A cancer diagnosis flips your world and your life upside down. It distorts the way you view reality and compresses time. It forces you to weigh alternatives and make choices that normal people don’t have to make and conventional circumstances don’t dictate. Deciding to treat it, and specifically how to treat it, involves not merely what is available, but what a patient can tolerate. Cancer patients are frequently weak and wounded, and the tools that physicians have at their disposal, recent remarkable advances notwithstanding, are dangerous and can be lethal. Most of the alternatives like radi ..read more

Conservatives love to talk about the progressive movement’s efficacy at penetrating culture, dominating the spheres of everything from entertainment to sports to education. Over the decades, the far left has conquered the institutions and the right side of the aisle is just beginning to retaliate. Some say conservative values are making a comeback while others contend that Western Civilization is too far gone to save. The jury is still out, and the verdict may depend on one crucial skill—the art of storytelling. Those who stand firm in traditional values and mores will never gain ground in the ..read more

Editor’s Note: Mitch Daniels, then Purdue University President, made these remarks during the university’s spring commencement ceremonies the weekend of May 13-15, 2022, in Purdue’s Elliott Hall of Music. Greetings, friends, and welcome. I should say “Welcome back.” We are back in Elliott Hall, where Purdue spring commencements belong, for the first time in three years. And as I’ll tell you in a few minutes, to me that matters beyond just the pleasure of returning to this beautiful, traditional venue. Starting with my first delivery of these remarks a decade ago, I have ended them ..read more

What future exists for American conservatism? As a lifelong conservative, I answer this question by looking to the past. The American conservative tradition has produced a host of luminaries since the 1952 publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, but there is one figure in particular that conservatives would do well to rediscover: poet and historian Peter Viereck (1916–2006). Viereck is one of the most insightful figures in postwar American conservatism, and one of the most compelling, despite the fact that he has been largely forgotten. A cursory survey of histories of conservatis ..read more

In the 2004 film Collateral, silver-haired assassin Vincent (Tom Cruise) forces cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) to taxi him to his various would-be targets throughout the night. In an early scene, an unsuspecting Max is patiently waiting outside when a dead body falls from a second-story window onto the hood of his cab. When Vincent returns to the scene and the realization sinks in that the hitman is responsible for the fresh corpse, a shocked Max accusingly asks, “You killed him?” Vincent, unfazed, coolly responds, “No, I shot him. Bullets and the fall killed him.” It is a distinction without a d ..read more

I first picked up F. A. Hayek sometime around 2010. Everyone was doing it; it was the right’s Hayekian moment. I had not had occasion to read Hayek, having written my dissertation on Scholasticism. I was unable to find a Latin translation of The Road to Serfdom, so I had to settle for reading it in my native language, but I still managed to capture a bit of the heady sensation of stepping into a different world. Hayek introduced me to the logic of limited government. I still think he is as good an introduction as one can find, at least for readers too mature to be delighted by John Galt. We ar ..read more

In the March-April 2024 Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, there is an article that may drastically affect the practice of pharmacy in the United States. It is, unfortunately, not an article that describes a new life-saving drug that pharmacists can counsel their patients to use correctly, but rather it is about “Exploring LGBTQ+ cultural competency and DEI in continuing education: A cross-sectional review of U.S. pharmacy legislation.” The article by Ko, et al. approvingly writes about California Assembly Bill 2194 that requires an hour of continuing education in so-called cultu ..read more

“He [Tom Ripley] will always get away with it,” said Patricia Highsmith in an interview once. Tom Ripley—Highsmith’s most famous character, and the main protagonist of five of her novels—is a man, whom readers both love and hate. Through Highsmith’s prose, Ripley has made violence, theft, and murder into nothing more than a domestic affair, or sipping on an espresso in Rome, quietly, calmly, innocently observing the people that pass. Highsmith’s novels—especially The Talented Mr. Ripley, first published in 1955—have been the subject of many film adaptations. In 1951, Alfred Hitchcock adapted S ..read more

Health care presents unique challenges to elected officials. Without some public regulation, market failures will lead to consequences many voters would find unacceptable, as Kenneth Arrow explained long ago in a seminal essay. Among the problems that inevitably arise is the collision of risk aversion among consumers, which leads them to seek insurance protection against expensive medical services, with the ability of insurers to steer clear of potential customers who can be identified as high risks because of their health conditions. Without governmental intervention, the market will drift to ..read more

In the 1990s, the American Left had no political significance, though it was copiously influential in shaping the minds of the young. This story has now been updated in the 2020s, a triumphant period for the American Left when it continues to win the battle for cultural hegemony not only in the classroom but also in the press, American sports, and corporations. Moreover, it now possesses enormous power to affect immediate events. What has happened? When the social unrest subsided in the seventies, radical graduate students retreated from the streets en masse and moved into the ivory tower, the ..read more