I was introduced to the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s after they were already over. As a teenager, I was given a copy of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon by a well-meaning family friend. It ...

Paul Finebaum is known as “the mouth of the South,” but he does a lot of listening. This is the secret to his success as the host of a call-in show focused on college football in the Southeastern ...

Has Elon Musk read the Odyssey? Despite the trillionaire’s endless carping about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Homeric poem, I have yet to see anyone ask this simple question. Musk has ...

Imagine that you work as a janitor in the office building of a large corporation. One evening you encounter the distraught CEO standing on a window ledge. “Don’t jump!” you cry. “I’m free to do as I ...

Ten years ago, an editor at Penguin approached me to ask if I would like to edit a collection of essays by Wendell Berry for a British audience. Berry’s essays had never been published in book form in ...

On the night he was elected president, in November 2008, Barack Obama addressed a throng in Chicago and declared that America had been made over the course of “221 years—block by block, brick by brick ...

William Lane Craig has recently caused some consternation by saying he does not confess the faith of the Nicene Creed. The reaction is understandable. Nicene orthodoxy, after all, is the faith ...

In his Apologia ad Carolum Quintum, English cardinal Reginald Pole claimed that Thomas Cromwell told him in 1529 that Machiavelli’s The Prince had inspired King Henry VIII to break with Rome. The ...

Before her song “I Will Always Love You” became a Whitney Houston hit, Dolly Parton was a young girl from Pittman Center, Tennessee. She was born to a farmer, “Lee,” who sharecropped land before later ...

In June 2025 Janet Daby, the Member of Parliament for Lewisham East, started having nightmares: terrible images of death and dying that disturbed her sleep and haunted her conscience. She didn’t need ...

In London this summer, I walked past a pub sign near Trafalgar Square that read “Fully Air Conditioned. Serving Cold Beers.” Turning to my wife, I laughed: “I truly don’t recognize my own country ...

Reluctant as I am to fiddle with the U.S. Constitution, I’m willing to consider an amendment banning any elementary school from opening before Labor Day. That’s the way things were when I was a boy in ...