Innovation Through Constraint

Innovation Through Constraint

How to Think Like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok. Princeton University Press, 2020. Hardback, xv + 185 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Matthew Stewart Scott Newstok has written a delightful book about modern education in the guise of a Shakespearean analysis. He succeeds in...
Properly Dangerous Ideas

Properly Dangerous Ideas

Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction by Chuck Klosterman. Penguin Press, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $26.00 Chris Butynskyi Ideas are dangerous. Most people would agree that a certain level of danger and harm can take root in ideas. Culture, too, is dangerous....
Bradbury in the Afternoon

Bradbury in the Afternoon

Bradbury Beyond Apollo by Jonathan R. Eller. University of Illinois Press, 2020. Hardcover, 336 pages. $35. Reviewed by James E. Person Jr. Anyone who considers the life and career of Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) is eventually struck by a remarkable fact: although the...
Feudalism Without a Soul

Feudalism Without a Soul

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin. Encounter Books, 2020. Hardcover, 288 pages, $29. Reviewed by Casey Chalk Perhaps one of the great cons of the twenty-first century has been corporate America’s success in deceiving...
Quasi-Religious Parenting

Quasi-Religious Parenting

Religious Parenting: Transmitting Faith and Values in Contemporary America by Christian Smith, Bridget Ritz, and Michael Rotolo. Princeton University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 312 pages, $35. Reviewed by Melissa Langsam Braunstein Nearly a decade ago, long before I was...
Feudalism Without a Soul

The Never-Ending Threat of Utopia

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin. Encounter Books, 2020. Hardcover, 288 pages, $29. Reviewed by Robert Grant Price Feudal times are here again. This is a thesis Joel Kotkin hammers to a fine point in The Coming of...