November 26, 2018

For generations, probably for centuries, Anglophone writers have struggled with the fact that our language lacks a gender-indeterminate third-person singular pronoun. In English, we have he for a man, she for a woman, and it for everything else. There is no option in the third-person for someone…

A university named for George Washington and Robert E. Lee wrestles with its traditions and heritage.

The last two years have seen a great deal of handwringing about the future of democracy. Scores of commentators, left and right, have claimed America’s democratic institutions are under siege. Some, mostly on the left, advocate a variety of changes to the Constitution in order to make our electoral…

A hudna is not a resolution.

Since most political journalism tends to be wishful thinking, most of the post-midterm analysis this year followed predictable paths.

In two phone chats after Democrats won the House in the midterm election, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and likely House speaker Nancy Pelosi broached the subject of bipartisanship—or as McConnell put it, “ways we might be able to find a way forward.”

For a full year, maybe more, Americans who follow national politics were subjected to the unabating use of a single metaphor: the “blue wave.” Would there be a blue wave? If so, how big? What would the blue wave, if it turned out to be a wave, mean for the Trump administration?

An unlikely outcry over a U.K. government architecture committee.

Another good reason not to drop acid.

How J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis defied the spirit of the age.

Tolerating scoundrels is a bipartisan weakness.

Ten years after the financial crisis, Robert F. Bruner surveys the best books on what went wrong and what still should be fixed.

Danny Heitman on the slender volumes of Notting Hill Editions—treats for the mind.

Michael M. Rosen on border barriers and the human future—a review of ‘The Age of Walls’ by Tim Marshall.

Are you running for president?” For aspiring presidents who haven’t fully committed to running, the question is almost impossible to answer in a way that sounds genuine. “I haven’t given it much thought” means “I’ve been planning to run since I was a teenager but haven’t decided if this is the…

The debate over gun control in America, if “debate” is the right word for it, has become stale and predictable to the point of parody—but a sad, bitter parody, not a funny one. That’s true largely, if we may be permitted to generalize, because the measures gun-control supporters propose after mass…

Last week, a group of anti-“fascist” or antifa thugs posted online the home address of Fox News host and former Weekly Standard writer Tucker Carlson. They then gathered outside his Washington residence and terrorized his wife, who was home alone at the time. Maybe these menacing shenanigans were…

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Neologisms, words newly coined, are as necessary to language as water to land. New inventions, institutions, patterns of behavior require new words to describe them. Nor need all neologisms describe new phenomena. Some are required to cover long-established phenomena that have called out for but…