From Lionel Trilling to Sarah Palin: Podhoretz’s Pilgrimage

  Once upon a time, Norman Podhoretz admired intelligence. Podhoretz’s best book, Making It, is a non-fiction bildungsroman, the story of how an uncouth Brooklyn boy learned to love literature and high culture, eventually becoming a formidable critic and editor. The book is filled with tough-minded but loving portraits of Podhoretz’s teachers, especially Lionel Trilling [...]

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The Frum Firing Fiasco

In Yiddish, “frum” is a word denoting someone who is religiously observant and pious. David Frum is not, as far as I can tell, a frum in the literal sense but he has been a leading frum of the American conservative movement. Like the theologies of most religions, modern conservative thought is a farrago of [...]

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Joseph Epstein: Nostalgia for the Empire and the Closet

My previous essay about Commentary earned me a rebuke from a friend who happens to be a former contributor to that journal. I had suggested that Robert Alter was the only first-rate writer still contributing to Commentary. What about Joseph Epstein? My friend asked. Or Terry Teachout? Or Ruth Wisse? Or Victor Hanson Davis? Or [...]

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“A foul anti-Israel polemicist of uncommonly repellent vintage”

Over at Commentary, John Podhoretz responds  to my earlier post where I contended that the magazine had compared President Obama to Hitler.  Mr. Podhoretz argues that my post was based on ”a patently deliberate misreading” of a post written by Jennifer Rubin. I’ve already responded to Mr. Podhoretz’s clarification of the original Rubin post in the comment section of [...]

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Room without a view

It won. This narrow, simplistic, disappointing little film won the Oscar. No, I’m not shocked. Nor am I disappointed with the Academy — though it has been on an admirably strong run in this century (No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire), this is also the group that elevated both Shakespeare in Love and Titanic [...]

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Obama, Hitler, and Commentary Magazine

In his 1979 memoir Breaking Ranks, Norman Podhoretz, then the editor of Commentary magazine, told the story of his political shift from left-liberalism to neo-conservatism. A key reason for his political rethinking, Podhoretz asserts, was the intemperate attacks on legitimate political leaders by the New Left and its fellow travelers. As an example, we’re told [...]

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Conrad Black as Tubby Tompkins

Over at the Inkstuds radio program I spent a very enriching hour talking with Gail Singer and Frank Young about the work of John Stanley, the journeyman cartoonist who wrote the great Little Lulu comic book series of the 1940s and 1950s. One of the impressive things about Stanley’s work is that his characters do [...]

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The storm we carry with us

I had an unexpected bout with a ruptured appendix — mine, unfortunately — late last week, and as a result ended up missing several days of work. Having returned to the office on Wednesday, I immediately began to reconstruct my schedule of tasks and appointments. If you glanced at my Outlook calendar, you’d see what [...]

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Compare and Contrast

“But Jesus called them to him, saying, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God.’” Luke 15:16 A bit of news from Politics Daily: A Catholic school in Boulder, Colo., has refused to re-enroll a child in its preschool program because the student’s parent [...]

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Refugees in Japan

The following is the first of several (slightly modified) excerpts I’d like to share from my book Japan’s Open Future. The Japanese government affirms that “refugee assistance is a bounden duty of a member of the international community,” and “one of the important pillars of Japan’s contribution to world peace and prosperity.” The country does [...]

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