Justin Torres is a writer who contributed to The Weekly Standard from 2000 to 2016. His articles for the magazine covered a range of topics including education policy, religion and the Catholic Church, and cultural commentary. He also wrote on legal and political issues such as class action litigation and the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
THE ONLY INTERESTING QUESTION left to ask about Salman Rushdie is: How can a writer so good be so bad? There are passages in Rushdie’s novels that are among the best of the past quarter century: funny and moving and written with real verve. He is a prodigiously talented prose stylist with a…
It’s a rare constitutional law case that has something for everyone to loathe. But 10 years ago, the Supreme Court sparked a singular moment of bipartisanship when it held, in Kelo v. City of New London, that states can take property from one owner and give it to another to re-develop for a higher,…
New Orleans is, for many people, synonymous with disaster. But disaster has been the last thing on the minds of New Orleanians in the past few months, at least prior to the explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig off the Louisiana coast on April 20. Tourism was up, the local economy was…
Common Sense School Reform
Breaking Free
The New Anti-Catholicism
The Courage to Be Catholic Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church by George Weigel Basic, 208 pp., $22 FOR NOW, at least, the media seem to consider that the June meeting of America's Catholic bishops in Dallas largely brought the priestly abuse scandals to a close--which, for the bishops,…
The Spy Next Door The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Phillip Hanssen, the Most Damaging FBI Agent in U.S. History by Elaine Shannon and Ann Blackman Little, Brown, 288 pp., $25.95 The Bureau and the Mole The Unmasking of Robert Phillip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History by…
At first glance, Andrew Hurley's Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture seems too idiosyncratic to tell us anything about the postwar rise of the middle class. After all, many factors contributed to the consumer culture of the 1950s and…
When the Boston Globe broke the story of John McCain's phone call to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of a campaign contributor, the media briefly savored the spectacle of America's chief campaign finance reformer caught in a little old-fashioned influence peddling. What they didn't…