Fate of the West
Where Western civilization is headed. History, demography, culture and power, with serious attention to both decline and renewal.
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This reading list brings together items from the sources selected for Fate of the West. Open each item at its original source for the complete article, episode or video. This is a selection of current coverage, not a complete archive.
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There’s No Good Reason to Make a Spectacle of Nidal Hasan
And there are plenty of reasons not to stream his execution.
The Zone of Commitment
Neal climbs up to join me at the belay. Moving quickly, he kicks the front points of his crampons into the gray alpine ice and swings one of his ice axes like a framing hammer
A Muslim Answer to Muslim Immigration
Modern America worships at the altar of youth and eagerly tracks in polls and market research its latest and lightest velleities. Our present preoccupation with youth, of course, stands
Job and Her
It is said that Job lost everything, but she has lost more. All her possessions—the money, the house, the clothes—they still exist, but she no longer regards them as
Smashing the Images
As the postwar era draws to an end, some Christians continue to reach for analogies to the 1930s. Social decay recalls Weimar; populist political movements and demagogues are 1933 all over again
Meet the Post-Religious Right
There have been many books written about the online right and the Trump movement, most by people who are, to put it mildly, critical of them. This book is different.
Forget Odysseus. Aeneas Is the True American Hero
Who is our Odysseus? Or more precisely, who is the most Odyssean hero of American film? Matt Damon’s mopey trauma patient? Certainly not.... The post Forget Odysseus. Aeneas Is the True American Hero. appeared first on First Things.
A Culture of Parricide
I learned a new word the other day: déploration. It’s the French, directly from the Latin, for “lament.” But as a term for a specific musical genre, it was novel
New Founders Wanted
It’s now 250 years since America declared her independence and embarked on the experiment of fashioning a nation dedicated to liberty. Do those long-ago events and the deliberations of
The Chariot Burials
Wheeling through the clotted earth, Bronze, bone, and leather clumped in clay, We rolled below the world’s new birth While all the old was burned away. We thundered through our barrows Beneath the deepening harrows Until the plow dragged in the light of day. Then came the scholar’s brush for bone, With pick and trowel to nip around. We had been better left alone Than raised beneath this scratching sound.
De Gaulle Triumphant
The Second World War left Europe invaded and ruined, divided between Soviet and American occupations. Hitler’s defeat represented a “triumph and tragedy”—the title Winston Churchill took for the final
Algorithm, Interface, and AI
Many conversations about artificial intelligence end in a stalemate: A sentiment like “ChatGPT is awful because kids are using it as a therapist” runs up against “But it can
The Cold Beauty of Jan Morris
Jan Morris (1926–2020) was a writer of astounding gifts who not only recorded history but made it. First, as the young reporter James Morris, he joined the successful 1953 British
How Genetics Rewrote History
For the last 2,500 years, since Herodotus and Thucydides pioneered the Western tradition of history, the discipline has been one of the load-bearing intellectual foundations of our culture. In 1905, the philosopher George Santayana famously stated that those “who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Long before this, Western civilisation had taken a particular interest in its past, not just for matters of intellectual curiosity, but for the lessons it can teach us.
Tyler Cowen: America Needs African Immigrants
I have been pro-immigration since I first started thinking about the subject in the 1970s, but in recent times a new issue has come to the forefront: large-scale immigration from Africa, and specifically sub-Saharan Africa. The president recently has helped inflame this debate, posting on Truth Social last week that Minnesotans should “fight back” against Somali immigrants he says have “taken over” the state. It seems to be a good time for a fuller accounting of what immigration from Africa will mean for America, at scale and over time.
The Heirs of Carlos the Jackal
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was 20 years old when he arrived in Beirut in 1970 and made his way to the offices of al-Hadaf, a weekly Arabic-language newspaper. Deputy editor Bassam Abu Sharif welcomed the young Venezuelan, but they didn’t discuss feature stories or a reporting job.
I Support the Death Penalty. Don’t Livestream It
On a summer morning in 1936, thousands of people packed the streets of Owensboro, Kentucky, to watch a man hang. Rainey Bethea had been convicted of rape and murder, and his execution drew a crowd that treated it like a circus. Vendors sold hot dogs and drinks near the gallows. “Spectators jeered throughout, even while Bethea prayed,” legal historian Stuart Banner writes in The Death Penalty: An American History.
Why Rejoiners need the Russian bogeyman
Burnham is following Europe’s playbook
Britain shouldn’t leave Sierra Leone
Military intervention saved the country
Elon Musk’s daddy issues
His paternalism knows no limits
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