Can the State Punish Thoughtcrime?
A Melanchthonian Analysis E. J. Hutchinson There have been a slew of comments in recent months suggesting that ideological woke progressivism is a new religion manqué (the reference to the left hand is intentional), a bottomless reservoir both of false...
What Literature Makes Happen
E. J. Hutchinson What is literature for? Any number of things, one supposes—pleasure, say, or escape. But does it do anything else? In a frequently used and even more frequently misunderstood phrase, Auden says that “poetry makes nothing happen.”[1] But what if...
Caesar Still Lives
E. J. Hutchinson Probably, when one hears the phrase “the classical tradition,” the first name that comes to mind is not “Iggy Pop.” And yet Iggy Pop, like Bob Dylan, has an avid interest in Roman antiquity and its genetic connection to contemporary life. This...
A Quarantine Reading Journal
Eric Hutchinson Charles Portis, Norwood Arkansas’s Charles Portis, most famous as the author of True Grit, died on February 17. Also in February, COVID-19 was spreading around the world. Of these two facts, the first calls for memorialization. The second calls for...
Rachel Hadas’s Pastorals mirrors the house within its pages—static, but, like the windows, each one provides a different view each time it is read, depending on the changes in the seasons and the weather of the reader’s life. Pastorals invites you in, shows you around, tells a
Rediscovering the lost ideal of leisure is highly worthwhile regardless of whether we are headed for a world in which humans need not apply for most jobs. Tabachnick’s book is a fruitful and thought-provoking exploration of how we might realize this ideal. - Robert Rich on THE