Books
May 29, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Dr. Jill Biden is back in the news with her forthcoming memoir of husband Joe Biden’s presidency. In it she recalls her husband’s catastrophic debate with Donald Trump in June 2024. Dr. Jill purports to have been concerned that Joe was “having a stroke” during the debate. In an interview with CBS News to be aired this coming Sunday, she relates, “I was frightened, because I had never ever seen
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May 28, 2026 — Scott Johnson
“We’re caught in a trap,” Elvis Presley sang in “Suspicious Minds.” The trap then was jealousy. The trap everyone is talking about now — even China’s Xi Jinping found it of use — is the so-called “Thucydides trap.” Thucycides wrote the classic history of the Peloponessian War. Yale’s late, great teacher Donald Kagan wrote a four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War that is a standard in the field. All four
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May 27, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday we took a look at the unahappy scientific cranks of Laputa in Part III of Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver observed the “continual disquietudes” that upset their peace of mind, but he didn’t leave it there. He also observed their political obssession: Most of them, and especially those who deal in the astronomical part, have great faith in judicial astrology, although they are ashamed to own it publicly. But what I
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May 26, 2026 — Scott Johnson
I studied Gulliver’s Travels in Jeffrey Hart’s course on early eighteenth-century English literature, from Dryden through Pope. Hart was a great teacher and this was a great course. In Part III of the book Gulliver recounts his voyage to Laputa. Laputa is an island levitating in the sky. This is Gulliver’s description of the men he first encounters in Laputa when he climbs up to the island: At my alighting,
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May 9, 2026 — Scott Johnson
In his famous 1855 letter to his old friend Joshua Speed, Abraham Lincoln explained (emphases in original): I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are
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May 4, 2026 — John Hinderaker
Justice Sam Alito has rightly become a hero to conservatives. He has built a distinguished record, implementing a philosophy that some have called “practical originalism.” Mollie Hemingway has written an admiring biography of Alito, which you can buy on Amazon. Mollie’s book, however, is not just a biography of Alito. It also chronicles the controversies and some of the major cases of recent years. Yesterday, Mollie recorded an hour-long Rationally
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April 21, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government emeritus at Harvard and the author of many distinguished books, including this year’s The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, published by Harvard University Press. Not published by Harvard University Press is Professor Mansfield’s Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary That Fell On Deaf Ears, forthcoming from Encounter Books on May 12. I go back with Professor
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April 20, 2026 — Scott Johnson
It was galling to watch President Obama take the actions he took with the effect of strengthening the enemies of the United States — and to be able to do nothing about it, except to vote for Donald Trump after the damage was done. The blessing Obama accorded the Castroite regime in Cuba was sick and sickening. He got nothing in return — he merely sought to reenforce the depredations
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April 16, 2026 — Scott Johnson
RealClearPolitics has flagged this X post by Jesús Enrique Rosas by including it in its lineup this morning. It is necessary and clarifying. Last week the pope met with former Obama strategist David Axelrod. CBS News reported that the meeting took place this past Thursday. No one said anything about what went down at the meeting. Axelrod’s memoir, by the way, is entitled Believer. The reference is not to religion.
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April 11, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Borrowing a phrase Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” I want to flag Brendan O’Neill’s Spiked interview with historian and former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren. Spiked itself flags the interview as “We can’t make peace with a terrorist state.” I have posted video at the bottom. In the interview O’Neill and Oren take up where we were, where we are, and what lies ahead in our conflict
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April 3, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Professor James Hankins is the author of Volume I of The Golden Thread (The Ancient World and Christendom). Professor Allen Guelzo is the author of Volume II (The Modern and Contemporary West), Spencer Klavan reviews both volumes in “The Renegade Academy,” just posted online by the Claremont Review of Books. Klavan rightly deems the publication of The Golden Thread “a momentous achievement” and “a landmark event in the history of
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April 2, 2026 — Scott Johnson
In our Picks I will be posting essays and review from the forthcoming issue of the Claremont Review of Books as the editors make them available online. However, having noted the publication of the awesome two-volume history The Golden Thread in this post, I want to highlight Spencer Klavan’s review of the books in “The Renegade Academy.” In my comments I confined myself to noting what the two volumes had
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March 22, 2026 — Scott Johnson
In today’s Weekend Beacon newsletter, books editor Vic Matus highlights an excerpt of Nicholas Eberstadt’s “thorough takedown of the late doomsayer Paul Ehrlich.” In “Insect-ifying Humanity: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy,” Eberstadt writes: * * * * * One of the reasons worldwide life expectancy has been rising over the postwar era is that food is becoming steadily more plentiful—so plentiful, in fact, that overnutrition is displacing undernutrition as the globe’s
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March 16, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Paul Ehrlich died this past Friday at the age of 93. He represents another illustration of my slightly hyperbolic proposition that “only the wrong survive.” Noah Rothman takes up Ehrlich’s “disastrous legacy” in a good column behind NR’s paywall. Ehrlich spent a long career peddling doom commencing with publication of The Population Bomb in 1968. The book and the career made him a rich man. Students of ancient history may
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February 26, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Michael Lynton was the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment when it greenlit Seth Rogen’s film The Interview. You’ve most likely never seen it because it displeased the Supreme (Communist) Leader of North Korea and led to North Korea’s hack of the company’s emails, confidential scripts, and his family’s personal information. Sony limited distribution of the film in order to mitigate the damage. The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of
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February 26, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Thinking about Leo Thorsness when I posted Tom West’s message about Royce Williams yesterday, I inserted the “Air Force” instead of “Navy” as the branch of the jet accompanying Williams on his Medal of Honor mission. Mr. Miller served under the command of Williams in the Navy. Of course, he knows what branch Williams and his colleague were serving in at the time of the dogfight. The mistake was mine.
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February 23, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of books including, perhaps most prominently, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (2014). I reviewed it for National Review in “A new old regime” and subsequently posted a Power Line interview with Professor Hamburger about the book here (more here). In connection with what I’ve been calling Califoria’s (looming) billionaire tax, Professor Hamburger has
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