City Journal Archives - Ethics & Public Policy Center
Free the Mind from Bitterness
Americans have become dangerous to themselves. This must be transcended.

Infamy and Mythology
For Donald Trump, yesterday’s events may prove to be as much one as the other.

Christmas in a Dark Time
Christmas should speak of the power of love, of forgiveness—a truce, a tenderness. There’s not much of that right now in the noisy, nasty public square.

Elite Opinion Is Never Wrong
Reality may fail to measure up to cocktail party assumptions, but the chit-chat of the better people rings on, unchanged.

A Noisy Place
Our exhausting and not-yet-settled election of 2020 should remind us that America has rarely been “one nation, indivisible.”

Two Universes
In 2020, a mind open to the other side’s point of view—a mind capable of truly understanding that point of view—is rare.

Fire, Again
The current outbreak of protests and riots feels like a sudden, comprehensive event of physics or meteorology, a perfect storm of perfect storms, multilayered and interpenetrating and simultaneous.

The Other Great War
Rudyard Kipling’s World War I-era book contains surreal and haunting similarities to today’s pandemic.

The War Goes On
Americans are engaged in a great double struggle—against a pandemic, but also against one another.

Calamity Has Much to Teach
We live in history—and calamity has a lot to teach us. Some say that we learn only by suffering and disaster.
