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Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual

You’ve asked me how to become an intellectual. You’re young, it seems (only young people ask questions of that kind), and you think you might have an intellectual vocation, but you can’t see what to do about it. What should you do in order to become the kind of person an intellectual is? What . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

dark powersR. R. Reno’s “The Nazi Taboo” section in his “Public Square” (December) immediately piqued my interest, but I am still not sure where the thesis was headed. Is the sudden emergence of ISIS an example of our vulnerability to an “upsurge in primitive urges?” Certainly it has . . . . Continue Reading »

A Dialogue Upon the Island

On the strand, Ariel and Caliban: the former seated atop a milk-white boulder with knees drawn up beneath his chin and wings folded behind him, the air about him stained with a mild prismatic splendor; the latter crouching in the surf with one hand shielding his eyes from the sun and his thick . . . . Continue Reading »

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