That this movie exists is a cinematic achievement. Whatever my criticism, whatever its flaws, the movie about an American government official’s deliberate, historic conspiracy — a real, proven conspiracy of corruption, deceit and silence, ahem, Oliver Stone — to...
Organizing and signing online petitions against gun manufacturers may be emotionally gratifying but will not end gun violence.
Ben Affleck’s 2012 movie, Argo, reduces the so-called Iran hostage crisis (1979-1981) to an episode of smaller proportions with satisfactory results. This isn’t great cinema, and it leaves a lot of meaning, context and history out of the picture, but the...
A few historical and inconvenient notes left on the cutting room floor during Black History Month.
Inventing vaccines, restoring eye sight, developing new and more efficient food sources, increasing productivity, reducing poverty, all depend on human ingenuity: our exercising reason to solve problems and to create.
Those who speak about being on the “right side of history” have, knowingly or not, adopted a central element in Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism
One of the most common phrases to be heard from those on “the left” is the assertion that someone or some public policy is or is not on “the right side of history.”
Insinuating that he thinks gays deserve to die and stating clearly and explicitly that he aims to enact a religious government disqualify Moore from political office.
The essential moral case for finance that Brook and Watkins present is that finance is good by the standard of human flourishing.
It is important to choose work that you enjoy.
Three things about Islam you didn’t know. For every opinion or belief someone may hold there will be another party who just as strongly oppose that idea. Both sides usually claim to sit with the best arguments, the real facts and the correct worldview, and...
The Inca rulers imposed on almost all in society a compulsory equalitarianism in virtually all things.
History teacher Alexander Marriott examines facts and fiction about slave rebel Nat Turner in this exclusive interview by Scott Holleran about Nate Parker’s 2016 film, The Birth of a Nation.
On the eve of his 90th birthday, Dion Neutra sat down at his home with Scott Holleran and remembered his father, his childhood and his career with a great 20th century modern architect including thoughts and remembrances of Richard Neutra’s architecture and relationships with Frank Lloyd Wright and Ayn Rand. Dion Neutra also spoke of his single proudest achievement at Gettysburg.
The head of NASA convinces the President that space exploration should be done by private industry, and the United States government declares, “The first person to land on Mars, live there a year, and return alive owns the whole Red Planet.” Welcome to the greatest race in history.
The intellectual intolerance and resort to physical force to prevent speakers from addressing students represents a dangerous totalitarian streak among so-called “progressives.”
This “inconvenient history” of how individualism and capitalism changed the course of human events from its thousands-of-years of slavery to near universal human liberty, has been practically eliminated from college courses.
Government funding of the arts is as deadly as government funding of religion or the press.
If today’s students are increasingly hostile to intellectual freedom, can we really expect tomorrow’s voters, lawyers, judges, politicians to uphold free speech?
So long as academia talks demographic “diversity” and practices groupthink when it comes to ideas, we have little reason to expect better of student mobs that riot with impunity.
Everything the Marxists said about capitalism – exploitation of the many by a privileged few; a gross inequality of wealth and opportunity simply due to an artificial arrangement of control over the means of production; a manipulation of reality to make slavery seem as if it meant freedom – was, in fact, the nature and essence, of Soviet socialism.
This egalitarian ideal sets the standard as the color of one’s skin, or sex or sexual orientation, as against the quality of the movie, performance or direction.
One of the most successful schools I visited was in an aging building in a rundown ghetto neighborhood in New York, where a friend told me that I was “brave” — he meant foolhardy — to park a car.
In his first interview, Ayn Rand Institute’s new CEO, Jim Brown, talked exclusively at his office in Irvine, California with Scott Holleran.
Teachers’ unions have fought for years to prevent charter schools from being created.
United Artists’ High Noon (1952) is a lightning rod of controversy. This compelling movie was made with the best talents and its taut, purpose-driven plot gains and keeps attention. Any honest appraisal must account for its flaws, too. I recently saw it again at...
You’re gonna make it after all.
I deeply regret the passing of Ralph Raico. In his youth, he was my brother.
Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve is an enjoyable exercise in re-framing what the reader probably already knows about a favorite writer and discovering references, patterns and facts the reader may not know.
According to the authoritative “Black Book of Communism,” an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China.
While often criticizing government for curtailing our freedom instead of protecting it and businesspeople (or others) for failing to act ethically, I want to focus on the positive in my last post of the year.
Even the best things come to an end. After enjoying a quarter of a century of writing this column for Creators Syndicate, I have decided to stop. Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age, so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long.
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