Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

A New Conservative Agenda

What has been known as conservatism in the Republican party since Ronald Reagan left office, fully thirty years ago, has become inadequate. This has been evident for a while, though we’re only now noticing. From the Great Recession and loss of manufacturing jobs to perpetual war in the Islamic . . . . Continue Reading »

Sentimental Frenzy

On the basis of a sixty-second clip, thousands of prominent Americans rushed to denounce the students of Covington Catholic High School. The students’ alleged crime was mobbing an American Indian activist named Nathan Phillips while wearing “Make America Great Again” caps. Respectable people . . . . Continue Reading »

Miyazaki's Reality

Miyazakiworld:  A Life in Art by susan napier yale, 344 pages, $30 Never-Ending Man, a documentary that recently enjoyed a limited release in the United States, shows an exchange between the animator Hayao Miyazaki, seventy-eight, and a group of young programmers from an artificial intelligence . . . . Continue Reading »

The Past in Full

There’s a book I keep in the bathroom at home, a big blue volume of 750 pages titled, somewhat ironically, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes. A terrific book to browse in, with more than four thousand brief anecdotes about more than two thousand individuals from ancient times to the near . . . . Continue Reading »

The Caudillo

Franco:  Anatomy of a Dictator by enrique moradiellos i.b.tauris, 264 pages, $30 Not long after the successful Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain, removed a photograph of Adolf ­Hitler from his desk in the Pardo Palace in Madrid. He promptly replaced . . . . Continue Reading »

Taleb the Philosopher

Incerto:  Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile by nassim nicholas taleb random house, 1,568 pages, $70 Skin in the Game:  Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by nassim nicholas taleb random house, 304 pages, $30 Boethius’s ambitious goal to synthesize all . . . . Continue Reading »

Bread Eternal

In the ruins of Ostia Antica, where Roman roads have disintegrated into a tangle of worn stones and earth, past market stalls where tall grasses jut from meticulously laid mosaic floors, one can find about three dozen stone basins in which bakers once placed bread dough to rise. This is one of . . . . Continue Reading »

Filter Tag Articles