When a friend called me this morning with the news that Susan Sontag had died at the age 71, just about the first thing I thought was, “well, we’ll have a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times.” Check to see if I am correct. In the meantime, as you prepare yourself… Read More Susan Sontag: a Prediction by Roger Kimball. 2004
“We’ll get you through your children.” —Allen Ginsberg, 1958 The core of the heresy of the Free Spirit lay in the adept’s attitude towards himself: he believed that he had attained a perfection so absolute that he was incapable of sin. Disclaiming book-learning and theological subtleties, they rejoiced in direct knowledge of God- indeed, they… Read More The Beat Generation… cultural catastrophe. By Roger Kimball
The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now “The Ideological Lie, as Solzhenitsyn calls it, was born when modern revolutionaries replaced the age-old distinction between good and evil with the illusory distinction between progress and reaction. In the name of progress, evil was called goodness, and goodness in the form of wise restraint was labeled evil, backward, racist,… Read More The Persistence of the Ideological Totalitarian Lie
By Norman Podhoretz. Sex, drugs, America, the middle class, and “poetry power”: reflections on a literary entanglement of 50 years’ duration. by Norman Podhoretz, 1997. “Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet of Beat Generation, Dies at 70,” proclaimed the headline on the front page of the New York Times for April 6, 1997. Reading it, I was moved more deeply… Read More My War With Allen Ginsberg
The New Criterion.June 2024. Later in this issue, Gary Saul Morson writes about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork The Gulag Archipelago. Much of that book is devoted to the details of the dehumanizing brutality of the Stalinist regime: its terrifying sadism and staggering assault on basic human dignity. The Stalinist horror show, in which terror was perfected in… Read More Lenin everlasting. On the totalitarian’s continued relevance.
Updated. Freddy Gray is joined by writer Roger Kimball to discuss the attempted assassination of Former President Donald Trump. With the dust beginning to settle from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, they look at how this could have happened, and what’s gone wrong. They also take a look at how important Donald Trump’s Vice… Read More Roger Kimball on Gross Negligence and Diversity Hires
“To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to… Read More “Christophobia” and the West
The Incomparable Mr. Buckley | William F. Buckley, Jr. | Full Documentary “A new American Masters documentary on him settles on one adjective in its title, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, but not before first suggesting “insufferable” and crossing it out, in reference to a letter Buckley said he once received. Indeed, not many people like the through-and-through WASP… Read More The Incomparable Mr. Buckley | Full Documentary
By far the most important book on Western revolutionary culture I’ve read in over a decade. Indispensable. A REVIEW OF THE LONG MARCH. BY ROGER KIMBALL. Encounter Books, 2000.By Bill Muehlenberg In many ways the cultural revolution of the 60s has been as influential and momentous as other great social upheavals, such as the Industrial, French or… Read More The Long March by Roger Kimball
Why Were Authorities so Quick to Rule out Arson in the Notre Dame Conflagration? BY Roger Kimball, Apr. 17, 2019 I feel I must hand it to those stalwart souls investigating the devastating conflagration at the Cathedral of Notre Dame… The flames were not quenched at the 12th-century masterpiece of Gothic architecture when the authorities… Read More An Old Flame We Do Not Forget. Notre Dame.
Foucault’s Child-Sex Allegations Should Shock But Not Surprise us. He elevated common criminality into a virtue. Dr. Matt Treacy. The allegations that the French philosopher Michel Foucault – who has been long admired and oft-quoted by the liberal left in Ireland [and of course everywhere] – repeatedly “raped” pre-pubescent boys in Tunisia during his time as a… Read More Where the Radical Left Would Take Us
Catholic Critique 