It’s easy to look at the relative achievement rates of Chinese and American students and assume it’s because of the institutions. But it’s plicated. It’s also the culture, stupid. Read More… In a recent essay for the New York Times, American fashion designer Heather Kaye writes about raising her daughters in Shanghai and sending them to the Chinese public schools. Far from finding the schools backward and totalitarian, she expresses profound gratitude for the experience: “As an American parent in...

The extreme medical suicide policies pursued in Canada have caused people of goodwill to champion the value of a single human life and note the role government-controlled medical care has in driving people to despair. Read More… “You know what your life is worth to you. And mine is worthless,” said Mitchell Tremblay, a 40-year-old Canadian man battling severe mental illness and intent on using his country’s medical suicide program to end his life as soon as possible. Currently, 10...

The sequel to the record-breaking box office success Avatar is here. The enemy is still America/Europeans. The victims this time: whales. For all its technological innovation, the sheer banality of its theme is the most remarkable thing about it. Read More… The biggest box office success in cinema history, strictly in dollars taken in, is Avatar, the 2009 movie that made 3D a technology audiences would finally flock to. The movie made some $785 million in America, more than another...

Following the work of one of social conservatism’s most prominent defenders is a good start for the new year. Read More… In 2021, for the first time in two decades of Gallup polling, America’s social ideology shifted. For the first time in two decades of Gallup polling, social liberals outnumbered their socially conservative counterparts. Although a 4% dislocation may not seem that significant, it serves as evidence of a trend many on the political right have bemoaned for years: More...

A new biography of Fr. Edward Dowling, S.J., by Dawn Eden Goldstein offers inspiration amid suffering and a role model for those seeking strength in a “Glad Gethsemane.” Read More… Being fully human plicated. Having a foot in both the material and spiritual worlds and with an originally good but fallen nature, our thoughts, motivations, and desires e into conflict, and we don’t always choose what is best for us. Indeed, the decisions we make in our brokenness plexity can...

A recent NY Times op-ed rang an alarm bell about the Supreme Court’s supposed preference for religion “over all other elements of civil society.” This betrays a terrible misunderstanding of what exactly the First Amendment protects. Read More… Earlier this week, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist Linda Greenhouse came out of retirement on the opinion page of her former paper to warn Americans that their nation is now on the cusp of seeing religion “elevate[d] … over all other...

Nobel Prize or not, such an honor does not end the entrepreneur and freedom fighter’s legal battles. Read More… Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai has lost a great deal. From his news outlet, Next Digital, to his rights as a citizen of Hong Kong, 75-year-old Lai now sits in a prison cell for his pro-democracy activities and may spend the rest of his life in prison under the Chinese Communist Party’s National Security crackdown on dissent of any kind....

From Connery to Craig, the character of James Bond, the British superspy with a license to kill, e to represent a certain kind of maleness: from toxic to tender, from selfish to self-sacrificing. But is he merely a reflection of our cultural expectations? Read More… As the producers of the venerable James Bond e to ponder how best to refurbish their hero for the uncertain times ahead—a woman, perhaps, and/or a person of color?—a small but persistent debate among film...

This sequel to a film many critics found risible in 1986 is a Best Picture Oscar nominee. How did that happen? Read More… The surprise hit of 2022 was Top Gun: Maverick, a man and machine heroic picture, sentimental and nostalgic, the sort of thing Hollywood just doesn’t do anymore. At first glance it seemed way too old-fashioned, yet it made more than $700 million in America and just a bit more than that in the rest of the world,...

“What happens at war is the price we pay for normal life.” Read More… Thirty-five-year-old Viktor Cherniivaskyi is no stranger to pain. In August 2014, he was helping citizens escape a militarized zone, the product of mass Ukrainian protests, the ousting of Ukraine’s president, and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Russian soldiers captured Viktor, hooked up wires to his feet and ran currents through his body, torturing him with electricity and baseball bats for over an hour in the basement...