Exceptional, the new book from former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, is not. It is nothing more than an unhinged rant that smacks of sedition. “The children need to know the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s duty to be freedom’s defender,” the […]

Read more

  Before I read Arthur Brooks’s The Conservative Heart, I wondered if he chose that title because Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul (HarperCollins, 2006) was already taken. After reading this odd work, I wondered if he chose that title because American Hustle was too accurate a description. Brooks, the head of the right-wing American Enterprise […]

Read more

  Gregory Pardlo is a poet of joyous variety and wonder. It’s clear from the lively and anthem-like opening poem, “Written By Himself,” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Digest, that he’s as wide-ranging, humane, irrepressible, and inclusive in his snappy 21st-century fashion as fellow urbanite and trailblazing singer Walt Whitman: I was born in minutes in […]

Read more

  The United States is a separation-of-powers system within which the chief executive has substantially less power over domestic policy than, say, a British prime minister. Despite this, legislation passed by the United States Congress tends to be associated very strongly with the president who signed the bills. The Affordable Care Act—addressing what has been […]

Read more

  My mother Isabel, a very light-skinned African American, once told me of a lunch stand she happily frequented as a 50s-era teenager in her North Carolina Piedmont town. She went there so frequently that the benevolent owners became akin to “second parents.” One day, she motioned to some students from her high school to […]

Read more