Steven Hayward

With John Yoo in the host chair for this week’s Three Whisky Happy Hour, we get off to a rocky start because a certain friend of ours made a favorable reference to Edmund Burke in a draft article shared with us in advance of publication, and Lucretia immediately went to DefCon1. To be continued next…

That was an extraordinary five hours at the Supreme Court yesterday—twice as long as the oral arguments were originally scheduled to last—and the longer the argument went on, the worse it seemed to get for the defenders of raced-based admissions for higher education. Maybe that was by design on the…

With the World Series knotted at 2-2, and the mid-term election just days away, it seemed the perfect time for a classic format conversational podcast with Henry Olsen, the premier psephologist (trying saying that word fast just once, never mind seven times) of all things data-related when it comes…

About those ‘democratic norms’ and the ‘threats to democracy’ that Joe Biden and other braying dogs of the left are saying come from ‘ultra-MAGA Republicans,’ perhaps this is another case of projection? As this survey data from the Polarization Research Lab shows, it is Democrats who are more prone to having norm-breaking attitudes, especially when it comes to exercising executive power. And also this, as Polarization Research Lab puts it:

Watching the implosion of FTX—the darling company of woke capitalism, ‘effective altruism,’ and the ESG investing crowd whose founder, the ridiculous Sam Bankman-Fried, was second largest donor to the Democratic Party this year, naturally—calls back to mind what Milton Friedman wrote about the first…

From the late Kenneth Minogue’s very fine Politics: A Very Short Introduction (highly recommended): ‘In our time,’ Thomas Mann remarked, ‘the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.’ This is certainly true for a lot of bores in universities who believe that one cannot enjoy a poem or conduct a love affair without at the same time making a political statement. At a common-sense level, this view is

I wrote here the other day about the suicide of academic history, which brings me to today’s thought from the 14th century ‘father of Renaissance humanism,’ Petrarch: In my work may be sought only deeds that can be attributed to virtue and its opposite, for this, unless I am mistaken, is the fruitfu…

As you may have heard, Stanford “University” embarrassed itself this week by issuing a list of 160 words or phrases that you shouldn’t use because they are not sufficiently “inclusive” or sensitive, including even “trigger warning,” because, Stanford helpfully explained, “The phrase can cause stress about what’s to follow. Additionally, one can never know what may or may not trigger a particular person.” And although “American” is among the terms Stanford

Various ‘public health’ authorities are openly jonesing for re-instituting a mask mandate, and the CDC continues to insist that masks are an essential protection against COVID, and probably voting Republican or owning a gun, too. One of the CDC’s key pieces of evidence was its own study of over 500 counties where the school districts observed the mask mandates and had lower rates of COVID infections. Here’s the chart the

John Jay, Federalist #4: It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private