The Nightstand

The departure of Donald Trump from the White House will assuredly not mean the departure of Trumpism from American life. The collection of...

When we see that beauty and imagination, rightly understood, are intellectual as well as affective, we no longer have to try to bridge some gap between imagination and reality.

The Cult of Smart is deeply entrenched in most modern systems of public education around the world, and the increasingly clear reality of cognitive and genetic differences between different human beings poses a sharp challenge to liberals whose membership in the Cult makes them want to deny this reality entirely.

We all want students to think critically and to reflect on what they have encountered in the course of their education. In order to do that, however, they must have something to reflect upon.

The Bruderhof do not blindly follow the status quo but have chosen to organize their life around simplicity, self-sacrifice, and peace.

Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope that keeps open a sense of possibility—that shines obscurely beneath their grief.

Perhaps, without silence for a reference point—something out there that reminds us of our place in the big order of things—the masters of information feel free to shade, obscure, or otherwise manipulate their messages.

This book at least provides a compelling diagnostic starting point, calling us back to our own networks of dependence and encouraging us to pursue friendship, particularly in the most challenging and vulnerable contexts.

Ordinary and unrefined, Kooser's poems suggest the steady hand of a craftsman who doesn’t need to go looking for the next big thing.

If Dolly Parton left the Smoky Mountains, it seems to have been on a hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell would have recognized. She came back, bearing gifts.