“The Great Feminization,” Compact, October 2025
Everything you think of as wokeness is a result of demographic feminization.

“How Asian Immigration is Changing U.S. Education,” Compact, September 2025
America doesn’t have anything like the Chinese gaokao.

“Are Teen Summer Jobs Obsolete?” Commonplace, July 2025
Summer employment for teenagers is a tradition worth preserving.

“How Australia Stopped Grooming Gangs,” Compact, July 2025
The Sydney rape-gang crisis of the early 2000s and how it was resolved.

“The Last Gatekeeper,” Compact, June 2025
A review of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus.

“Should Illiterate Students Sue the Schools that Failed Them?” Commonplace, May 2025
Lawfare is a bad way to set education policy.

“The False Promise of High-Skilled Immigration,” Compact, January 2025
H-1Bs do to white collars what NAFTA did to blue collars.

“The Death of the Anti-Globalization Left,” Compact, November 2025
Veterans of the Battle in Seattle are surprised that trade is now a right-wing issue.

“Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Hates Israel,” Compact, October 2024
A celebrated race memoirist visits the Middle East.

“Beyond the Pale,” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2024
Two new books give different explanations for America’s racial reckoning.

“Where Was ‘Bioethics’ During Covid?” The American Conservative, July 2024
A book on medical whistleblowers ignores the most glaring test of medical ethics in recent times.

“The Long Shadow of NAFTA,” The American Conservative, March/April 2024
Neither side of the border has seen the benefits it was promised.

“Against Human Resources,” The Lamp, February 2024
HR ladies are a menace to society.

“Our LGBT Empire,” The American Conservative, January/February 2024
Why is it America’s business to “queer the Donbass”?

“Mass Madness at Three,” The American Conservative, November/December 2023
Remembering the lessons of Covid when everyone wants to forget the whole thing.

“Ancient Pain,” The American Conservative, November 2023
A new biography of Anthony Hecht is a study of discipline, in life, art, and civilization.

“The Failure of War Crimes Tribunals,” Compact, November 2023
The Tokyo Trials after World War II were a failure, as have been all such trials since.

“Playing the Race Card to Protect Chinese Spies,” The American Conservative, September 2023
The Wen Ho Lee case taught China that crying racism would trump incriminating facts.

“What Soviet Nostalgia Gets Right,” Compact, May 2023
It’s not enough to shrug that the post-communist transition has had “winners” and “losers.”

“Look Back in Anger,” Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2023
Could the disaster in South Africa have been averted?

“Behind Steve Sailer’s Rise,” Compact, March 2023
If you want to live a normal life, the left-wing race obsessives have to lose and Steve Sailer has to win.

“House of Leaves,” The Lamp, November 2022
Mark Z. Danielewski wrote the last horror novel of the age of literacy.

“Andrea Dworkin Didn’t Care,” Compact, May 2022
The conservative-feminist alliance of the 1980s was destined to fail.

“What the 1619 Project Means,” First Things, February 2022
None of the scholarly rebuttals touch the 1619 Project’s central claim.

“Doctor Who,” The Lamp, May 2021
Dr. Fauci learned the wrong lesson from AIDS.

“Do-Gooder in Chief,” Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2021
Eleanor Roosevelt’s career vindicated every misogynist cliche about women in politics.

“Casino Capitalism, Literally,” The American Conservative, September/October 2021
When gambling was normalized, we lost a vital dimension to our ideas of political economy.

“Benevolent Autocrat,” First Things, February 2021
Portugal could have done worse than a dictator like Salazar.

“The Chicago Seven’s Guilt,” Wall Street Journal, January 2021
If inciting mob violence is bad, someone forgot to tell Abbie Hoffman.

“The Law that Ate the Constitution,” Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2020
Christopher Caldwell vs. civil rights.

“Marriage of Genius,” First Things, March 2020
Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and The Dolphin.

“Obscenity Blindness,” American Mind, February 2020
Pornography and Paul Schrader.

“Our Socialist Future,” First Things, August/September 2019
A Victor Gollancz for our times.

“Don’t Get Cute,” Wall Street Journal, 3 May 2019
Kawaii at the cat café.

“A New Schlafly,” New York Times, 28 April 2019
The missing voice in family policy.

“#MeToo vs. McCarthyism,” Washington Examiner, 26 February 2019
Give me Red Channels any day.

★ “Shame Storm,” First Things, January 2019
A personal reflection on public shaming.

“Kicking Against the Pricks,” Hedgehog Review, Fall 2018
Anthony Comstock gets a bad rap.

★ “A Loving Ambivalence,” First Things, October 2018
Bartolomé de las Casas was a menace.

“Inconspicuous Consumption,” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2018
A Thorstein Veblen of the yoga moms.

“Poet in History,” First Things, January 2018
Czesław Miłosz’s poetry holds up, but The Captive Mind does not.

★ “Zimbabwe’s Trauma,” National Review, December 2017
From Rhodesia to majority rule.

“Far Out,” Modern Age, Fall 2017
Seeking freedom, Seventies style.

“Shiny Happy People,” Hedgehog Review, Fall 2017
None of the great utilitarians died happy.

“A Magnificent Anomaly,” Education & Culture, July 2017
The apocalyptic sci-fi of daily Mass-goer R.A. Lafferty.

★ “Romance & Socialism in J.S. Mill,” American Affairs, Summer 2017
Did Harriet Taylor Mill make her husband a socialist?

“Pilate Error,” Weekly Standard, 27 March 2017
Pontius Pilate didn’t wash his hands.

“George Eliot’s Rebellions,” Catholic Herald, 24 March 2017
Don’t take life advice from a moral solipsist.

“Lessons of Algeria,” Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2017
France needs Jean Lartéguy at home more than we needed him in Iraq.

“Saint Louverture,” First Things, March 2017
The Haitian Revolution was a disaster.

“The Swiss Kafka,” Quadrant, January–February 2017
Robert Walser and other Swiss lit.

“Tocqueville in the Gutter,” First Things, January 2017
How can Tocqueville save us if civil society is dead?

“Ivy League Laughs,” The Weekly Standard, 5 December 2016
Does Harvard have a sense of humor?

“An Eroded Culture,” National Review, 15 August 2016
Is the white working class to blame for its own predicament?

★ “The New Ruling Class,” Hedgehog Review, Summer 2016
The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy—so let it.

“Dangerous and Suspect Men,” Books & Culture, March/April 2016
The gay marriage debate finds a French revolutionary precedent.

“The Green and the Brown,” First Things, March 2016
Timothy Snyder gets Nazi agronomy wrong.

“Cowards, Patriots, and Pasternak,” Quadrant, December 2015
Dr. Zhivago is a Siberian soap opera but the Cold War made it something more.

★ “AA Envy,” Hedgehog Review, Fall 2015
Addiction recovery is the last acceptable path to spiritual growth.

“Helen Vendler’s Idolatry,” Books & Culture, September/October 2015
Has the poetry doyenne read the Gettysburg Address?

“The Heritage of Ta-Nehisi Coates,” University Bookman, August 2015
Marxism, violence, cheap misdirection, intellectual slipperiness—have I left anything out?

“The Anti-Paglia,” University Bookman, July 2015
Terry Castle is America’s greatest living essayist.

“Siberia’s Surprisingly Australian Past,” Quadrant, June 2015
Honeymooning on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

★ “A Cause Lost—and Forgotten,” University Bookman, March 2015
Women against suffrage.

“Stewardship of the Reading Eye,” FirstThings.com, November 2014
One cheer for censorship.

“Counterfeit Goods,” First Things, August 2014
Teju Cole is not the real deal.

“Master-Slav Dialectic,” American Spectator, May 2014
More about the Russian soul, please.

★ “Underburked,” American Spectator, March 2014
Yuval Levin gazes into the Burkean mirror.

★ “Bloodless Moralism,” First Things, February 2014
Social science shouldn’t be our only basis for moral arguments.

“Up from Colonialism,” Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2013/14
Chinua Achebe ruined African literature.

★ “18th Century Fox,” American Spectator, October 2013
There were low-brow conservatives in Edmund Burke’s day, too.

“Charles Lamb’s Confessions,” FirstThings.com, September 2013
The first recovery memoir.

“A Measure of Forgiveness,” Books & Culture, May/June 2013
Ngugi wa Thiong’o comes across nicer than usual in his second memoir.

“Cronyism’s Charms,” First Things, May 2013
In defense of the Chicago way.

★ “Sex in the Meritocracy,” First Things, February 2013
College hook-up culture is depraved, but not the way Nathan Harden suggests.

“An American Abroad,” Spectator Australia, 7 July 2012
A Spectator diary about my first month in Australia.

“In Defense of Robert Moses,” Weekly Standard, August 2010
Take that, Caro.

“The Smoker’s Code,” Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation
“Perhaps my favorite essay in this book,” says Jonah Goldberg’s introduction.