On Wednesday, a different Castro was in the news: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro decreed that all 3,100 local Public Housing Agencies must implement "smoke-free" policies for all indoor dwellings within the next 18 months. In essence, by late 2018, smoking…
Summer vacation may be upon us, but that doesn't mean that the learning need stop. Consider getting the youngsters in your life Alpha is for Anthropos, an illustrated text designed to teach children—and Greekless grownups—their Alpha-Beta-Gammas.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry—"Professor, Author, Intellectual," if you trust the descriptors of her personal website—is back in the brainy thick of it all, this time popping up as the Editor-at-Large at Elle.com, the online version of the high-profile, global fashion magazine.
The Scrapbook noted a few weeks ago that several brave students at Stanford University, affiliated with the Stanford Review, were pushing to reinstate Western Civilization courses into the elite college's core curriculum via a student referendum. Sadly, today comes news that the measure was voted…
Bolivians voted Sunday on an amendment that would allow sitting president Evo Morales to run for a fourth term in 2019. Morales, who took office in 2006, officially ends his term in 2020. As the results trickle in, it appears that a little over half (adjust accordingly for corruption, of course) of…
Some years ago, Tom Wolfe attended a Manhattan fundraising party that composer Leonard Bernstein hosted for his Black Panther pals. The result of the evening was a sardonic piece by Wolfe titled "Radical Chic" which continues to provide us with language to describe an undying phenomena: The…
On Sunday night, The X-Files returned to television.
"Mission accomplished. We have him. I would like to inform Mexico that Joaquin Guzman Loera has been detained."
Have you heard the news? The liberal arts, whose study antedates that old peripatetic from Stagira, are in jeopardy. In fact, they are in such a weakened state that public intellectuals are busy writing books with titles like In Defense of a Liberal Education, as if the study of man and man's place…
Two years ago, Forbes broke the news that famed rap group the Wu-Tang Clan had created, and would soon be auctioning, a single copy of their latest album, Once Upon A Time in Shaolin. Literally, a single copy.
Latin American politics has a tendency to resemble the magical realism made famous by the "boom" generation of southern-hemisphere writers a few decades ago; just when you think you've reached solid, stable ground, everything shifts and you find yourself more disoriented than when you started. It…
In a city where the sine qua non of life is failure, it is amazing that political miscarriages don’t receive more studious treatment. But in The Peace That Almost Was, Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, offers us a splendid treatment in this meticulously researched…
The greatest “recognition” scene in Western literature takes place in Homer’s Odyssey, and occurs between storm-buffeted Odysseus and long-suffering Penelope. Shakespeare’s Pericles, a play with deep Hellenic—and specifically Homeric and Sophoclean—undertones, is its closest rival in the portrayal…
As much as one loves Bob Dylan, it is always best to resist the temptation to write about him. He is a slippery fish, who is routinely put-off by the industrial-level attempts to access his soul through the interpretation of his lyrics. And if Dylan makes albums—at the rate of almost one a year—as…
It’s tempting, when writing about modern art, to devote more attention than is useful to the kinds of market forces that bestow, say, Jeff Koons ’s totalitarian visions or Damien Hirst’s intellectual posturing with the imprimatur of respectability. After all, so much modern art has become uniformly…
In 1758, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a chastising letter to his former colleague (and editor of the Encyclopédie) Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Rousseau’s criticism centered on d’Alembert’s proposal for the establishment of a theater in Geneva, whose “Lacedaemonian” culture, he lamented, lacked the…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is currently playing at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre, must be a nightmare to direct.
The new documentary Best of Enemies commits a mortal sin fatal to the integrity of its interesting subject matter: It treats William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal as intellectual equals, and therewith perfect synecdoches of conservatism and liberalism. But at the cost of too high a compliment to…
Sherlock Holmes is one of the few literary inventions still captivating audiences well after its creator settled into dust. Growing apace with the tastes of his audience—seamlessly transitioning from print, to stage, to screen—Holmes has, as Zach Dundas, Executive Editor at Portland Monthly, so…
Professor of history emeritus at Brown, National Humanities Medalist, and WEEKLY STANDARD contributor, Gordon S. Wood, here discusses his latest books, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate (Volume I, and II), both published by the Library of America.
Fareed Zakaria, CNN’s foreign policy touchstone, has officially entered what is passing for the “culture wars” in American education with his new book, In Defense of a Liberal Education. Zakaria argues that the mode of education known as the liberal arts is in peril, and purports to offer a robust…
Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the greatest French export to the United States, took special notice, during his travels, of what he called the “philosophic method” of Americans:
I used to watch sports on television in the same episodic and grudging manner I would tune in to C-SPAN. The proceedings mattered little, but I picked up useful information. It made me better at water cooler conversation—I got passing references to Monday night’s game.
St. John’s College, one of the few remaining schools devoted to providing a liberal arts education through the careful study of the “Great Books,” is close to having uploaded all of the back issues of its famed academic journal, The St. John’s Review.
Rachel Maddow understands the utility of a good old-fashioned riot.
Today is Shakespeare’s 451st birthday. Around the world, performances and recitals will be put on in a host of languages, and in a multitude of countries. There is something in Shakespeare’s art wherein everyone tends to find a positive reflection of their community and values, which explains the…
Today we observe the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. We're also at the start of the presidential political season. Over the course of the next year and a half, we will be presented with contrasting visions of America’s future. To help us evaluate these arguments, it is useful…
Churchill presents a wonderful metaphor, inspired by Edmund Burke, of the importance of consistency in leadership. He describes the ship of state, buffeted by winds, tacking left and right, from policy to policy, but always heading toward a main point in the distance. Lesson: circumstances call for…