Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State By Mark Lawrence Schrad (Oxford, 512 pages, $35) A wager on the strong and sober” was the tagline given by Russian prime minister Peter Stolypin to his sweeping land…

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and LeftBy Yuval Levin(Basic, 296 pages, $27.99) [[{“type”:”media”,”view_mode”:”media_large”,”fid”:”94162″,”attributes”:{“alt”:””,”class”:”media-image”,”height”:”480″,”style”:”float: right;”,”typeof”:”foaf:Image”,”width”:”308″}}]] Shortly before receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Yuval Levin was given the unprecedented honor of seeing his…

ANY CONSERVATIVE who expends energy denouncing relativism is wasting his time fighting the last war. Relativism was quite a force for evil in its day, but the vitality has gone out of it. The villain that once needed an army…

The following things are not news: Craven horse-trading in the New York state legislature, that State Sen. Pedro Espada plays politics with his elbows high, and that Democratic Gov. David Paterson is too politically weak to do anything about his…

Ross Douthat doesn’t know it, but his column this morning was written in 1772. Justus Moser took a harder line in “On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and Their Children in Our Day” than Douthat does in “Liberated and Unhappy,”…