When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

Political judgment takes place within political time. And political time is less a matter of chronology than of genre. What kind of moment are we living through? Is our system of government undergoing ...

This essay appears in our current print issue under the headline “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Political Violence.” Subscribe to get a copy. Georges Sorel, writing in 1908, gave a very ...

This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for the field of forensic science. In an unprecedented display of repentance, the Bureau announced that, for years, ...

Rare is the CEO today who, in the face of public concern about a potentially dangerous product, says, “Let’s hire the best scientists to figure out if the problem is real and then, if it is, stop ...

This essay is part of an Election Chronicle series in our Winter 2025 issue, Trump’s Return. I am baffled, as I was in 2016, as to why so many liberals are still shocked by Trump’s victory—and why, in ...

Events of the past decade have prompted frenzied discussion of the state of democracy across the globe. In countries across Europe, Latin America, and Asia—as well as, of course, in the United ...

It seems almost quaint—at a time when the academy is under systemic attack by those who talk of facts, faith, the greatness of the Founders, and the still greater power of “woke” educators—that during ...

This essay appears in our print issue, On Solidarity. As I watched Pat Buchanan address the Republican National Convention three decades ago, I cried. I can still see his doughy face and fixed ...

In 1601, as a succession of failing harvests left people jobless and hungry, and vagrants roamed across England, the Elizabethan poor laws were established to reassert control over the population. The ...

U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and ...

What happens next and how to take things seriously are difficulties these texts have something to tell us about—something we need, still, to learn. This account of these three notoriously difficult ...