Algis Valiunas
Fellow
Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.
Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.
A literary essayist, his writings have appeared in Commentary, the Weekly Standard, National Review, First Things, the American Spectator, the New Criterion, and the Claremont Review of Books. They have also appeared in various collections, including most recently The Best Spiritual Writing, 2013 (Penguin, 2012). He is also the author of the book Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study (Encounter, 2002). He holds degrees from Dartmouth College; Trinity College, Cambridge; and the University of Chicago, where Saul Bellow was his doctoral dissertation adviser in the Committee on Social Thought.
Between Heaven and Hell
Algis Valiunas
The Divine Comedy is one of the great works of humanity, but it is good to remember that this extraordinary poet never transcended the sharply circumscribed thought and feeling of human nature. Dante’s is an unforgettable poem, but before you go changing your life on its authority, you should recall that the most reliable authority on the afterlife you will ever have is yourself.
Articles
Claremont Review of Books - Spring 2017 issue / May 1, 2017
Kraus Revisited
Algis Valiunas
Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a hotbed of genius, and the arch-journalist, poet, and playwright Karl Kraus presided over this efflorescence of art and thought, knowing everything and everybody, making all the right friends and all the right enemies.
Articles
The Weekly Standard - February 27, 2017 issue / February 23, 2017
America’s Shakespeare
Algis Valiunas
For Americans, Shakespeare has been a figure of particular reverence, yearning, and vexation. He has stood for the time-honored refinements of civilization that Americans, as late starters, have not yet had time to nourish into full flower. But he has also been the paragon whom stout-hearted democrats believe themselves destined to surpass.
Articles
National Affairs - Winter 2017 issue / January 12, 2017
Voice of Civilization
Algis Valiunas
Like Herodotus, Thucydides, Montaigne, and Proust, Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was a one-book wonder.
Articles
Claremont Review of Books - Fall 2016 issue / December 21, 2016
Shakespeare’s Savior
Algis Valiunas
Henry Folger made it his life’s work to gather up scattered British treasure and bring it to America for conservation.
Articles
Philanthropy magazine - Winter 2016 issue / January 8, 2016
The Man Who Loved Hitler
Algis Valiunas
A new biography of Josef Goebbels depicts a man consumed by personal ambition, the fate of German culture, and the raving hatred propagated by his master.
Articles
Commentary Magazine - June 2015 issue / June 10, 2015
A Seventh Note
Algis Valiunas
A new book on the siege of Leningrad does valuable service to the city’s years of supreme ordeal and the famous tribute by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Articles
The Weekly Standard - May 4, 2015 issue / April 30, 2015
King of Pain
Algis Valiunas
Just about everyone who pays any attention at all to contemporary fiction knows two things about David Foster Wallace (1962-2008):…
Articles
Claremont Review of Books / March 5, 2012
Mastering the Master
Algis Valiunas
The Peloponnesian War is renowned, and notorious, as the most momentous and destructive conflict of the classical Greek world, surpassing…
Uncategorized
Commentary magazine, November 2009 / November 1, 2009