James Bowman

President Trump’s rhetorical approach is a bold, even reckless strategy in our scandal-obsessed media culture, but it has at least paid the dividend of keeping the media’s ostentatious outrage perpetually at top volume as a distraction from any more substantive coverage of his presidency, which could only be hostile and probably more effectively so.

It’s best to think of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri as a sort of cinematic parable about forgiveness — both of others and of ourselves.

Movies about historical events always tell us more about the time in which they were made than they do about the time in which they are set.

The moral panic over celebrity male sexual misbehavior that has raged through the media since the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in October seems to be part of the on-going progressive effort to bring about the eviction of President Trump from the executive mansion.

It is not elected officials of either party but the media, with the power to decide what is scandal and what is not, who are now in charge of us all.

The coincidence of the birth of social media and the death of manners should not be surprising to us. What is surprising is the outrage about it on the left, which refuses to recognize its own part in killing manners off — perhaps to preserve their hypocrisy in condemning the right for unmannerliness.

Robert Wuthnow deserves commendation for thinking more creatively about discrimination and its ideological twin, “othering,” than many of his colleagues in the social sciences, and in the process making a real contribution to social history as it used to be understood, before it got so politicized.

As the advent of that earthly paradise has been deferred, and deferred again, and as the honor culture whose destruction was its condition has grown ever more irrecoverable, the urgency with which the institution of the progressive utopia is required and the bitterness towards those seen as standing in its glorious way have grown pari passu.

Over the last 50 years we have become so accustomed to the media’s obsession with scandal and, therefore, politics in black-and-white, that we hardly notice it anymore, or how far our politics has strayed from the political into the realm of the merely personal.

Kurt Andersen’s new book amounts to little more than an elite attempt to justify its author’s perception of the America for which he harbors such contempt.

A 125-year-old statue commemorating Confederate soldiers stands as a symbol of reconciliation between the two halves of the recently-divided nation.

Christopher Nolan’s innovation in Dunkirk is that he has attempted to preserve and, indeed, enhance with technological wizardry, the realistic, grunt’s-eye view of the battle while keeping the emotional side of things low-key.