Author: David Schaengold

I’m very pleased to see that the fight against fast cycling, spandex, helmets, thin seats, and other automotive-like cyclalia has taken on a religious dimension.

Rufus writes, commenting on Ned Resnikoff’s generational self-indictment below: What I find more interesting though is that both the left and right are expressing deep misgivings about that atomistic individualism. The right, of course, has...

I recently watched Goodbye Lenin, which is not very good movie, but I was surprised and pleased by its moderatedly positive portrayal of life in the DDR. Without playing down the unpleasant reality of political...

To pull a page from his own writing, Damon Linker isn’t just wrong; his wrongness is a threat to American democracy.

I used to characterize the contemporary GOP as a party whose economic policy is “let’s eat the seed corn,” but perhaps that was unfair, and informed too much by my interest in infrastructure policy,...

One of the most important things happening in the United States right now is getting a trivial amount of press. As a 30-day moratorium to investigate cost overruns comes to a close, it’s becoming...

I know very little about Christine O’Donnell, and I suspect I would not like her politics very much if I were familiar with them, but if this New Republic article really lists the craziest things...

I read with some dismay the calumny of G.K. Chesterton recently posted on this blog. It seems to me that Austin and the criticisms he quotes have completely missed what Chesterton was up to. One...

If you’re Catholic or interested in subsidiarity, the idea that social problems should be addressed at the most local or immediate level possible, you might find Mark Shea’s recent article on why it’s only part...

Donald Shoup has made a career out of studying the effects of government parking mandates on the way we drive and live. After a bit of a blogospheric kerfluffle about free parking, Shoup responds...

When the debate over the proposed “Ground Zero Mosque” first began to engage the attention of the nation, my first reaction was to dismiss those who loudly and insistently protested its construction as demagogues...

Philosophical confusion seems to cloud all discussions about same-sex marriage to a degree unusual even by the already very cloudy standards of mass democracies. This isn’t a feature of all culture-war issues in general....

The fiscal obstinacy of Tom Coburn, you might be surprised to know, is saving American lives. Due mostly to his objections, an otherwise uncontroversial bill to grant oversight of rail transit safety to the...

Very belatedly indeed, I’d like to offer a rejoinder to Ross Douthat and Alan Jacob‘s explanation for the absence of good George Eliot-style realistic novels in our time. Jacobs in brief: I am inclined to think...

This is why we should repeal the estate tax altogether for illiquid assets, and maybe do away with annual property taxes, too. The creation of a penniless aristocracy would benefit us all.

If you have seen I am Love, you should go read Matthew Milliner’s review, which explains what most of the critics who reviewed the film seemed to miss. Spoilers below.

After you get past the heavy-handed plot exposition by characters, the cutesy classical allusions and maybe-nothing-is-real philosophizing, I think the movie is actually meant to be a paean to Le Corbusier. The final, skyscraper-filled...

If I were introducing a recent immigrant to the United States to our way of living, the first lesson I’d teach him would be “everything is always about the culture war.” He would be...

This is indeed a terrible shame, considering how scarce land is in Manhattan, but it’s also kind of amusing.

The anti-localism of American urbanism summed up in a paragraph: “The interesting thing about this demographic rocket ride, with an ascent and descent perhaps more rapid than that of any other U.S. city, is...