Scholar's Stage: Contemporary America↗

I t is unusual for me to read a book aimed at popular conservative audiences.  I am something of a disaffected conservative.

I n the comment thread of the post “ Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: Three Centuries of American Political Culture ” a reader writing under the tag “Bormington” questions whether or not the changes...

O ne of the benefits of living in China is a certain sense of perspective. China exists outside of the Anglophone culture wars.

I am a fan of the musical Hamilton. My willingness to acclaim its merits is quite shameless, actually. This may strike some readers as odd, and perhaps strangely arbitrary.

I have a short essay out in the Weekly Standard this week arguing that most of the commentariat have a deeply flawed understanding of pop psychologist Jordan Peterson.

DR. STOCKMANN: It’s my own fault. I should have faced them down long ago — shown my teeth — and bite back! Call me an enemy of society! So help me God, I’m not going to swallow that! MRS.

Norman Rockwell, draft version of Freedom of Speech (1943). “In the United States… there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined power of individuals.

I have a new essay out in the National Review which extends some of yesterday’s thoughts on the limits and attractions of the “common good” conservatism to a new topic: the generational divide that...

T wo weeks ago I appeared on Titus Techera’s podcast Post-Modern Conservative to talk with him about my article for the National Review, “ Learning the Wrong Lessons From Reform Conservatism ” and...

A book to read before making a poor analogy. E arlier this week I was interviewed by Erik Torenberg, for his podcast “Venture Stories.

Ideology, which was once the road to action, has become a dead end.

W hat did I get wrong in 2020? What did I change my mind about?

L et’s talk about the grand Slate Star Codex brouhaha. A lot of people have already written about this. Here is the original New York Times piece that started the controversy.

From Ryan Burge, tweet , 2 July 2021. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked? “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” —Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926).

If there is one lesson the world should learn from the great pandemic of 2020, it is this: we must discard the myth of panic.

Vladislav M. Zubok’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev is a surprising counterpart to my essay, “ Culture Wars are Long Wars .

Image Source The political project of the “post liberals” is not my own.

You may remember a piece I wrote last summer. It was a review of Vladislav Zubok’s book, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev .

A few months ago Jonathan Haidt made waves with a big think-piece in the Atlantic arguing that most of the ills of the 2010s can be traced back to the invention of the retweet button.

Readers of the Scholar’s Stage will be familiar with a thesis I have pursued in multiple essays and posts over the last half decade: America was once a place where institutional capacity was very...

To write of Christmas after December 25 th is neither a sin nor a crime, but there is something untoward in my tardiness.