Our embarrassment at the present, rancid state of our politics calls us to a new resolve: to rebuild the public moral culture that can sustain a democratic politics capable of advancing both human flourishing and social solidarity. Continue Reading »
George Frazier had a story about the first time he met John O’Hara. The journalist and clotheshorse Frazier was introduced to the novelist O’Hara while hanging out at a Greenwich Village jazz club. The famously cranky O’Hara looked Frazier up and down before inviting him to have a drink. . . . . Continue Reading »
America is a nation of immigrants. America has always been a nation of immigrants. Or so we are constantly told. Strange, then, that the phrase did not become common until John F. Kennedy published a book with that title in 1958. “All Americans have been immigrants or the descendants of . . . . Continue Reading »
I first walked into the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx because I had been told not to. I had been told it was too dangerous and too poor, and that I was too white. I had been told that “nobody goes there for anything but drugs and prostitutes.” The people telling me this were my . . . . Continue Reading »
Conservative thinkers will have to become at once less political and more political. Continue Reading »
Young Rabbi Binder has opened the floor for a “free discussion” period at the afternoon Hebrew school housed in the synagogue, where the minimal Jewish education he dispenses to postwar Jewish boys is a prerequisite for their bar mitzvah ritual. As usual, most of the kids are indifferent, even . . . . Continue Reading »
The Best American Poetry 2018 edited by dana gioia scribner, 240 pages, $18.99 American poetry lost three greats last year: John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall. But it also welcomed A. R. Ammons’s “Finishing Up,” A. E. Stallings’s “Pencil,” and Anne . . . . Continue Reading »
I just passed a sign in a store window that says, “No Vacancy for Hate.” Well, I thought, that’s a little less righteous than similar messages in front lawns and restaurant portals: “Hate Is Not Welcome Here,” “Hate Is Not a Family Value,” and other censures of the number one sin . . . . Continue Reading »
Liberalism has created a world in which disordered souls kill themselves with drugs and alcohol—and in which those harboring murderous thoughts feel free to act upon them. Continue Reading »
A deep, hard-to-pinpoint angst saps and drains the morale of America’s children: The quiet carnage of the cult of success. Continue Reading »
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