We Want Workers, But We Must Form American Citizens

Free Minds, Free Markets, and Free People

Symposium: Citizen, Community, and Welcoming the Stranger by Bradley J. Birzer I’m not sure when it became a “conservative” thing to oppose relatively open borders and the free migrations of peoples, especially those seeking freedom from totalitarian and...
We Want Workers, But We Must Form American Citizens

The Proxy War

Symposium: Citizen, Community, and Welcoming the Stranger by Daniel McCarthyThe fight over immigration is a proxy war. The absolute number of immigrants to be welcomed into the country is only a secondary question: the primary question is how that number should be...

Not Lucian’s Lucian

Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, translated by H. & F. Fowler & W. Tooke, edited by Nicholas Jeeves. PDR Press, 2016. Paperback, 149 pages, $14.Woe to the great comic authors of the ancient world, none of whom would be terribly good sources for a Boy Scouts of...

The Future of France

Faire by François Fillon. Albin Michel, 2015. Paper, 313 pages. Vaincre le totalitarisme Islamique by François Fillon. Albin Michel, 2016. Paper, 155 pages.Less than three weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, longtime French politician François Fillon won...

When Time Was Measured in Decades

Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja (Old Stories of Old Castile) is a short novel about Old Castile, the historic region and birthplace of Spanish author Miguel Delibes (1920-2010). The novel was published in 1964. Castilians revere their language, which they refer...

Four Acres in Herefordshire

The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel. Doubleday, 2016. Hardcover, 298 pages, £16.99. “Really: I just want the birds back.” So concludes the brief preface/apologia of writer-farmer John Lewis-Stempel’s wonderful new book The Running Hare,...

Hitchens: A Look at a Skeptic

The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist by Larry Alex Taunton. Nelson Books, 2016. Hardcover, 199 pages, $15.Christopher Hitchens (a.k.a. “Hitch”) was a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking writer and public speaker with an...

An American Arcadia Made Accessible

The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait by W. Barksdale Maynard. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Hardcover, 276 pages, $34.95. When an author writes of a place that he or she loves, there is always the danger of slipping into an overly sentimental paean that...