Archive

I didn’t like doing my spring cleaning in March. March is cold on Wildcat Mountain. It was twenty degrees in the daytime, five degrees at night. Two and a...

Tourism makes fact seem fiction. I feel confident Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and I believe it is a great portrait, until I get to the room...

On Monday, the Princeton University faculty voted overwhelmingly to end the 133-year-old tradition of unproctored examinations. Princeton had previously administered all assessments on the honor system. Former dean of...

In 1716, a remarkable commoner by the name of James Oglethorpe took a leave of absence from Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His most notable accomplishment to date—admittedly, he was...

Last month, New York archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan unveiled a new painting for St. Patrick’s—the largest work of art commissioned in the cathedral’s 146-year history. Journalists celebrated the work...

A funny story is almost never improved by an assiduous concern for facts. Case in point: Gerald Durrell’s marvelous My Family and Other Animals, one of the glories of...

On this day in 1813, England’s most beloved novel was published. Pride and Prejudice has become the quintessential tale of a supremely suitable marriage joined to dazzling wealth, but...

Politicians talk about helping small businesses. But what can they do? During the Covid lockdowns, one third of all American small businesses closed. They were already struggling. In Steubenville,...

The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible—a Bible decades in the making, under the editorship of Steubenville scholars Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch—recently arrived in our bookstore. Students from the new...

I grew up in working-class New York City in the 1980s, which means I grew up with the ’86 Mets. The Mets, founded in 1962, had an unfair reputation...

This week is “Banned Books Week,” a fact being advertised at libraries and booksellers across the country. A sweet savor of past respectability still clings to the observance, which...

A year and a half ago, our city’s one bookshop went up for sale. My wife and I bought it. The place had 20,000 books, a good music system that probably played...

For some people, a timely warning can avert disaster. For others, it is a prophecy. The 1930 film Morocco, starring Marlene Dietrich as the nightclub singer Amy Jolly, is...

My grandfather died before I was born, and he remains to me a mostly mysterious figure. As is true of many people born poor who are committed to bettering...

If you are ever in Steubenville, Ohio, that plucky burg of seedy steel mills and fresh-faced Catholic youth, it is to be hoped that you may chance upon the...