IN THE December 31, 2015, ISSUE
The New Melting Pot
A new culture war is breaking out in America. Unlike the culture wars of the recent past, this one isn’t about the place of Judeo-Christian values in our public life, ...
Magazine
Also In This Issue
Articles
Reclaiming Traditional Education
John Stuart Mill described conservatives “as being by a law of their existence the stupidest party.” The present candidates for the GOP nomination seem determined to prove him right.
Marco Rubio ...
The True Sprit of Chrismas*
Many persons our ages of 12, 10, 8, 6 think the Sprit of Chrismas is about toys and presents instead of about the real sprit. These persons are immature and ...
Cruz vs. Rubio
Freud wasn’t talking about party primaries when he coined the phrase “the narcissism of small differences,” but he might as well have been. The similarities between Senators Ted Cruz and ...
Discriminating Discrimination
Donald Trump has a peculiar talent for turning good ideas into bad ones.
This is related to his talent for salesmanship, which demands that he deal in superlatives and simplicities. An ...
Features
Climate Play-Acting
Goalposts move all the time, but rarely are they disassembled and carted away, leaving the teams to circle aimlessly while the crowd roars and the commentators prattle on as if ...
On Earth Peace, Good Will Toward Men
In the opening sequence of the 1988 film Scrooged, there’s a trailer for a movie called “The Night the Reindeer Died.” In this fictitious made-for-TV movie, Santa’s workshop is attacked ...
The New Melting Pot
A new culture war is breaking out in America. Unlike the culture wars of the recent past, this one isn’t about the place of Judeo-Christian values in our public life, ...
Self-Defense and the Second Amendment
Of all the ill-considered tropes that are trotted out in anger during our ongoing debate over gun control, perhaps the most irritating is the claim that the Constitution may indeed ...
Books, Arts & Manners
The Reductionist Trap
The author of this always-informative new ode to Darwinism took a doctorate in zoology at Oxford. I am a grad-school dropout who took geology (Rocks for Jocks!) to avoid math ...
A New Christian
Just a few things are widely known about Augustine of Hippo (354–430 a.d.), whose designations are as lofty and sweeping as saint, doctor (= “teacher”) of the Church, and the ...
Mystery Man
Writing about Bob Dylan’s politics would seem to be a thankless task. The famously curmudgeonly songwriter claims to know and care little about the subject, and what he has said ...
An American Original
New Market, Va. — Clive A. Babkirk is a Yankee in the South. He and his wife, Lois, are Mainers who live in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Each has ...
True Grit
The movie poster for Room shows a young mother, head tilted back, garbed in comfortable-looking gray, swinging her little boy in her arms. He’s wearing a plaid jacket, a raccoon ...
Down by Winter
I have flown into the city dozens of times, but this time — slam — it felt like a crash-landing in my ears. Nothing — yawning, swallowing, those little rubber ...
Sections
Letters
Can Peace in the Middle East Be So Simple?
In “The Islamic War” (December 7), Victor Davis Hanson wonders why Islamists despise us “all the more” as the Middle East has ...
The Week
‐ It figures: Homeland Security has the only government employees who don’t spend enough of their workday on Facebook . . .
‐ Senator Cruz is rising in the polls, both ...
Feel the (Non-Fossil-Fuel) Bern!
The Paris climate-change agreement is a remarkable document. If every printed copy were wadded up into a gigantic ball, it could be stuffed down the chimney of a Chinese coal ...
From https://wikileaks.org/clintonemailserver/recoveredemails/index
TO: sidblume@sbloompartnersllc.ae
FROM: bubbalicious@otherclintonemailserver.biz
RE: account transfer
Sid:
Was hoping to get $10 million transferred to my personal account from the wire transfer we’re getting from the Saudis. I’ll also need about $500k in ...
Poetry
WINTER SONG
As we unfreeze our rosy faces
We envy friends in warmer places,
Though we are wont to wish them well,
Even those toasting toes in hell.
We feast on heavy meat, creamed peas,
Fried ...
The Philosopher Suffers a Toothache
Like many writers, I spend a fair amount of time each day combing through Twitter, one of the planet’s more frenetic social-media locales. In case you have never darkened its ...