Author: Austin Bramwell

Like pretty much the whole internet-reading public, I haven’t been able to avoid New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini’s list of top 10 composers of all time.  As Tommasini acknowledges, the point of...

The Bookshelf column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (I know, ancient history in blogging time) featured an essay so typical you normally wouldn’t even notice it. Reviewing a new book entitled Fame, Toby...

(Cross-posted from @TAC.) Virginia Postrel argues this weekend that environmentalists favor high-speed rail and wind power not because they reduce carbon emissions but simply because they look good. “These technologies,” she writes, aren’t just about getting from...

I confess: We are alternate side parkers.  To make way for “Mechanical Brooms,” New York City prohibits parking for 1.5 hours on one side of the street on Mondays and Thursdays and the other...

Here’s my post-election reaction.  The public school where I voted on Tuesday was giving books away from its library. I spotted an Important Book lying on the table — Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch —swiped it...

I’ve just never liked G.K. Chesterton — which, among the conservative Christians with whom I sometimes (though, as an Episcopalian, not often) travel, is almost enough to make me a Bad Person. Yet by the time...

[Update: In response to comments, I have toned this post down a bit. It was unduly harsh in relation to the fault I am identifying.] NR‘s Jason Steorts, responding to Whitaker Chambers scholar Richard Reinsch, writes: I think Reinsch mischaracterizes...

This comes 12 years too late, but I still think it’s worth correcting the record. In his otherwise wonderfully readable and acute book, In Praise of Commercial Culture, Tyler Cowen (now, of course, a...

I highly recommend this BBC documentary about Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who solved Fermat’s last theorem. In one scene, Wiles leads a course wherein he lays the groundwork for what would ultimately become his...

I just don’t get the hostility to Trig Trutherism.  Over on Volokh, Dave Kopel takes Human Events to task for publishing a column arguing that Obama is a Muslim.  Kopel quite properly warns that...

In my first post in this series, I claimed that Charles Hill, Yale’s “Diplomat in Residence,” had won “uncritical, almost fulsome praise.” You can strike the “almost.”  According to Edward Luttwak’s review, Hill’s book...

So I had planned a running critique of Charles Hill’s appearance on Peter Robinson’s webTV program, Uncommon Knowledge.  Alas, I got through just one chapter before getting rudely sidetracked by the need to make...

The cult of Charles Hill, of which I was not a member, was just beginning when I graduated from college 10 years ago.  Hill, a former foreign service officer, began teaching at Yale in...

The delightfully impious Roissy in DC is going after blogging superstar Megan McCardle, who evidently isn’t impressed by the so-called “seduction community.”  As usual, Roissy has some brilliant insights — for example: Ultimately, women...

Over at TAC, I blogged earlier this week on a particularly bad study calling for a more open immigration policy.  One commentator, addressing my points that immigration (of low-skill workers) depresses wages and increases...

The friend who pointed me to Joseph Epstein’s essay in the first place takes exception to some of what I wrote earlier on Epstein and the (non)decline of intellectual life: I’m glad you posted...

Reviewing the new history of Commentary magazine, Joseph Epstein writes: The chief problem facing John Podhoretz in his editorship of the current-day Commentary, I would say, is not the distraction of the Internet or the...

Andrew Manshel of an outfit called the Greater Jamaica Development Corp takes aim today at sainted urbanist Jane Jacobs. I yield to no one in my admiration for Jacobs. Still, she has become something of...