Culture
December 8, 2021 — Scott Johnson
This is a personal note about Garrison Keillor. I began listening to Keillor on Minnesota Public Radio while I was in law school. Garrison occupied the station’s three-hour morning slot five days a week with A Prairie Home Morning Show. I thought the show was so entertaining and funny that he would become a star. I learned a lot about American popular music listening to the show. The first time
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October 17, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
John wrote here about how the Superman character will come out as bisexual in the latest DC Comics series. But there’s more to the new Superman. According to this report, Superman will no longer be said to fight for “truth, justice, and the American way.” The motto will be changed to “truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.” DC Comics defends the change on the theory that Superman does, indeed, fight
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September 30, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I am a charter subscriber to the New Criterion and vividly remember receiving its original announcement and solicitation to subscribe in 1982. The magazine was to provide a sane appreciation and critique of culture and the arts. It was to be edited by Hilton Kramer and published by Samuel Lipman. I thought such a magazine was badly needed and, given the leadership of Kramer and Lipman, bound to be good.
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August 10, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The death of St. George Floyd has been the occasion of deep thoughts of all kinds. On the assumption that he is taking a typical cut of the action, I note that attorney Ben Crump has come to Minnesota and found his stays lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice. Now he turns his attention to new frontiers in linguistic sensitivity as he salutes abolition — abolition of references to the
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August 4, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The big news out of Disney’s Magic Kingdom is the reopening of the Hall of Presidents after a long hiatus. The reopening featured the debut of animatronic Joe Biden. Walt Disney World News Today reported the story along with several photos and the video below (h/t Loree Hinderaker). In the Hall of Presidents lineup animatronic Joe stares ahead vacantly in a slightly more lifelike fashion than the character who struggles
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July 1, 2021 — Scott Johnson
When Notre Dame Magazine came calling to ask George Spencer what he was reading, he had a good answer. He was reading Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted (2013), a history of the Mary Tyler Moore Show of blessed memory (1970-1977). Readers like me who remember the show with special fondness will find Spencer’s discussion of the book of interest, probably of more interest than the
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June 29, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The Manhattan Institute’s invaluable Heather Mac Donald wrote “The revolution comes Juilliard” for MI’s City Journal last month. The story Heather tells is a tale of our time from the ever larger land beyond satire. Racial hysteria and opposition to Western civilization are among its themes. Heather’s column concludes: A leader in the arts world, told of Juilliard’s travails, observes: “This is a crucial time to stand up and call
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June 16, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I took a look at the New York Times’s drive-by defamation of the Babylon Bee last week in “Sting like a Babylon Bee.” The Times disparaged the Bee as a a “far-right misinformation site” that “sometimes trafficked in misinformation in the guise of satire.” The Bee is of course a site devoted exclusively to satire with a conservative bent. The Times’s reference to the Bee as a “far-right misinformation site”
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June 9, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I’m not entirely sure whether satire degenerates in the hands of the left, but one could make the case. From Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh, the greatest satirists writing in English have been conservatives of one stripe or another. As for the degeneration, Philip Roth’s stabs at satire might suffice by themselves to make that side of the case. By the same token, we may wonder if the understanding of
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April 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It’s been a long while since I inflicted my adolescent interest in progressive rock on Power Line readers, mostly because I know it is a rarified taste that only appeals to a minority of similarly idiosyncratic people like me. That’s why I post these in the middle of the night instead of prime time. In any case, there hasn’t been much “new” lately about this by now very old genre.
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March 3, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The New York Times is a sick institution, but it is representative in a way that signifies. It is in the grip of the cultural totalitarian madness that has become something like regular order in the schools, the press, Big Tech and corporate titans, the world of the prestige nonprofits, and other precincts where the sick left holds sway. I would like to say other precincts where reality is optional,
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February 23, 2021 — Scott Johnson
“Death to me!” is the title of the best column I have read on the sordid ritual of public confessions following the “woke” party line. By David Mikics, the column draws on the history of false confessions by Communists caught up in the purges of the Soviet Union’s Stalin era. It is a history with which every literate American should be familiar, but it appears to be as obscure in
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February 21, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Steve Hayward posted the new documentary on the life of Thomas Sowell here last month, but it blew right by me. In case you missed it then, I have embedded it below. It has racked up nearly 3.5 million views and more than 8,000 comments since Steve posted it last month. I realized I had missed it when the Hoover Institution’s Greg Stamps wrote this past Friday: “Thomas Sowell: Common
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February 18, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I wrote Rush on the evening of February 3, 2020, the day he had announced his diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer: Rush: I write for Power Line and you kindly responded to my request for information about one of your [2004] segments on Rathergate back when the film Truth came out in 2015. I just dug out your email message responding to my request in order to get your
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February 13, 2021 — Scott Johnson
University of Pennsylvania’s Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History Alan Kors writes regarding Andrea Mitchell. Mitchell, you may recall, presumed to instruct Ted Cruz on the source of the phrase “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Purporting to correct Cruz’s attribution of the phrase to Shakespeare, Mitchell attributed it to Faulkner while demonstrating her ignorance of both Shakespeare and Faulkner. Mitchell is a prominent NBC/MSNBC reporter and host,
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February 2, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Escaping from the memory hole down which Joe Biden has deposited the 1776 Commission and its final report, Victor Davis Hanson comments on the saga in The Classicist podcast below in response to questions posed by Troy Senik. This is a highly illuminating podcast featuring a principal on the right side of the fight for our true history and related issues in the culture war that now threatens our survival.
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January 28, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Amanda Gorman is our National Youth Poet Laureate. Lucky us. The title isn’t an oxymoron — it’s not impossible for a young person to be a great poet — but the appellation doesn’t sit well on Gorman. “Laureate” means a person who is honored with an award for outstanding creative or intellectual achievement. Gorman has achieved little as a poet, other than being named youth poet laureate. If Gorman has
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