For the mainstream media, every angle of an awful event is a programming opportunity. When mass shootings and attempted assassinations occur in the era of the 24-hour news, one expects wall-to-wall coverage, and that every last, lurid detail of the perpetrators will come into clear view. Thus, the media’s conspicuous lack of curiosity when such perpetrators are involved in, or adjacent to, [...]
Tanis Cortens, Feature Writer: U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s Cincinnati, Ohio, residence was broken into on Jan. 5. The Vance family was not at home at the time, having returned to Washington, D.C. The man accused of the crime, 26-year-old William D. DeFoor, is facing both local and federal charges. DeFoor has a history of mental health-related legal issues, beginning in 2023 [...]
From the editor’s desk As we were ready to go to press, Norman Podhoretz died. He was one of the three most important conservative intellectuals of the American conservative movement of the second half of the 20th century alongside William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, and Irving Kristol, with whom Podhoretz is a founding godfather of neoconservatism. Neoconservatism has come into [...]
Sporting Life, Victor Penney: Do you want to know one of the easiest ways to get under the skin of the toughest, most intimidating professional wrestlers on the planet? Call out pro-wrasslin’ for what it is: fake. The outcomes are predetermined and the moves are choreographed, but make no mistake: the athleticism and pain are real, and so is the passion. It’s [...]
Tanis Cortens: The array of health problems caused by cannabis has serious consequences. A May 2023 analysis by Quest Diagnostics found that, in the general U.S. workforce, the percentage of employees testing positive for marijuana after an on-the-job accident reached a 25-year high in 2022, marking a steady overall 204.2 per cent increase from 2012. Katie Mueller of the National Safety Council [...]
Tanis Cortens: Though Trump is considering reclassifying marijuana with less dangerous substances such as testosterone and ketamine, strong evidence suggests the drug’s health risks are more significant than many realize. A November 2024 article in the American Journal of Public Health said cannabis use “can lead to a range of short- and long-term adverse cognitive, psychological, and physical outcomes.” Short-term harms include [...]
In the 1960s, Malcolm Muggeridge remarked that “sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.” In the heady days of the sexual revolution, his observation had a special force: it revealed, behind the relaxed, permissive posture of “free love” advocates, a concealed cultic reverence for the bodily pleasures that they elevated above all others. For [...]
David takes down Goliath: Student newspaper wins defamation suit against pro-abortion professor The Irish Rover is an independent, non-profit student newspaper at Notre Dame University in Indiana established in 2003. Its mission is “devoted to preserving the Catholic identity of Notre Dame.” (Note: Recently, Notre Dame announced that it was not necessary for the components of the university to continue to ‘preserve its [...]
From the editor’s desk: In October, Compact published a provocative essay by Helen Andrews titled “The Great Feminization” in which she argued that cancel culture is essentially feminine: “Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” The thesis is not Andrews’. She borrowed it from the pseudonymous J. Stone and an essay [...]
Oswald Clark: Eric Kaufmann of the Centre for Heterodox Social published a report in October, “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans,” showing that the number of university students identifying as transgender is in steep decline. Using data collected by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), polling 60,000 undergraduate students, Kaufmann determined that 3.6 per cent of respondents [...]
The contortions that the transgender phenomenon has foisted on the medical profession’s language are myriad—and pernicious. Although 20th-century thinkers had described man as “the symbol-making animal,” we have demonstrated, in our day, that we are symbol-destroying animals as well. The way in which the medical profession has conspired to warp both language and bodies to conform to a series of self-defining fictions [...]
Tanis Cortens Quillette magazine’s podcast released an episode on Oct. 10 entitled “Desexing the Language of Motherhood,” in which maternal and infant health specialist Karleen Gribble joined host Iona Italia to discuss the trend toward gender-neutral terminology in the field of women’s health. Italia and Gribble talked about Gribble’s article, “The Desexing of Language in Women’s Health Research and Care: A Story [...]
"I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer”: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column Mary Beth Norton (Princeton, $34, 203 pages) In the 1690s, John Dunton published a two-page broadsheet, the Athenian Mercury, a double-sided broadsheet that was “the world’s first advice column,” answering queries from anonymous writers and responded to by the paper’s anonymous Athenian Society of [...]
Paul Tuns, Review Moral Issues: How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics by Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp (University of Chicago Press, $42.50 pb, 223 pages) In their book Moral Issues: How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics, Paul Goren, director of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology [...]
Canadians divided on abortion, euthanasia, not so much on divorce, contraception Paul Tuns: On Oct. 16, Research Co. released the results of their online poll on what behaviours Canadians find morally acceptable from abortion and euthanasia to marital affairs and gambling. With the exception of pedophilia, there was significant support for most immoral behaviours and majority support for many of them. While [...]