Opinion

Making the rounds in April was a higher-ed post for our time: “The honest B or C student, submitting essays filled with awkward constructions, malapropisms, [and] earnest, if failed or surface-y arguments, [is] a surprise hero of the present age.”  So wrote professor Matt Dinan of Canada’s St. Thomas University, a liberal arts institution in […]

No one will ever confuse Chicago with a well-run city. Perhaps things would be better if voters stopped voting for racists to be mayor. Mayor Brandon Johnson added yet another bizarre racial comment to his racial history. He said black people should be in charge because “we are the most generous people on the planet.” […]

The blockbuster first season of HBO Max’s adaptation of The Last of Us features a high-stakes post-apocalyptic story arc that centers on the possibility of quite literally saving humanity. The unstoppable spread of a malevolent fungal strain called cordyceps has ravaged the global population and turned ordinary human beings into zombies who survive only by […]

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was one of America’s finest writers, essayists, and humorists. His literary masterpieces, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, are timeless classics. They’ve engaged legions of readers and sparked the imagination of countless young minds. […]

“Nobody,” Tisha Johnson declared, in a careworn voice betraying three consecutive days of jet-lagged speech-giving, “wants a bunch of tech in their car.” Not exactly what you’d expect to hear from a senior executive of any Amazon-backed firm, let alone one devoted solely to the production of a controversial new electric vehicle, but the audience […]

John Cena walked into WrestleMania 41 in Las Vegas with the polite shuffle of a man reporting for overtime. He walked out with the belt, the boos, and a line in the record book no future star will touch: 17 recognized world championships, all in World Wrestling Entertainment, one more than Ric Flair ever claimed […]

Just as federal courts blocked former President Joe Biden’s abuse of the Clean Air Act to shut down coal power plants, and just as they blocked Biden’s attempt to erase hundreds of billions of dollars in college debt using the 2003 Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, so now the Court of International Trade […]

Sue Prideaux’s latest biography paints a vivid portrait of Paul Gauguin, the towering artist whose bright colors, flat planes, symbolism, and naked, dark-skinned Polynesian women paved the way for modernist art. She covers Gauguin’s life from his infancy and childhood in Peru to his adolescence in France and later as a Merchant Marine to his […]

A joke is a very simple thing. It has only two moving parts: the setup and the punchline. And if you write jokes for a living, as I have done for 35 years, you learn that the basic rule of comedy is that if a joke isn’t working, there are only two ways to fix […]

Three curtains of lies surrounded former President Joe Biden for his entire term and kept the country in the dark about the important matter of whether the president’s health left him cognitively fit to discharge the duties of his office. Original Sin, the new, much-discussed book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, draws back the […]

For nearly 30 years, Tom Cruise and his collaborators on the Mission: Impossible series have made a series of what are cosmetically spy movies that, at their core, have really tried to perfect the art of the heist movie. With the latest entry, The Final Reckoning, he and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie have certainly made the […]

What was the most demented moment of the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020? For me, it was when 1,200 public health officials declared that, although meeting other people was a health risk, especially if you were protesting the lockdowns, demonstrating in support of BLM was fine. Few dared speak out against this obvious madness. […]