James Bowman

Recent reappraisals err by judging director Ernst Lubitsch by the standards of the wrong era.

We have been put on notice that whenever and wherever Democrats are once again entrusted with power, they may be expected to use it without restraint against their political enemies.

In the pages of our once great newspapers, argument has given way to assertion, policy to scandal, hard news to gossip and speculation, and observation of political life to participation in it — with the result that there can be few people on either side of the political divide who any longer expect news to be the stock-in-trade of the news media.

When a political culture ceases to value truth for its own sake instead of its political utility, it breaks down into violent or quasi-violent partisanship.

The lives of 19th-century utopians were more interesting than the utopias they imagined.

The purveyors of fake news turn out to be willing customers for fake jokes.

To some political junkies, reading Sam Rosenfeld’s book The Polarizers will be an exercise in almost unbearable nostalgia for that world of political stability and comity and the kind of genuine debate that can only come with mutual respect between those of differing political points of view—as we can see now that both genuine debate and mutual respect appear to have vanished from our politics.

The tale of Stormy Daniels and its failure to arouse the public’s indignation against President Trump might seem to give hope that eventually the public will tire of the media’s scandal culture. But even if scandal fatigue should set in, its obverse, which is government by virtue-signaling, has never been stronger.

We ought always to be suspicious about retrospective moralizing about the past, which didn’t have the luxury that we enjoy of being able to balance costs that had yet to be incurred against benefits that remained hypothetical in order to decide if a prospective course of action was “worthwhile” or not.

Our Rashomon politics is not an artifact of the Trump era but an inevitable outgrowth of an ever-increasing tendency to political moralizing, which itself arises out of identity politics as lately perfected by the left, with the willing cooperation of the media.

In trying to modernize our understanding of the “elusive concept” of reputation, a new book loses sight of its historical meaning.

Greta Gerwig, who both wrote and directed Lady Bird, has done a wonderful job of taking us through teenage anxiety step by step in a way that feels entirely right.