“It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man,” Clint Eastwood’s character said in the 1992 Western Unforgiven. “You take away everything he’s got and everything he’s ever gonna have.” The statement, made with cold indifference by a hardened killer, underscores the stakes in putting someone to death. Those stakes are not only born by […]
The idea that the government could forcibly seize ownership of a groundbreaking invention you created is chilling. But that is the prospect the Biden administration seeks to invoke against American innovators in the pharmaceutical space — the driving force behind two-thirds of global drug discoveries. President Joe Biden’s misguided proposal not only jeopardizes the incentive […]
We live in a world of plastics. They have revolutionized medicine with life-saving devices, made space travel possible, lightened cars and planes (conserving fuel and lowering air pollution), and made all manner of consumer goods cheaper. However, their convenience and low cost have spawned a throw-away culture that has a dark side: Single-use plastics currently […]
This week, I lodged a complaint with a public high school in Fairfax County that one of its teachers holds biases against white male students following an incident concerning what I believe to have been grading inequities. The principal tasked an administrator to investigate my accusation that the teacher has referred to a “privileged white […]
On Sunday, I watched the movie Remember This, a remarkable tribute to former Georgetown University professor Jan Karski, a messenger for the Polish Underground who was the first man to take an eyewitness account of Nazi labor camps directly to President Franklin Roosevelt. On Monday, I read a Townhall story about how the Georgetown School […]
In delivering caucus and primary victories to former President Donald Trump, Republican voters seem poised to grant the wishes of Trump’s presumed opponent, President Joe Biden. The president and his party see Trump as an easy mark, or at least easier to beat than other Republicans. We hope, even at this late hour, the GOP […]
Like most American Jews I know, I spent Oct. 7 scrolling through social media, listlessly pushing my toddler on a playground swing as I swiped between images of burning kibbutzim, fixing dinner to television images of a modern-day pogrom. Yet for all the horror of that day, I was not especially surprised that a group […]
Readers of a certain age may recall when school overcrowding was a big worry. Throughout the 1990s, as the baby boomers became school parents — that is, as the millennials started flooding elementary schools across the country — students were moved into temporary classrooms erected on the playing field, and PTAs everywhere fretted about overpopulation […]
It is an act of vandalism that Poor Things, the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray’s astonishing 1992 novel, even shares a title with Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s atrocious reimagining of a book he didn’t understand. Gray decorated his works with Blakean visionary illustrations, and his 1980s masterpiece Lanark is as close to life-changing as novels get. […]
Last week, a young woman who had worked at a web security company recorded the entire ordeal of her own process of being laid off. It’s an excruciating 20 minutes you can find online if you look. But don’t bother, frankly. It goes pretty much the way you expect it to. She demands an explanation […]
The famous Dupont slogan “Better Living Through Chemistry” was never intended to apply to drug use, but as Benjamin Breen explains in Tripping on Utopia, his charming and highly readable history of the rise and fall of psychedelic substances in the United States and abroad, it might as well have been. A historian of science […]
There’s a legend, most recently propagated in a song from the musical Hamilton, that upon surrendering at Yorktown, the British army played the tune “The World Turned Upside Down,” an English bar ballad written over 100 years prior. Though likely apocryphal, the story fits. The world had changed when Gen. Cornwallis laid down his sword to the […]
In its three previous outings, the HBO anthology series True Detective used police work to explore and defend masculine virtues. The show’s new season abandons that project, inaugurating instead a novel television genre in which radical environmentalism, racial complaint, and the occult vie for narrative supremacy. Call it woke Gothic. Or don’t call it anything […]
The Ukrainian ambassador to France is a courtly man who discharges his duties with all the gravitas of an envoy of a nation at war. Yet, at a ceremony on Jan. 16, he allowed his somber Slavic face to break into a smile — broad and uninhibited — as he pinned a ribbon and medal […]
