History
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.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
Killers of the Flower Moon, Directed by Martin Scorsese
Thomas Walker-Werth October 28, 2023
Killers of the Flower Moon is a bloated film with a malevolent sense of life. Despite its enormous runtime, it misses the opportunity to depict both the rights abuses to which the Osage were subjected and the good entrepreneurship they and others engaged in.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
Oppenheimer, Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan
Angelica Walker-Werth July 28, 2023
Oppenheimer was a key mind behind the invention and development of the bombs that ended World War II. He was also haunted by the question of whether producing these bombs was the right thing to do. This question runs throughout Christopher Nolan’s recent biopic, Oppenheimer, hailed by some as “the most epic WWII film yet."
Biographies, History
Robert P. McCulloch: The Man Who Bought London Bridge
Thomas Walker-Werth July 11, 2023
Robert P. McCulloch worked constantly to grow his wealth and create new things, even when others couldn’t see the potential in his ideas or dismissed them as impossible. He deserves to be remembered as a productive businessman, a pioneering inventor, and, most of all, a visionary.
Ayn Rand & Objectivism, Economics, History, Philosophy, Politics & Rights
Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and the Philosophic Foundation for Freedom
Jon Hersey May 24, 2023
Adam Smith and Ayn Rand are widely considered to offer merely different flavors of pro-capitalist thought. But their differences are greater—and far more consequential—than their similarities.
History, Politics & Rights
Brits Should Reject Monarchy and Embrace Rights
Thomas Walker-Werth May 3, 2023
If freedom-loving Brits are serious about the moral principles on which liberty depends, they must oppose the monarchy and advance a vision of a free British republic.
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, 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.
History, Politics & Rights
Iranian Freedom Fighters and the Winds of Reason
Jon Hersey October 6, 2022
Ayatollah Khamenei has said that an Islamic revival is spreading through the Middle East, not by conscious intent, but “like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze.” Maybe so, but a headwind is blowing steadily and insistently from the West.