Israel and Its Enablers

Over at the National Post I have an essay about the “peace process”. You can read it here. This is the opening: Belligerent, self-destructive men aren’t always loners. Think of Ernest Hemingway. He abused his body with drink, constantly picked unnecessary fights and alienated those he loved. In short, he wrecked his life and his final act of self-slaughter [...]

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Motion arrested

It is a strange yet common tendency of the beginner artist to think that the use of a reference object or image — a live model, for example, or a photograph — is somehow cheating. The beginner thinks, as I have thought at times, that a true artist is able to generate beautiful pictures directly [...]

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The Romance of Counterinsurgency

The romance of war doesn’t just appeal to conservatives who have spent too much time reading Kipling and watching old John Wayne movies. Liberals also have their own tendency to glamorize war, going back at least as far as Woodrow Wilson’s absurd celebration of the First World War as a great battle for democracy. For [...]

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Heer, There, Everywhere

    “What have you been up to?” That’s a question that no reader of this blog has asked me. Still, here is the answer: 1. I’ve been writing literary essays for The Walrus, Canada’s answer to Harper’s or The Atlantic Monthly. My long review essay on “the Holocaust novel” can be found here. It [...]

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People, shooting people

One of the great benefits of the Internet is the ability it gives creative people to communicate with and support each other, by sharing techniques and providing feedback on work they’ve offered up for review. One of the great benefits of the Internet for the rest of us is that it allows us to see [...]

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Precision warfare

We’ve seen this in the movies dozens of times: highly-trained Western special forces burst suddenly into a target building, their weapons at shoulder height. Moving rapidly from room to room, they identify each potential target within a second, unhesitatingly shooting the bad guys while keeping safe the unarmed and innocent. When it is over, the [...]

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Frum on Fox

Jeet has twice written thoughtfully herein on David Frum’s recent firing by the American Enterprise Institute (see both here and here), so I’ll limit myself to pointing out a couple of related items. The first is an essay on the topic by the estimable Scott Horton, who argues that the intellectual death of the Republican [...]

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A Charles Murray Thought Experiment

I want to revisit something Charles Murray wrote in response to the firestorm that followed David Frum’s firing from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “AEI has a culture, the scholars are fiercely proud of that culture, and at its heart is total intellectual freedom,” Murray argued. “As for the reality of that intellectual freedom, I [...]

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