Books

Few Americans are aware that Washington is the country’s largest single patron of art. Every year a group of unelected federal bureaucrats and congressmen spends millions of taxpayer dollars on monuments, sculptures, buildings, plays, and exhibitions, largely without public knowledge or involvement.

In Zero Hour for Gen X, Matthew Hennessey calls on Generation X to take a stand against tech-obsessed Millennials, apathetic Baby Boomers, utopian Silicon Valley “visionaries,” and the menace to top them all: the soft totalitarian conspiracy known as the Internet of Things. Soon Gen Xers will be the only cohort of Americans who remember life as it was lived before the arrival of the Internet. They are, as Hennessey dubs them, “the last analog generation,” the sole remaining link to a time when childhood was still a bit dangerous but produced adults who were naturally resilient.

Though many people know that American universities now offer an inadequate and incoherent education from a leftist viewpoint that excludes moderate and conservative ideas, few people understand how much this matters, how it happened, how bad it is, or what can be done about it. In The University We Need, Professor Warren Treadgold shows the crucial role of universities in American culture and politics, the causes of their decline in administrative bloat and inept academic hiring, the effects of the decline on teaching and research, and some possible ways of reversing the decline.

Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades—and he fought with the Polish anti-communist movement to abolish it. Having lived for two decades under a liberal democracy, however, he has discovered that these two political systems have a lot more in common than one might think. They both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity, and accept similar presuppositions about history, society, religion, politics, culture, and human nature.

Andrew Forge was an English painter and a teacher of painting (Yale University 1975–1994), renowned and respected on both sides of the Atlantic. But he was also known for his writing on the arts, spanning almost fifty years, which was admired for the delicacy and openness of his language and the ways in which he thought about the processes of perception in all their sensual possibilities.

In Western Civilization, the arts embody the eternal battle between good and evil, and through understanding the arts, we can address the political issues that plague us. Far from being museum pieces, simple recreation, or tales and artifacts from the past, the arts should be seen at the wellspring of our politics, and in particular in public policy debates. They are actually the reason we have public and foreign policy in the first place.

President Donald J. Trump said he wants to “drain the swamp.” But is it a swamp or an ocean? It’s about time the American people had some hard facts regarding the federal bureaucracy.

In Operation Drain the Swamp, we expose all of it. We showcase who receives how much, where they work, and what they do. Most importantly, we reveal how much these bureaucrats cost the American taxpayer.

In recent years, politicians led by President Obama and prominent senators and governors have teamed with extremists on campus to portray our nation’s institutions of higher learning as awash in a violent crime wave—and to suggest (preposterously) that university leaders, professors, and students are indifferent to female sexual assault victims in their midst. Neither of these claims has any bearing to reality. But they have achieved widespread acceptance, thanks in part to misleading alarums from the Obama administration and biased media coverage led by The New York Times.

Are robots finally replacing humans? Does the emerging age of artificial intelligence and automation mean we will soon see “peak jobs” and the need for a Universal Basic Income to support a widening swath of hapless citizens unsuited for employment in a future “knowledge” workforce? Productivity—reducing labor-hours per unit of product or service—has been the hallmark of progress for centuries.

JBS Haldane F.R.S. (1892-1964) was one of the leading scientists of the 20th Century, renowned for helping to reconcile Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection with Mendel’s discovery of genes. Haldane gained fame as a popularizer of science and commentator on public affairs, broadcasting often on the BBC and publishing extensively in newspapers and magazines.  During the Second World War he was extensively involved in scientific research to aid the British war effort. But no one at that time knew that JBS was also a Soviet spy.

The idea of human rights began as a call for individual freedom from tyranny, yet today it is exploited to rationalize oppression and promote collectivism. How did this happen? Aaron Rhodes, recognized as “one of the leading human rights activists in the world” by the University of Chicago, reveals how an emancipatory ideal became so debased.

In a fascinating blend of biography and history, Joseph Tartakovsky tells the epic and unexpected story of our Constitution through the eyes of ten extraordinary individuals—some renowned, like Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and some forgotten, like James Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

To effect just outcomes the justice system requires that law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges be committed—above all—to doing justice. Those whose allegiance is to winning, regardless of evidence, do the opposite of justice: they corrupt the system. This is the jaw-dropping story of one such corruption and its surprise ending.

In this Broadside, Sally C. Pipes makes the case against the single-payer system by offering evidence of its devastating effects on patients in Canada, the United Kingdom, and even the United States. Long wait times, substandard care, lack of access to innovative treatments, huge public outlays, and spiraling costs are endemic to single-payer.

The transgender movement has hit breakneck speed. In the space of a year, it’s gone from something that most Americans had never heard of to a cause claiming the mantle of civil rights.