Originally published in 1996, Andrey Kurkov’s novel Death and the Penguin, which follows a humble obituarist and his pet penguin in post-communist Ukraine, finds tenderness and comedy in bleak circumstances. Lies are endemic, and murder is commonplace, but there is enough warmth and humour for one to feel the power of evil in the knowledge […]
William F. Buckley called him “Mission Control.” National Review publisher Bill Rusher referred to him as “the Master.” From Australia, Professor Hiram Caton described him as “the central nervous system of the body conservative, the only man who was in constant touch with what all of us in the remote regions were thinking.” REVIEW OF ‘BUCKLEY: THE […]
Something profoundly important may, one hopes, have happened to America’s understanding of itself when a sniper murdered Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10. This is despite our becoming sadly familiar with political violence, not least because of two assassination attempts against President Donald Trump last year. Back then, Trump got up quickly from the ground after […]
Democrats are pitching a familiar playbook to rally Americans to their side. They claim Republican policymakers are only out to help their “billionaire buddies” at the expense of working families. Those tired, false slogans should ring hollow as Americans begin to reap the benefits of President Donald Trump’s signature legislative achievement: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. […]
In the fall of 2024, a Jewish teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District opened an email from his teachers union to find a flyer promoting an “International Day of Action” with the statement, “One year of genocide, one year of resistance.” Disgusted, he reached out to leadership and demanded his dues be returned. […]
Rolling blackouts were a familiar experience for Californians just a few years ago, as Democrats’ reckless climate policies weakened the state’s electric grid. Now they are back, as the state has failed to keep its forest fires under control. Rural Californians are now being forced to go without power for days at a time as […]
It’s not every day that you can claim without reservation that someone is almost entirely responsible for a cultural achievement. But you can absolutely make that claim about Charles James Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, which is, without question, the most successful grassroots youth political organization in the conservative movement in history. It […]
When Walt Disney first opened his theme parks in California and Florida, he had every intention of making them available “to as many families as possible,” according to management consultant Daniel Currell. “Everyone is a VIP,” was the official company motto at the time, and an employee handbook from the 1950s quoted Disney as saying, […]
What do you get when the party of feminism joins up with the party of the upper-middle-class strivers? You get today’s Democratic Party, where career achievement and material success become all-consuming goals in life. NBC News asked nearly 3,000 Gen Zers for their top priorities in life. Specifically, it asked, “Which of the following is […]
Part of being a student — even an old one, like me — is spending time in the library. As I write this, I am sitting in the Firestone Library at Princeton University, looking up at a wall festooned with names of honored, illustrious alumni and super-rich donors, two categories that do not always, or […]
I am always on the lookout for historians who can fashion well-worn stories from the past into sparkling new dramas filled with cliffhangers and near-catastrophes that keep me turning pages in taut expectation of an outcome decided centuries ago. Author Scott Ellsworth provides just that in Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the […]
Godzilla has terrorized the Land of the Rising Sun for decades. Known as a kaiju (monster) in Japan, and King of the Monsters in the United States, Godzilla’s fearsome roar and atomic breath is a child’s nightmare come to life. It’s fought with and against other gigantic creatures. It’s struck fear in the hearts of […]
Until it closed last year, Monarch Novelties was the only souvenir store in Washington, D.C., that sold campaign memorabilia exclusive to the three presidential elections of the 1960s. The store was an oddity, a decaying building on 14th Street that, for more than 80 years, trafficked in eccentricities: not just Kennedy– and Nixon-era nostalgia but […]
Recently, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has argued that during the Biden years, Army basic training became too soft and lost some of its hardcore edge. He wants basic training to toughen up. Which brings us to a phenomenon in the Army I’ll call the Hardcore Paradox: Soldiers enjoy comfort and dislike pain, stress, and […]
