In the dock that day, Apple CEO Tim Cook found...
Post
Take the Money and Run: Entitlement Politics
As New York City’s mayoral campaign kicked into overdrive earlier this spring, the New York Times saw fit to question the viability of Republican candidate Joe Lhota, former chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. With all the populist fervor it could muster, the Times asked readers, “Can New Yorkers learn to love someone who increased...
Post
Anarcho-Tyranny Versus…Walmart?
Everyone hates Walmart nowadays. Environmental groups protest the company’s “greenwashing,” numerous violations of the Clean Water Act, and contribution to suburban sprawl. Traditionalists detest Walmart’s displacement of small, family-owned businesses with big-box stores that serve as little more than cash drop boxes for the Bentonville, Arkansas, mother ship. Organized labor, as expected, objects to the...
Post
Burning Fries in Hell
Ronald McDonald had better look into renting Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout. Several national newspapers recently published a letter, signed by over 1,000 health professionals and two-dozen institutions such as the Chicago Hispanic Health Coalition and the Inpatient Diabetes Program at Boston University, imploring McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner to “stop marketing junk food to children.” ...
Post
Airport Frisking
How many terrorists share a surname with a 19th-century American plutocrat famed for starting one of the country’s first investment banks and founding a technical university in the City of Brotherly Love? How many terrorists hail from the Bluegrass State? And finally, how many terrorists have yet to reach their seventh birthday? If you answered...
Post
Too Big To Bail
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner boasted on December 16 that 2008’s $700 billion bailout of an assortment of private enterprises would ultimately cost taxpayers less than congressional analysts had predicted. The green eyeshades had calculated that the enormous wealth transfer would end up docking us taxpayers a mere $25 billion. Without providing further detail, the secretary...
Post
It Takes a Crisis
While Europe’s monetary crisis spreads, Americans watch in astonishment as the German government bails out its feckless co-unionists. Greece’s financial predicaments boiled over last summer with baton-wielding riot police pummeling Greek civil servants who objected to their government’s modest proposal to raise the official retirement age from 61 to 63 by 2015. In response, Germany...
Post
Hitting the Wall
On October 8, Americans awoke to government reports that the domestic economy had shed another 95,000 jobs in September. Despite the billions of dollars mailed to select citizens in the form of stimulus checks and the politicized bailouts of protected industries, U.S. policymakers have failed to resuscitate the moribund economy or coax unemployment down from...
Post
The Borrower’s Crisis
Like the mindless day traders of the 1990’s who piled into the same hot internet stocks, today’s commentators on the causes of 2008’s residential-real-estate implosion have exhibited a similar obtuseness regarding the workings of financial markets. One will search in vain for any article that identifies a party other than Wall Street or large commercial...
Post
Unhappy Anniversary
The one-year anniversary of the 2008 global financial-market implosion passed with little fanfare. With the U.S. stock market soaring throughout the spring and summer, the Pollyannas of the American media preferred to focus their attention on the return of good times while ignoring all that ancient ugliness of last year. In September 2008, at the...
Post
Family Matters
Cesar Rodriguez, a 27-year-old unemployed security guard, had it in for 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, the daughter of Nixzaliz Santiago, his common-law wife. After losing his job a few days before Christmas, Rodriguez increased the frequency of his daily beatings of the helpless, undernourished four-foot-tall girl. Police records indicate that Rodriguez had been beating her for...
Post
The Dissenting Eagle
Few decisions require more prudence and judiciousness than when a country’s leaders determine whether to go to war. They must weigh the cost in lives, national treasure, and security against the price of inaction. Morality may enter their calculations through the application of just-war theory. They will listen to, if not necessarily heed, diverse voices...