The Burden of the Humanities

Posted: Monday, July 14, 2008
The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon.  [Full Story]

Remarks on the Anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's Birth

Posted: Thursday, April 24, 2008
Perhaps, in the past, we have been too prone to place our forebears on a pedestal. But it is far worse, to feel compelled always to cut the storied past down to the size of the tabloid present. Perhaps the time has come for that to change. Perhaps we are wise enough now, to know that imperfect heroes are the only kind there ever are, or can be.  [Full Story]

Birthday of a Preacher Man
Elmer Gantry turns 80.
Posted: Friday, January 4, 2008
You probably didn't notice it, but that old rogue Elmer Gantry turned 80 this year. A surprising thought, perhaps, given what a fixture Sinclair Lewis's 1927 fictional portrait of a bogus and amoral itinerant Midwestern preacher has become in both our speech and our imaginations. Was there really a time when we didn't have Elmer to kick around--or to kick others with?  [Full Story]

Prof in a Box
A mail-order company gives us a second chance for education.
Posted: Friday, August 24, 2007
As the generations of post-1960s college graduates grow older, they will come to understand that their expensive formal education, with its trendiness and lack of breadth or rigor or enduring substance, quite simply failed them -- by failing to connect them to the riches of their own civilization.  [Full Story]

Twilight of Sociology

Posted: Wednesday, February 7, 2007
If sociology can somehow tame its misguided activist zeal -- if it can reclaim a supple awareness of the hard and permanent things -- it may gain back some of its lost status. Tocqueville believed that the great task facing modernity is not to erase the past and "reconstruct" the present but to recognize what was best in the past -- what was essential -- and to carry it forward.  [Full Story]

Is Conservatism Finished?

Posted: Thursday, January 4, 2007
Even before November's midterm elections and the Republican party's loss of its congressional majorities, there was widespread talk of the exhaustion, even death, of conservatism in America. But nothing about the GOP losses justifies the claim that conservatism lost, or that the slow movement of the American electorate to the center-Right of the political spectrum has stopped or even diminished, let alone reversed.  [Full Story]

Yes, There Are Two Americas

Posted: Saturday, December 23, 2006
If Mr. Brooks is right, our era's common sense of the matter -- that the political left is more compassionate than the political right -- is demonstrably inaccurate. In fact, Sen. John Edwards's repeated claim that there are "two Americas" turns out to be correct but misstated: The line of separation runs most saliently not between the haves and have-nots but between the gives and the give-nots.  [Full Story]

In the Heat of the Southern Night

Posted: Monday, November 27, 2006
Journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff have provided an account of the turning point in American journalistic self-definition. Their book provides strong evidence that, far more than Vietnam or Watergate, it was the experience of the civil rights movement that shaped the ideals of the journalistic profession as we know it today. And there is much to be said for that perspective.  [Full Story]

A Flood of Words on Katrina

Posted: Wednesday, May 17, 2006
The Great Deluge turns out to be a book worthy of its title. It just goes on and on and on, a veritable Mississippi of sludgy, sophomoric, rebarbative prose, with gimmicky human-interest stories, transcriptions of press releases, gratuitous quotations from great writers about hurricanes, and potted history. This author may feel the gravity of his subject, but he does not manage to convey it.  [Full Story]

Writer's Block

Posted: Tuesday, May 16, 2006
There was a mystique about Richard Hofstadter, as David Brown tells it in his biography of the eminent American historian. He produced the best books (The American Political Tradition and The Age of Reform) for the best publisher (Knopf), won the best prizes (two Pulitzers), taught at the best university (Columbia) in the best city (New York) at the best time in its history (the quarter-century after World War II). It is not claiming too much for Hofstadter to grant him a significant role in the transformation of American writing about history.   [Full Story]