We’re stuck. The signal innovations of modern times—mass water purification, electricity, automobiles, modern manufacturing processes—are behind us. This slowing of invention presents a problem. We are trapped by the imperative of ever more innovation even as innovation becomes harder . . . . Continue Reading »
Philosophers are supposed to be doubters. When we think of Socrates, the patron saint and martyr of philosophy, we usually fix on the early Platonic dialogues, which depict him as a man who defended no positive doctrine but was such a nuisance with his doubt-inducing questions that the guardians . . . . Continue Reading »
Nothing stimulates the emergence of a guru like a crisis, especially one to which the correct response is far from clear. People want simple, reassuring answers. They eagerly suspend their critical faculties; their wishes are father to their beliefs. A good guru can transform the proudest skeptic . . . . Continue Reading »
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who comprised the most consequential partnership in the history of American musical theater, were brought together by chance. It happened in the early 1940s, when each on his own cottoned to the idea of adapting the play Green Grow the Lilacs into . . . . Continue Reading »
Julia Yost’s wide-ranging and masterly critique of The Body Keeps the Score (“By Our Wounds We Are Healed,” October) is cumulatively devastating. I wonder, though, whether Bessel van der Kolk will even care. As Liberace remarked when similarly challenged, “I cried all the way to . . . . Continue Reading »
A war is slowly brewing. It pits parents against their children and children against their parents. Longstanding social and economic trends are creating tensions between the generations. These trends, which show no sign of abating, have largely escaped the attention of the public and are rarely . . . . Continue Reading »
Emma Eckstein was a bleeder: She liked to bleed. She wanted to empty herself out into the world. She was sick and dying, because that was what she desired. This isn’t my interpretation; it’s the analysis offered by her doctor, one Sigmund Freud. Emma was one of Freud’s first patients, but she . . . . Continue Reading »
The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is open again. One has to book an entry time so that the museum can control the (tiny) crowds during the time of the virus. It’s hardly a fight to get in. Architecturally redone not so long ago with a steady but meditative touch by Frank Gehry, the AGO houses small . . . . Continue Reading »
How are we to assign responsibility for the opioid epidemic? Patrick Radden Keefe—the New Yorker staff writer who in 2017 wrote a lengthy profile of the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma—offers an easy answer in his new book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the . . . . Continue Reading »
In a series of short but incisive essays, Matthew Rose, a frequent contributor to First Things, examines five thinkers of the radical right: Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis. Why study a set of thinkers with dubious ideas, whose lives contain . . . . Continue Reading »
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