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The Desecration of Man

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the lectures that became C. S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. Speaking to an audience at the height of the Second World War, Lewis identified the central problem of the modern age: The world was losing its sense of what it meant to be human. As . . . . Continue Reading »

Surgery is the New Sex

The villains intent on snuffing out evolutionary adaptation through technocratic means are battling against nature itself. They are, in the name of preserving human nature, redefining it according to arbitrary will. Continue Reading »

The Politics of Unhappiness

A traffic jam, a shoe that ­pinches: It takes very little to ­ruin a nice day. Nothing can please you then, and your judgment is affected. At first glance, ­unpleasantness and the resulting peevishness have no political or economic significance. These experiences are commonplace, part of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Postnatural Intelligence

Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus belongs to the literature of the uncanny. But the young Mary ­Shelley who wrote it—or rather, the teenaged Mary Godwin who sketched it in a summerhouse near Geneva—was nothing if not canny. Her 1818 debut novel was and still is hugely . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

TeachersIn his “Re-Educate for America” (November), Malcolm Rivers identifies correctly the cultural hegemony that undergirds the educational establishment (and the leadership class) in America. A decade ago, as a New York City Teaching Fellow (a program in lockstep with Teach for America), I . . . . Continue Reading »

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