James Nuechterlein

When I came to New York eight years ago, it was a much tougher town than it is today. A recent report on the collapse of crime in New York sent me back to read my first impressions”recorded in a different journal”of the city’s “Hogarthian rawness.”“There is much . . . . Continue Reading »

In Bob Dole’s remarkably inept campaign for the presidency, he could nonetheless count on one surefire applause line to rouse even the most dispirited audience: an attack on “the liberal media.” (He made a particular target of the New York Times .) Dole obviously enjoyed sticking it . . . . Continue Reading »

Elsewhere in this issue ( “The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy,” Public Square ) my colleague Richard John Neuhaus, citing the nineteenth-century prelate Henry Cardinal Manning, suggests that “there is something deeply incoherent about sectarian catholicity.” He is referring . . . . Continue Reading »

Like coyotes and roadrunners, writers and editors are natural enemies. Writers suspect that all editors are misanthropes who compensate for their crabbed lives and creative frustrations by exercising petty tyranny over the efforts of their literary betters. Editors, for their part, regard most . . . . Continue Reading »

If one were to judge from the current presidential campaign, one could only conclude that our current age marks a new end of ideology. Indeed, we sometimes seem to have arrived at the end of politics. Not since the 1950s”when the end of ideology was first proclaimed”have we witnessed a . . . . Continue Reading »

I made a vow, after finishing my May column on “The End of Neoconservatism,” that this was, for me, the end of neoconservatism. Like most writers, I try to avoid repeating myself, and yet over the years I have written so often on that subject that now merely to think of it induces acute . . . . Continue Reading »

Some years ago I participated in an academic conference whose main attraction was the late Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind . Over the several days of the conference, Bloom, as spirited and engaging a performer off platform as on, held the spotlight. He was a brilliant and . . . . Continue Reading »

It is Tuesday morning in Holy Week and my mood is appropriately somber. Not, I fear, out of piety, but because I have just arrived at the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, to begin a stint on jury duty. The administrative judge of the court bids me and the two hundred other . . . . Continue Reading »

Everybody, it seems, is pronouncing the death of neoconservatism”including, most significantly, the two people most responsible for its existence in the first place, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz.Kristol has done so in his recent Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Free Press) . . . . Continue Reading »

My April calendar reminds me that my oldest child celebrates her birthday this month. Which in turn reminds me of the mysteries and puzzlements of child-rearing. Which in its turn reminds me, once again, why I am a cultural conservative. . . . . Continue Reading »