In land acknowledgments, there is to be found a fatuous mix of nerve and naiveté. The former comes to light in the public pronouncement that some present-day site was once the ancestral homeland of another people and that those currently occupying it and making the pronouncement have absolutely no intention of giving it back. Imagine finding a lost dog, keeping it, and solemnly proclaiming that this dog traditionally belonged to the Thompsons who live down the street. If the people issuing such statements were not so thoroughly neutered, one might say upon hearing a land acknowledgment: that t ..read more

The best scenes in Masters of the Air, a nine-part series on Apple TV, arrive at 25,000 feet, as squadrons of B-17 Flying Fortresses cruise in formation to bomb Germany during World War II. Oxygen masks strapped on, the crews man their posts and brace for flak and Luftwaffe fighter planes. The ball turret gunner squeezes into his glass globe in the underbelly, the waist gunners swing their weapons to the ready, the navigator hunches over crinkling charts, the bombardier readies his Norden bombsight. On the flight deck, the pilot and co-pilot grimly watch as flak shells burst and pop. The gray ..read more

You find yourself in a bar, deeply engaged in a discussion with a friend over a public policy issue. You hold your position with confidence, convinced beyond doubt that there’s no room for debate. Every article you have read, every news segment you have watched, and every conversation you have had in the past month regarding this issue has reinforced your stance. In your mind, you are right, and your friend is mistaken. The evidence, as you see it, is undeniable. Why, then, does she fail to acknowledge what seems to be so clear? However, it dawns on you that she’s not alone in her perspective ..read more

Liberalism has faced strong intellectual headwinds since 2008. The collapse of the financial system did not just rock consumer confidence but the political system on which it was founded. Ever since, we have witnessed rising concern about the state of liberalism in America, creating a genuine fear of backsliding. Could a political order again emerge that sees inequality between peoples as natural and ongoing? Will political movements fearful of globalisation and its fruits gain the upper hand? Will identity-focused politics overwhelm liberal ideals and values about intrinsic human worth? It is ..read more

In our current public discourse, there are growing concerns about the relationship between church and state. The extreme versions on the right and left either supplant religion for other moral preferences or hope to return to some golden age of Christian Nationalism or Integralism. Living in a pagan world, the early church walked a different path, maintaining a positive vision of the civil authorities, but defending their right of the virtuous expression of religious activity. The following excerpt is from my book: Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church, that lo ..read more

We’re still processing the pandemic. Covid-19 did odd things to people. Or, rather, government responses to Covid-19 did odd things to people as much as the disease itself. I was one of those people. At the same time, new drugs emerged which are starting to do odd things to civilisation. That they emerged as the world seemed to come unmoored from reality in other respects may turn out to be significant. In 2020 and 2021, I piled on roughly thirty kilos. That’s sixty-six pounds for the non-metric crowd up the back. I went from being a person who’d never been fat in her life to someone who tippe ..read more

Personal tragedies transform individuals and families. National tragedies transform nations and international systems. Britain was never the same country, nor the same empire, after the Battle of the Somme came to a grim close in November 1916. Across the Atlantic, eighty-five years later, America’s post-Cold War luxury vacation from history ended abruptly on the morning of September 11, 2001. On that day, al-Qaeda’s terror attack not only murdered over 3,000 people, it also permanently altered America’s domestic politics and view of its place and role in the world. Whatever its eventual fate ..read more

In his 1889–90 fictional portrait of aspiring Victorian artists grasping for success, Henry James observed that novels of the age were “large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary.” Science, technology, and imperial expansion encouraged Enlightenment thinkers and popular broadsides to rhapsodize about the steady march of “progress” and the supposedly rational, modern subjects beating its drum. Nevertheless, beyond the edges of Europe’s known world, mapmakers sketched a bubbling abyss brimming with serpents and devils. The friendly figurines of pr ..read more

I have written about Denis Villeneuve for some years now, remarking that no other director is given so much money to waste on beautiful spectacles. This might do us honor. Villeneuve is the favored artist of the digital/AI era (Blade Runner 2049 could be a computer game) and yet he cannot make his studios a profit on his blockbusters. Everyone knows his movies are better than Marvel, but they somehow fail to win over enough of the audience, even with the full support of major studio advertising and devoted fans on social media. I’ve tried to explain this problem in my review of Villeneuve’s fi ..read more

This month marks 75 years since the founding of the NATO alliance. Celebrations will include two very capable new members of the alliance, Finland and Sweden, who opted to break from neutrality and join the alliance shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Despite NATO’s recent growth and defiant unity as Putin sought to fracture the alliance in the early days of Moscow’s assault on Ukraine, recent years have seen not only an impassioned debate about US support for Ukraine’s defense but also a reinvigorated debate about the United States’ commitment to NATO. This debate is primar ..read more