A Force for Intellectual Good
More than any benefit we have had in the same period from Al Gore’s Internet, C-SPAN’s founder Brian Lamb has been a more important force for intellectual...
Spirituality Without Religion
The waning of organised religion is leaving a gap. Non-believers are finding that they have rejected not just faith’s stuffy dogmas, but also rituals that helped us to...
The Americanization of Everywhere
Everyone can recall their first encounter with America, whether it was watching 'Gone With the Wind' or 'Dumbo,' the death of John F. Kennedy, the resignation of Richard...
To Be a Grunt
When the longest war in U.S. history is finished (or at least U.S. involvement in it), "One Million Steps" may well stand as a classic account of what it was like to be...
A Forgotten Evil
British historian Roger Moorhouse found that almost no one he spoke to even knew about the Nazi-Soviet Pact, perhaps because it has been glossed over in too many...
Strong Towns
Charles Marohn, President of Strong Towns, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts urban development and what makes a strong town. The two discuss how the post-World War...
Woodrow Wilson's New Constitution
The centennial of Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration as the twenty-eighth president of the United States has been marked by substantial scholarly attention to...
Ludwig von Mises on Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy contrasts the two forms of economic management—that of a free market economy and that of a bureaucracy. In the market economy entrepreneurs are...
Rediscover the Missing Element of the Dismal Science
This next Liberty Law Talk is with John Mueller, author of Redeeming Economics. Modern economic thought focuses on production, exchange, and consumption. Much of...
Ebola Facts Are Scary Enough
This book, like most writing about Ebola, is deeply unsettling, but it’s also sober minded, and in this respect, a standout in the floodlet of Ebola books, many of...
How the Media Protects Obama
Now that she’s no longer on the CBS payroll, this pit bull is off the leash and tearing flesh off the behinds of senior media and government officials. In her...
Boris on Winston
The element of self-identification in Johnson’s project is too obvious to ignore. Here is a maverick Tory politician, endowed in equal measure with fierce...
How Do We Get Good Government?
The historian Arnold Toynbee once remarked that the past is "a chaos unamenable to...laws." Fukuyama has, thankfully, ignored that adage. While his modesty prevents him...
Schocking Indictment on Afghanistan
Afghanistan is not an easy place for in-depth reporting. Foreign civilians have been targets, even in the safer areas, since 2001, when the first Spanish journalists...
Updating a Chronicle of Suffering
When the Ebola outbreak in West Africa began to escalate a few months ago, the writer Richard Preston was working on a children’s fantasy novel. He dropped that...
The Last Founding Father
Unlike those mega-biographies that bury their subject’s chief accomplishments under 900 pages of undigested detail, Richard Brookhiser’s compact, profound,...
Renaissance Man or Charlatan?
The book is ostensibly a call for revolution, even if it doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete political actions Brand would endorse or execute himself....
Biting the Invisible Hand
If you go to a bookstore, you’ll find an abundance of books deploring the very nature of capitalism. Hence, it’s a pleasure to find one author who will buck...
The Reinvention of Sex
The story of four “brave, rebellious misfits,” “The Birth of the Pill” brims with fascinating detail, such as the forgotten fact that Prescott Bush—father and...
A Man in Full
That diary is a principal reason why Fred Kaplan’s biography is so big, thorough, and so rich in quotes from the most primary of sources. Since the rest of the...
Bliss in That Dawn to Be Alive
With the strain of romanticism that unites so many of the scientists that this book celebrates, Isaacson equates the postwar era with Wordsworth’s description of...
New Old-Fashioned Grammar
Surprisingly, British people have been snapping up copies of a book that heaps scorn on the education most of them received.
Pictures of Space Through Time
Graphic images need not be mere illustrations of concepts described in texts or equations; they can be an important form of knowledge in their own right.
'The Bell Curve' Turns 20
This month marks two decades since the publication of The Bell Curve, the massive--and massively controversial--ode to intelligence testing from Harvard psychology...
