Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning Eli Burnstein (Union Square & Co, $26, 201 pages) Dictionary of Fine Distinctions is a charming little book that uses pithy descriptions and cute illustrations to delineate the meaning of words that are often confused for one another. Most of these clarifying notes are done so in easily to digest one [...]
Brave New Words: How AI will Re/volutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) Salman Khan (Viking, $39.99, 237 pages) Salman Khan is the founder of the Khan Academy, a non-profit that provides free online educational instruction for all ages. His Khan Academy videos have been viewed billions of times by more than 150 million users as he has dedicated his life [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be by Timothy P. Carney (Harper, $36.99, 343 pages) Invariably, it seems, Timothy Carney’s Family Unfriendly and Brad Wilcox’s Get Married are getting reviewed together. Not here. Both are deserving of their own treatment. The Wilcox review will appear next month. Carney, a Catholic father of [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements There was a point, nearly a quarter century ago, when the war to protect children online was probably lost. Writing about the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in his new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt notes that the [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Two years ago at a Munk Debate about public trust in mainstream media, journalist Matt Taibbi was repeatedly smeared by his opponent, essayist Malcolm Gladwell, with a charge that he harboured an “affection” for (as Taibbi recalled) “Jim Crow, the ‘50s, and the ‘golden moment’ when media was ‘dominated by white men’.” It [...]
All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism by Kevin Vallier (Oxford, $36, 305 pages) Version 1.0.0 Kevin Vallier has set out to reply to the integralist challenge to liberalism in his important 2023 volume, All the Kingdoms of the World. Vallier takes a dozen pages to define integralism but if it can be summarized in [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools) edited by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan with foreword by Conrad Black (True North and Dorchester Books, $21.99 343 pages) In May 2021, the news broke that the remains of 221 missing children were discovered in an unmarked, mass grave in an apple orchard at a residential [...]
Interim Staff: Roe Canada: The True North in a Post-Roe World was released Jan. 12 on Vimeo. Produced and directed by Kevin Dunn of Dunn Media and Entertainment, the 80-minute documentary interviews Canadian and U.S. pro-life activists, academics, politicians, and even a retired abortionist, to examine whether Canada could have its own post-Roe moment of turning the legal and political tide of [...]
Meaning of Life by David L. Bahnsen (Post Hill Press, $29, 205 pages) Paul Tuns, Review: David Bahnsen is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of a wealth management company and a committed Christian, and he brings a wealth of knowledge from both perspectives to Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, a brief and highly readable book about the importance of work. Bahnsen condemns [...]
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up Abigail Shrier (Sentinel, $39.99, 297 pages) Abigail Shrier was the subject of attempted cancellation after her 2020 book on transgenderism, Irreversible Damage, upset trans activists. Her new book will likewise upset another group of people, although perhaps one less likely to see her silenced: a conglomeration of therapists, school counselors, and parents that have [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements The idea of a “God-shaped hole” that came into existence roughly during the Enlightenment and grew with the retreat of religion is mistakenly attributed to the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. The truth is that nobody really knows where the phrase came from, but it has taken on a life of its own, becoming [...]
The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised by James Pethokoukis (Center Street, $37, 327 pages) Paul Tuns, Review: James Pethokoukis, a policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, has written a call-to-arms for conservatives and policymakers to embrace almost limitless innovation to create the economic growth that will deliver the human flourishing that techno-optimists have been predicting for [...]
Amazing Grace: A Cultural History of the Beloved Hymn James Walvin (University of California Press, $30, 197 pages) The origin story of the hymn “Amazing Grace” is well-known: John Newton, the captain of a 18th century English slave ship, had a dramatic conversion after surviving a story which led him to become an abolitionist and pastor, with “Amazing Grace” written as a [...]
The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a World Without Us Adam Kirsch (Columbia Global Reports, $16, 99 pages) Adam Kirsch’s The Revolt Against Humanity is the best short introduction to the posthuman world imagined by futurists fascinated by the imagined combining of technology and humanity in what is called the singularity. He briefly lays out the literary, philosophic, and scientific literature that imagined [...]
Oswald Clark Where Have All the Democrats Gone: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira (Holt, $38.99, 325 pages) More than two decades ago, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, predicting demographic changes would result in presidential and congressional victories for the Democrats for the foreseeable future. [...]