6+ day, 10+ hour ago  (1007+ words) Great literature expands the moral imagination. It reveals hidden truths. And it also shapes our civic consciousness. I doubt Henry James's lone political novel, The Princess Casamassima, is on many'if any'university syllabi today. But it is worth reading. It is…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago  (513+ words) And perhaps, at times, Smith was that man. Yet at other moments, he epitomized the "absent-minded professor." Biographer E. G. West describes Smith's state while writing Wealth of Nations:" There is a legendary story of this period to the effect that one…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago  (576+ words) An Intriguing Mode of Analysis Hartle's aim is to show that O'Connor provides a coherent and forceful response to "modernity," though she understands modernity in a very particular way. She is interested in the loss of the "prophetic vision," beginning…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago  (835+ words) Beyond his ability to "notice," Adam Smith was able to bring the different pieces together into a cohesive picture of reality. Helen Dale praises Adam Smith for noticing, the beginning practice of a novelist's art. What did Smith notice? Dale…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago  (271+ words) Del Toro delivers what his audience desires, to judge by the applause. But none of it is memorable, nor does it build up to anything. All of it is done, of course, in the name of care and safety on…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago  (740+ words) That Stoppard would devote his lone epic to the subject of the doomed utopian delusion of communism signals how important he believed the topic was. People don't storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History zigzags because when people…...

4+ week, 2+ day ago  (1035+ words) Like many people, I cracked the spine on Wealth of Nations first: it was more famous than Theory of Moral Sentiments. There it sat, fatly, in my high school library's stacks, waiting for me to take it down from the…...

2+ mon, 3+ day ago  (369+ words) Maybe there should be an "i" in "team." Pluribus, which recently concluded its inaugural season on Apple TV, blends a familiar theme of alien takeover with a novel vision of a communitarian utopia. The result is sheer terror'and a full-throated…...

2+ mon, 3+ day ago  (725+ words) I am very grateful to the authors who responded to my lead essay for the Law & Liberty January forum. Their thoughtful and carefully written response essays provide excellent discussions of the subject at hand, exploring the dimensions of contemporary music....

2+ mon, 5+ day ago  (907+ words) Rather than simply extolling the merits of the work, which has been done amply elsewhere, I'd prefer to focus here on three themes that emerge through the first volume of The Golden Thread that largely characterize the work, but that…...