Arts & Culture
Arts & Culture
Blazing Saddles, Directed by Mel Brooks
William Nauenburg October 21, 2020
Blazing Saddles, through humor and satire, tackles the pernicious reality of racism and shows that a man’s reasoning mind and heroic deeds can overcome bigotry and prejudice.
Arts & Culture, History
Three Symphonies to Help You Triumph
Leisa Hart October 15, 2020
Finding music that conveys struggle and eventual triumph is difficult because, to depict true triumph, one has to study it intensely and perhaps experience it firsthand. But such music is a wonderful source of inspiration and empowerment.
Arts & Culture, History, Philosophy, Politics & Rights, Reviews
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
Timothy Sandefur October 2, 2020
In Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explore the connections between such phenomena as “shoutdowns,” “canceling,” and identity politics on the one hand and the philosophical doctrines taught in America’s universities on the other.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
Mulan (2020) Sullies the Legacy of a Heroine
Frank Olechnowicz October 2, 2020
If you’re looking for a Disney movie that conveys life-serving virtues and values, I passionately recommend watching (or re-watching) the 1998 animated Mulan—and abstaining from the 2020 live-action remake.
Arts & Culture, Good Living, History
How Travel Can Foster a Personal Renaissance
Joseph Kellard September 17, 2020
I once found it difficult to relate to the excitement travelers expressed at walking the same streets their heroes did centuries earlier. Not so after walking through cities where a hero of mine revolutionized art and science.
Arts & Culture, Politics & Rights
We Can’t Fight Racism by Engaging in Racism
Aaron Briley September 8, 2020
Making an individual’s race the determining factor in how we treat him is destructive and immoral—even if we think we’re helping him by doing so.
Arts & Culture, Biographies, Science & Technology
Remembering Grant Imahara: Mythbuster Extraordinaire
William Nauenburg September 3, 2020
Thanks in large part to Grant Imahara’s engineering brilliance, the myth that science is a purely academic realm reserved solely for people in white lab coats was thoroughly busted.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
The Death of Stalin by Armando Iannucci
Thomas Walker-Werth August 28, 2020
Comedy can be a powerful medium for expressing important ideas, and Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is a standout example.
Arts & Culture, Biographies, History
John Singer Sargent and the Art of Elegance
Timothy Sandefur August 20, 2020
More than any of his contemporaries, Sargent expressed the glamour that emerging capitalism made possible. Yet that is just what made him incomprehensible or unacceptable to later artists and critics.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
And Then He Shot His Cousin by Jeremiah Cobra
Grace Steele August 12, 2020
Thrilling and inspiring, And Then He Shot His Cousin is the story of an individual’s power to find and hold onto goodness while immersed in darkness, and to forge his own path into the light.