Millions of horrified television viewers yesterday watched terrified students running from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, sick with fear, hands up. A 19-year-old former student who had been expelled had shot up the school, killing 17 students and…
Friends of the University of Chicago often profess its humanities and social sciences have largely escaped postmodern infection. But no institution is immune, and recent developments at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, the university’s teaching collection, should dispel intramural complacency. According to…
Late last year, the California board of education brought to an end a decades-long campaign to emphasize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender historical figures in state social-studies / history textbooks, approving K-8 volumes that make identity politics of all kinds…
I know several clever people who think Garrison Keillor is funny. Many fell in love with his “A Prairie Home Companion” in the late 1970s and 1980s. Now he’s like Lawrence Welk for aging yuppies. They are devastated by yesterday’s…
Germany is in an unexpected political stalemate. This month, coalition talks among quarreling parties collapsed, leaving who will govern the country in question. If it is unable to form a new government, Germany could hold national elections again, a dismal…
The race hoax at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs has unraveled. The hoaxer, a black football player and prospective cadet at its prep school, is exposed and gone. Racial slurs scrawled across dorm whiteboards were fakes, the student’s…
In 1958, twenty-two years after he wrote Brave New World, the Englishman-moved-to-Los Angeles Aldous Huxley revisited his book and the future. Of democracies, Huxley said, “Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever…
The nation is less socially hopeful and generous than in years leading up to Barack Obama’s presidency. In 2008, voters signed up for an untested junior Illinois senator who promised them racial harmony and a post-racial nation. They got Black…
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the global Frankfurt Book Fair last week, preaching European unity and cultural diversity to thousands of book buyers, agents, editors, and publishers. But French author Michel Houellebecq’s appearance and reading from…
President Donald J. Trump, for all his defects, speaks to white Americans, badgered ceaselessly, told to renounce their heritage and confess ancestral sins. Too many of them — millions — have put up quite a while with censure they feel…