1985—In Jenkins v. Missouri, federal district judge Russell G. Clark launches his desegregation plan for the Kansas City, Missouri, School District—a plan that will become...
The first sound At 5 a.m. on May 24, employees at Kyiv’s Chernobyl Museum heard the thud of what was almost certainly an Iskander missile. In wartime Kyiv, a thud is never just a sound. It is a question. Where did it hit? Who was hurt? What is burning? Within moments, word began to spread. […]
On Aug. 18, 1920, a 24-year-old state legislator from East Tennessee walked into the Tennessee House chamber wearing a red rose on his lapel. Red meant no. The chamber was deadlocked 48-48. The 19th Amendment needed one more state, and Tennessee was the last realistic option. Harry Burn had a letter in his pocket from […]
“Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare” (“Love moved me, which makes me speak”). So declares Virgil to Dante at the outset of The Divine Comedy, explaining why he has come to serve as Dante’s guide through Hell: love set him in motion. Mark Helprin takes this line from Canto II of Inferno as the […]
James Ellroy is one of the great American authors of the last 50 years, and yet, it is easy to dismiss his literary achievement. If you were to pick up his latest novel, Red Sheet, and turn to a random page, you’re likely to encounter such terse fragments as, “It was a sex-slash job. Cuts, […]
It’s hard to keep a good man down, but it’s even harder to keep a bad man out. Hunter Biden is back. Best known as an influence-peddler, crackhead, whoremonger, struggling artist, and innocent man who got a presidential pardon from his father, the prodigal son and former first son reappeared on X, formerly Twitter, in […]
Crazy is, admittedly, a bit of a pejorative term. But as a new study published by Political Behavior shows, not only have the negative connotations attached to mental health conditions fallen as the prevalence of mental illness risen, but an increasingly large percentage of Americans use mental health as a source of political identity, particularly […]
Nearly 250 years after the Second Continental Congress adopted a resolution establishing the Stars and Stripes as the official flag of the United States, we mark another Flag Day celebrating Old Glory and the enduring freedom it represents. But this occasion also marks another year in which Congress no longer has the constitutional authority it […]
It was easy to admire Harold Bloom. One of the most distinguished American literary critics, he always gave the impression of having read anything and everything by the great and the good. Over the course of a 60-year writing career, he produced a steady stream of books that showcased the scope of his reading and […]
Deep within Scotland’s Edinburgh Castle, inside the ancient fortress’s prison vaults, is the oldest depiction of the “Stars and Stripes” outside the United States. The carving on a wooden door dates to the American Revolutionary War, when prisoners-of-war were either locked in ships or sent to prisons overseas by the Royal Navy. The anonymous POW’s […]
