Archive for the ‘Humanities’ Category
Why the cancellation of Dr. Seuss matters
This is not some confected culture-war spat. Woke zealots want to purge culture, and they’re succeeding. Read my Spiked article in full here.
Wokeness: old religion in a new bottle. My interview with Joseph Bottum
Joseph Bottum on how the decline of Protestant America fuelled the rise of identity politics. Read my Spiked article in full here.
Oberlin and the price of wokeness
An American college has discovered that PC mobs don’t always get away scot-free. Read my Spiked article in full here.
Why the elites are cheating
The college-admissions scandal reveals much about modern America Read my Spiked article in full here.
Spiked’s cultural highs and lows of 2017
Spiked writers gave their nominations for the best and the worst of this year’s art and culture. My high: The Vietnam War, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. My low: The petition to remove Thérèse Dreaming at the Met. You can read all of the nominations here.
Whither Christianity? My interview with Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher talks the future of faith, identity politics and the crisis of the West. I am very grateful to Rod Dreher for taking the time to speak with me, and provide such interesting insights. You can read my Spiked Review interview with Rod in full here.
“Free Speech, Not Hate Speech”: Censoring Bill Maher at Berkeley
Students at the University of California, Berkeley, are demanding that the administration “disinvite” comedian Bill Maher as the commencement ceremony speaker in December. An online petition from the Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian Coalition (MEMSA) declares that Maher “has made statements that are blatantly bigoted and racist,” in particular about Islam. Examples of “hate […]
Scourge of the elites
Christopher Lasch was a fearless iconoclast who defied left and right labels. Love him or loathe him, you need to grapple with his ideas if you want to understand today’s big political and moral debates. Read my review of Eric Miller’s Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, published in the spiked […]
Re-opening the American mind
Twenty-five years on, a re-read of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind reveals just how wrong liberals were to hate it, and how wrong conservatives were to claim it as their ideological bible. Read my review, in the spiked review of books, here.
Whitney Houston, 1963-2012
How did she hit that note (at 3:38)? What an amazing voice