J. K. Rowling is not a witch. She acquitted herself well in her recent “trial,” by which I mean the podcast series hosted by The Free Press, detailing the explosive controversy between history’s most famous children’s author and liberal progressive activists. It’s cleverly titled The Witch Trials, and it tells the story of Rowling’s rise to fame and her fall into (progressive) infamy. There is extended interview material from Rowling herself, along with some contributions from her detractors and critics. I should warn readers that this is the sort of podcast I had to turn off whenever my kids ..read more

Since taking office in 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron’s policies have frequently been met with large protests. Recently, these protests reached a fever pitch with the enactment of a pension reform bill that, among other things, raised France’s retirement age from 62 to 64. While the recent protests have focused on the policy itself, the manner in which it was enacted raises broader questions about the separation of powers. Particularly, what are the proper roles of executives and legislatures in modern democratic societies? It is a question that is equally applicable to the American co ..read more

Higher education in America, it is often observed, confronts serious challenges, even crises. True, many of the world’s leading research institutions are in the United States. And yet: Tuition-costs are soaring; the footprints and portfolios of human-resources, student-services, and other administrators are expanding; tenure-track faculty positions (especially in the humanities) are disappearing; reliance on (often exploited) adjuncts, graduate students, and short-term instructors is increasing; and regulatory burdens are growing. What is more, it seems clear that partisan homogeneity and ..read more

The risible history of pinball regulations is retold in Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game. If you can sit through a cliché script and writers beating you over the head with a dozen callbacks and motifs—quite a few for a movie with about a 90-minute runtime—you’ll learn about a strange regulation of a popular game, its origins, and how it was reformed. The film is confusingly set up as an actor-portrayal of a documentary featuring a depiction of the modern-day Roger Sharpe—the pinball player, author, and activist who challenged New York City regulations against the game. But the film also fea ..read more

In his recent congressional testimony, Sam Altman, the CEO of the company that created ChatGPT, called for the establishment of a new government agency to regulate artificial intelligence. According to Altman, such an agency would require AI companies to obtain a license before developing AI products on a significant scale, with a stringent focus on demonstrating safety. Altman got a good reception on Capitol Hill from both parties. But establishing a federal AI licensing agency would be harmful. It would retard AI research because investors would hesitate to back companies that might fail to ..read more

Benjamin Franklin was famous for his irreverent and occasionally inappropriate sense of humor. Protected initially by anonymity and eventually by authority, Franklin rarely suffered consequences from the objects of his ridicule. But once, early in his career, he did pay a price. In 1731 Franklin accepted a commission to print handbills advertising passage to Barbados. In Franklin’s printing that notice comically marked ministers and prostitutes as equally unwelcome on the journey. In the uproar that followed, Franklin was forced to apologize. The joke, coming from the press of a young man alre ..read more

Just for fun, I tease the hell out of ChatGPT in spare moments. Chatbots have no self, that is, no purpose for existing, and therefore can’t think. There is no such thing as thought in the abstract: thought is always someone’s thought, and mental activity doesn’t constitute thought unless it comes from a thinker who has a reason for thinking. To think, we must distinguish between significant and insignificant objects of thought, that is, those that matter to us and those that don’t (the exception that proves the rule is paranoid schizophrenia, which makes everything significant). Higher though ..read more

Editor’s Note: This is part of Law & Liberty‘s series of Faultline Essays, in which we publish different perspectives on a topic, allowing authors an opportunity to read and respond to one another before publishing the essays together. When most Americans hear the expression “liberal conservative,” they think of it as an oxymoron at best, at worst a particularly sticky variety of political fudge. Our hyperpartisan politics views liberalism and conservativism as almost genetic predispositions, much like Sergeant Willis in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe: I often think it’s com ..read more

Every year, I try to write about a war movie or show for Memorial Day, to reawaken interest in American history and reflect on the lessons of the great generals and statesmen who carried the flag to victory, secured the republic, and ensured that political freedom is not overawed by catastrophe or despotism. This year, I recommend Battleground, the 1949 movie which first showed Americans a cinematic account of the famous Battle of the Bulge, Christmas 1944, the last major Allied confrontation with the Nazis. World War II seems to have transformed America so thoroughly that it is extremely diff ..read more

Thick, humid air pressed down on the fans in the old Busch Stadium, that summer afternoon in the early 2000s. I sat with my grandmother in a shaded section under the upper deck, a sweaty scorecard on my lap, pencil poised in my right hand. The tickets for the close, shaded seats had been given to me by one of my mother’s co-workers, for I had a reputation in high school for being a huge fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. It was not often that people heard of a teenage girl loving professional baseball, so when they had tickets to give away, they often offered them to me. I listened to the games o ..read more