A heroine died the other day. Traute Lafrenz, a member of the White Rose resistance to Germany’s Nazis, passed away at 103 years old. She was the last known living member of the doomed group of idealistic students. The Soviet…
Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers By Emma Smith (Penguin Random House, 352 pages, $28) We are what we read. Such is the central claim of Emma Smith’s new book, Portable Magic: A History of Books and…
As Vladimir Putin forges ahead with his invasion of Ukraine, killing all manner of Ukrainian civilians in a horrific display of mass murder, the saga of Gavrilo Princip is recalled. Who was Gavrilo Princip? He was a Bosnian Serb teenager…
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” What is a guarantee worth? In its most meaningful form, as a treaty or covenant, it is…
Tuesday History is a great help in understanding today and tomorrow. Specifically, what we are seeing right now shows how thoughtfully Mr. Putin has read and understood his progenitor in statecraft, Adolf Hitler. As everyone once knew, World War I…
Whoopi Goldberg won a two-week suspension and public spanking from The View because she waded into the teeth of a global moral consensus: the Holocaust was genocide and thus, unmitigated evil. Goldberg did not deny the evil. But her denial…
I’d like to start by talking about something my father said to me on my 50th birthday 27 years ago. Some of you will recall that my father, Herbert Stein, a noted economist from about around 1945 to 1999, was…
The United States needs to abandon its longstanding “strategic ambiguity” regarding its likely response to a Chinese attack or invasion of Taiwan and replace it with “strategic clarity” in the form of a collective defensive East Asian-Pacific alliance with Japan,…
Convicted in the Nuremberg trials, Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, spent 20 years in Spandau Prison. His release in 1966 made headlines, and his memoir Inside the Third Reich (1970) was translated into 14 languages and sold over a million copies….