From the Editor's Desk
Correspondence
Essays
Reckless Optimism
It was a new age, until it wasn’t.
Solve for X
Malcolm X's strangely American life.
Enough Already
A welfare state we can live with.
How Wars End
One side wins.
Soldiers and Citizens
The careful balance of civil-military relations.
King of Pain
Novelist David Foster Wallace shows how to recover one’s soul.
Book Reviews
Scold, Scourge, Swashbuckler, Star
A review of Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, by Christopher Hitchens
and Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens
Conservatism Properly Understood
A review of Conserving Liberty, by Mark Blitz
Have a Nice Millennium
A review of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker
Science and Scientism
A review of On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence, by Peter Atkins
and The Tyranny of Science, by Paul Feyerabend
Specter of Decline
A review of Melancolie francaise, by Éric Zemmour
and La France est-elle finie?, by Jean-Pierre Chevènement
Why They Fought
A review of The Union War, by Gary W. Gallagher
The Limits of Justice
A review of The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law, by Kevin Jon Heller and The International Criminal Court: Europe's Guantanamo Bay? by David Hoile.
Persecution and the Art of Music
A review of Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, by Wendy Lesser
Classical Triumph
A review of The New York Public Library: The Architecture and Decoration of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (Anniversary Edition), by Henry Hope Reed and Francis Morrone
Of Thee We Sing
A review of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song, edited by Amy A. Kass, Leon R. Kass, and Diana Schaub
Studying Abroad
A review of The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, by David McCullough
The Importance of a College Education
A review of Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College, by Andrew Ferguson
and In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic, by Professor X
First, Let’s Kill All the Law Schools
A review of Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America, by Walter Olson
Measuring the Slant
A review of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, by Tim Groseclose
Shadow Play
Let a Hundred Blockbusters Bloom
China plans to blow up Hollywood’s monopoly.
Iran’s Mortal Threat
The Iranian nuclear program is a mortal threat the president of the United States fails adequately to address.