Spring 2023 • Vol 18, No. 1

First and foremost a magnificent novel, George Orwell’s 1984 is also a terrifyingly prescient political commentary. Written by an Englishman in 1949, it substantially mirrors the trajectory of American politics today.

Responses to the Twitter Files display a fundamental misunderstanding of what censorship is—and point us toward “solutions” far more dangerous than the problem.

The Chinese Communist Party perpetrates some of the worst censorship in the modern world. Film companies have a moral responsibility not to sanction the CCP and its horrors by capitulating to them—much less collaborating with them.

Incitement to violence and the spread of “disinformation” are common rationalizations for expanding government powers to restrict speech, but how does such censorship actually pan out?

If Jacinda Ardern were as empathetic, compassionate, and insightful as most reactions to her departure suggest, she would have respected the rights of New Zealanders, including their liberty to travel and to speak their minds freely. She didn’t, and that is how she should be remembered.

Babylon 5 is a unique science-fiction series that tells an epic story rich in philosophic ideas and moral messages. These make it timeless and well worth watching for anyone interested in complex drama.

Dr. Andrew Bernstein, author of Why Johnny Still Can’t Read or Write or Understand Math: And What We Can Do About It, recently joined me to discuss the problems with American schools today, along with some inspiring solutions.

Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, all published in 1943, launched the modern American liberty movement. Freedom’s Furies by Timothy Sandefur is the first book-length exploration of these women's relationships and context.

On November 25, ten people were killed and nine more were injured in a fire in a residential tower in Urumqi, Xinjiang province. Although such fires are common in China, the Urumqi fire exposed the human cost of China’s unjust “zero-COVID” policy and precipitated some of the most overt antigovernment protests China has seen in decades.

Americanism isn’t a matter of where you live or which government rules over you. It’s a matter of the principles that recognize individuals as individuals with their own minds and lives, and thus enable them to live by the judgment of their own minds.

You may have heard of Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile, or Virgin Galactic, but how much do you know about the mastermind behind all the Virgin companies—a man whose entrepreneurial spirit earned him the nickname Dr. Yes?

The stalemate over house speaker brings to mind a question: Isn’t it strange that in a nation of such ambition and inventiveness, our options for political candidates basically range from bad to worse, from senile morons with no understanding of basic economics to ditzy Marxists and outright frauds and crooks?

Contra those who think it’s not possible to ethically accumulate so much wealth, Taylor Swift has done so by trading value for value—never resorting to force or fraud. She created that wealth, and fans upset about this “need to calm down” and acknowledge this fact.

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.

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.

Recently, a growing chorus of voices has become increasingly hostile to free speech. Certain speech, we are told, must be suppressed in order to combat “hate speech,” stop misinformation, and “protect democracy.” But, as Jacob Mchangama explains in his book, Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media, these arguments are not new.

Knock at the Cabin depicts the vile notion that it is moral to sacrifice the person you love most—your highest value—for the benefit of others and/or to appease God.