Whether by toppling statues or neglecting the study of his life, we’ve been trying to cancel the Father of Our Nation for some time now. But it can’t be done. Some people are just too awesome. Read More… Cancel—as in noisily toppling George Washington’s statue and striking his name off of buildings? In 2020, one group demanded the removal of his statue from the campus of the University of Washington. Another outfit called for displacing, renaming, or “recontextualizing” the Washington...

This year we celebrate the centennial birthday of the creator of the Peanuts gang, which has endured as a ic strip since its debut in 1950, not least because it tackled the most enduring of Western maladies: loneliness. Read More… Charles Schulz believed that life was hard and lonesome. That is why he believed that life was best experienced with others. Only through the sharing of burdens and triumphs and fears and joys could a person navigate the immense challenges...

This year we celebrate the centenary of the birth of one of the most popular American novelists of the 20th century. Does a documentary shot by a friend do the author of Slaughterhouse-Five justice? Read More… What would Kurt Vonnegut have made of the accordion-style cycle of lockdowns and other restraints imposed on us by the seemingly permanent American sanitary dictatorship devoted to the religion of health in this the centenary year of his birth? Would he have joined the...

What begins with a surprisingly positive portrayal of Catholic church life among the faithful ends in all-too-familiar Hollywood territory. Is this the best we can hope for? Read More… Near the beginning of the Netflix series Midnight Mass, released in late 2021, an Ash Wednesday service is faithfully plete with a young priest’s effective and moving sermon, explaining the ashes as “a smudge of death, of ash, of sin—for repentance—because of where this is all heading, which is Easter. Rebirth,...

Instead of finding ways to do more and more, we should view our limitations as God’s gift so we know always to rely on him. Faithfulness is more important than great success by worldly standards. Read More… I love productivity books. I’ve read all the big classics on the subject, from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to Cal Newport’s Deep Work. I am a devotee of David Allen’s productivity ur-text, Getting Things Done. That book, in a...

Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson has managed the impossible: a love story wise as serpents but innocent as doves. And no sex! Read More… My series on cinematic nostalgia continues—after Wes Anderson’s Francophilia, Ridley Scott’s Italian farce, and Spielberg’s Puerto Rican fiasco, here’s a California story: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth feature film, Licorice Pizza, the only Hollywood movie made last year with some reason to be remembered. It’s a story about the ’70s, Hollywood, and the confusion of love in post-’60s...

March 6 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and creator of the Objectivist philosophy. Her novels still sell, but are her ideas still taken seriously? Were they ever? Read More… If it had not been for the railroads, I would never have gotten beyond the first chapter ofAtlas Shrugged. Having had a vague idea of what Ayn Rand believed in, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the story depended so heavily...

The gains made in fort by modernity still leave room for ancient wisdom and ancient law. In fact, they demand them. Read More… “All human societies face about the same problems,” claim David Friedman, Peter Leeson, and David Skarbek in their fascinating and peculiar book Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. “They deal with them in an interesting variety of different ways. All of them are grownups—there is little reason to believe that the people who created the legal systems...

When citizens’ right to peaceful protest and redress of grievances is treated as the equivalent of war by their government, everyone should be terrified. Read More… The mask has been torn off. If anyone had any doubts that some governments will do literally anything to suppress anyone who protests what they regard as unreasonable measures by the state to address the COVID pandemic, events in Canada has surely disabused them of such illusions. In times of war, we generally allow...

It was supposed to shine a light on American susceptibility to con men and demagoguery. Instead, this Oscar-nominated film is strangely clueless about its own self-deception. Read More… Guillermo del Toro won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Shape Of Water (2017), a movie infamous for a leading lady so desperate for intimacy that she makes love to a fish, probably the best metaphor for the ongoing moral collapse of the women who like such movies. It was...