WHEN THE SELF-POLICING REGIME of morality breaks down, the state must take charge of the mess and rescue the victims—both the unwilling victims, like the fatherless children of casual relations, and the willing ones, who have chosen dependency on the…
People poison themselves through consuming stuff that harms them. They also poison the world, by spreading venomous thought, venomous entertainment, and venomous waste. It is a strange feature of our societies that governments increasingly seek to control the first kind…
The British prime minister has “come out” with a commitment to gay marriage, arguing that it is not despite being a conservative, but because he’s a conservative, that he favors it. He is not the only one to have voiced…
The controversy over Frank Gehry’s design for a “memorial park” to President Eisenhower—a vast array of hideous metal walls, covered with reflections on the President’s humble origins, and mutilating (should it be built) an important public area of the capital…
It is fair to say that “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” as Daniel Dennett has described it, has caused more trouble to the ordinary conscience than just about any other scientific hypothesis. We cannot easily reject the theory of evolution, which explains…
Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to…
Changes in the technology of communication are occurring so rapidly that we human beings now move through a cloud of messages as dense as a locust-storm. Every new device increases the speed and the outreach of the last, and young…
The riots in British cities over the summer have been assimilated by our opinion-formers into the easy categories that govern their thinking. Leftwing writers have cited urban deprivation, poverty, and racism–in other words, factors for which the rioters cannot be…
I first visited Greece 50 years ago, hitchhiking with a school friend from England, in search of the glorious world of Homer, Plato, and Thucydides. Of course, we didn’t find that world. But we found something almost as remarkable, which…