Timothy Sandefur's Articles
Arts & Culture, History
The Song of the New World
Timothy Sandefur August 20, 2024
Antonin Dvořák managed to capture a beautifully American sense of life: the moment of dawning opportunity, the first glimpse of the potential for triumph, of the chance to prevail that has always been the New World’s greatest gift.
Politics & Rights, Reviews
On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors by Elizabeth Weiss
Timothy Sandefur July 25, 2024
In her new memoir, On the Warpath, Elizabeth Weiss reveals how anthropology is slowly being sacrificed for the sake of that toxically irrational sludge of ideologies collectively known as “wokeness.”
History, Politics & Rights, Reviews
The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative by John Swanson Jacobs, edited by Jonathan D. S. Shroeder
Timothy Sandefur July 12, 2024
Six Hundred Thousand Despots offers us a fresh view on slavery by one who not only experienced it, but evinced extraordinary heroism in escaping from bondage.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
Pudd’nhead Wilson with Those Extraordinary Twins: The Authoritative Edition by Mark Twain, edited by Benjamin Griffin
Timothy Sandefur June 7, 2024
The Mark Twain Project’s authoritative edition of Pudd’nhead Wilson is an important scholarly resource, a delightful read for Twain devotees, and an opportunity for readers at large to gain more insight into the author’s sincere, if imperfect, efforts to attack the scourge of racial prejudice.
History, Politics & Rights
Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass
Timothy Sandefur April 11, 2024
The first comprehensive book on the Japanese war crimes trial, Judgment at Tokyo is an exceptional feat of political, legal, and historical scholarship.
Good Living, Philosophy, Reviews
Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke
Timothy Sandefur February 8, 2024
The task of justifying a life aimed at self-improvement, flourishing, or ataraxia is a substantial one for writers on ethics. Unfortunately, Tosi and Warmke barely try.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman
Timothy Sandefur January 10, 2024
It’s been almost a century since Edith Hamilton published her classic The Greek Way, and during those years, countless thousands of readers have encountered Greek culture for the first time through her works. Yet despite her achievements, Hamilton has never been the subject of a full biography until now.
Arts & Culture, History
Frank Lloyd Wright: Rebel Architect
Timothy Sandefur November 23, 2023
It would be hard to name an artist whose influence has been as ubiquitous as Frank Lloyd Wright’s. Yet he achieved his status not by lowering his standards but through a devoted pursuit of his ideals—ideals that gave voice to the principles of individuality and aspiration at the center of the American consciousness.
Politics & Rights, Reviews
Against the New Politics of Identity by Ronald A. Lindsay
Timothy Sandefur November 10, 2023
If American culture is to survive the onslaught of identity politics, it will only be through the efforts of such reasonable and courageous thinkers as Ronald Lindsay.
Good Living, Philosophy
Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life by Emily A. Austin
Timothy Sandefur May 18, 2023
Living for Pleasure is a fun and much-needed introduction to the ideas of one of the world’s greatest philosophers. Epicurus’s teachings about reason, desire, and tranquility are as important now as they were twenty-three hundred years ago.
History, Reviews
The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class That Tried to Win the Cold War by Philip Oltermann
Timothy Sandefur February 28, 2023
The Stasi Poetry Circle offers an unusual glimpse of the relationship between communist totalitarianism and the poetic impulses of both its victims and their victimizers.
History, Politics & Rights, Reviews
And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham
Timothy Sandefur February 13, 2023
What many of Lincoln's contemporaries—and many today—mistook for paradoxes or even contradictions more often reflected the prudence of a leader facing the horrendous task of guiding the United States toward a philosophic principle when unprecedented bloodshed made it sometimes seem safer to disregard that principle.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A. E. Stallings
Timothy Sandefur December 3, 2022
A. E. Stallings’s distinctive poetry succeeds because it merges a conscientious focus on meaningful content—saying relevant and powerful things about human experiences—with a painstaking attention to formal design. The results are masterpieces of integration.
Arts & Culture, History
The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, Banned Russian Novelist
Timothy Sandefur October 29, 2022
The life and fate of banned Russian novelist Vasily Grossman is a tragedy worthy of his own novelistic skills. More than fifty years after his passing, we can only imagine what he might have achieved had communist tyranny not stifled him.
Politics & Rights, Reviews
The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman
Timothy Sandefur September 6, 2022
Elliot Ackerman’s The Fifth Act may be the first great book about the Afghanistan war. It uses the nauseating surrender of the United States to the Taliban in 2021 as a point of departure for a series of reflections on the irrationality with which the war was waged and the consequences of that irrationality for American culture.