RealClearBooks Articles

In 1985 – when I was 7 – the young kids in my neighborhood had a “swear club.” To join, the initiate had to hide behind a tree with the assembled members and say every swear word he knew. It was less common for children our age to encounter profanity back then. There weren’t many parents who routinely used profanity around kids, and other adults would clean up their speech when children were in earshot. This meant that the obscenities we did know were gleaned from overhearing adults in moments when they thought kids weren’t listening, or in brief bits of a...

It's 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife and two children. One day, Saul happens on an idea: stage a fake wedding for the benefit of her old world parents, invite a few friends in on the joke, and go about their lives. The ruse works. Except Saul realizes he actually wants to marry Mona, who vows never to permanently tie herself to a man. After losing her city job in the 1970s fiscal...

Five years after pandemic lockdowns disrupted the rollout of Chromatica, Lady Gaga has blessed our ears with her gigantic, return-to-form seventh studio album: Mayhem. The past years for the star have been action-packed with everything but giving us another pop album. She finally embarked on a postponed tour, released a remix album and a second jazz collaboration album with Tony Bennett, and honed her acting craft in the underrated House of Gucci and Joker: Folie à Deux. At last, Mother Monster is back on the radio in a true return-to-form. From the opening lead single...

Sarah Ruden, translator of Aristophanes, Homer, Petronius, St. Augustine, etc., and the author of a study on St. Paul and a biography of Virgil, has now written an evaluation of Sylvia Plath as a poet, taking up six of her best poems for scrutiny. The selection, running from 1959 until six days before Plath’s famous suicide in 1963, consists of “Mushrooms,” “You’re,” “The Babysitters,” “The Applicant,” “Ariel,” and “Edge.” Working with the conceit that Plath conceived herself in her poetry as a classical...

In a letter to Henry Lee penned a little more than a year before his death, Thomas Jefferson famously described the Declaration of Independence as “an expression of the American mind.” With great learning and insight, Paul Seaton explores the founding document that gave voice to that mind in his book, “Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us.” Seaton calls the Declaration the “first epic poem that Americans penned about themselves.” Simply describing its well-thought-out political theory is not enough. The Declaration tells a...

The Ideological Lie, as Solzhenitsyn calls it, was born when modern revolutionaries replaced the age-old distinction between good and evil with the illusory distinction between progress and reaction. In the name of progress, evil was called goodness, and goodness in the form of wise restraint was labeled evil, backward, racist, colonialist, sexist, etc. Jacobinism, Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism, Progressive Democracy, the New Left, and now, the new woke dispensation have all iterated upon this central conceit. Their adherents were all frenziedly preoccupied with being on “the...

Freedom, here, abides in this cell before me,bound to a crude, stone throne of eternityto reconcile Creator with creationand prevail against the proud, spiteful nations. Terrified, here, I quake in His bold Presence —He crowned, beaten and robed by flesh’s fragile weakness.Ancestors and heirs mock you with reed and shame;How dare I then petition and speak your name. The Man, yet, manifests mercy with a glance,the eyes, of which, pierce deeper than nails or lance.Yet He beckons me anon in a humble tonguewith a searing breath from the Song forever sung. This man, timidly, fails to...

WWE has mastered a nifty magic trick. The company simultaneously announces record revenues while its flagship event, WrestleMania 41, struggles to sell tickets for the upcoming Easter weekend. This isn't merely growing pains from a corporate transition. We're witnessing the ossification of mediocrity into parent company TKO Holdings’ shareholder value-delivering company policy. The numbers tell a stark story. The biggest wrestling show of the year has sold 50,000 tickets for Night One and 52,000 for Night Two. Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas holds 71,250. Last year  in Philadelphia,...

The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other words, even though most Americans still profess attachment to some religion, those attachments are in many cases so anemic and so historical—and American society as a result is now so presumptively secular—that a case for religious belief and practice must start from a very different place than might have made sense a quarter century...

In San Antonio’s grand expanse,Where sixty thousand held a trance,The Final Four took thrilling flight,Florida and Duke locked in a fight, But oh, the Gators, strong and true,Their will unbent, saw victory through.Duke fell, their championship dream denied,While Florida’s spirit burned inside. Then two days passed, the tension high,Against Houston’s might, they had to fly.A razor’s edge, the score so tight,Two points the margin, bathed in light. A whistle blew, the air grew still,A foul called late, against their will.Free throws awarded, pressure vast,A chance for...

Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of people who got hit by Bert Cooper. Inventive standards had to be devised to measure what had happened to them, because being hit by Bert Cooper didn’t hurt any more than being hit head-on by a runaway bus. Are you in pain once your entirety has short-circuited? Tyrone Booze: “Smokin’ Bert Cooper, when he hit you, you didn’t feel no pain. You was in the Twilight Zone. It’s been over twenty years, and I still wake up screamin’ from nightmares where I’m fightin’ Bert Cooper.” Eddie Mustafa...

Soren Kierkegaard once remarked that we can never be reminded too often that a man existed named Socrates. Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates thus comes as a particularly timely reminder. Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, focusing on ancient philosophy and ethics. Due to what’s called the “linguistic turn,” academic philosophy can often feel like a boring exercise in analyzing terminology and quibbling about what people are allowed to talk about. Callard breaks this mold. She is distinguished in her field by being interested in philosophy...

Mitch ‘Blood’ Green had more things going for him to make big money in boxing than nearly any fighter in history. A six-foot-six, 225-pound heavyweight with a chiseled physique and a traffic-stopping look, Green had street credibility for days—he was the gang leader of the Black Spades—and four New York Golden Gloves heavyweight titles. But his penchant for mayhem, drugs, and chaos, while keeping him in the news, torpedoed his pro boxing career. He lost a high-profile decision to Mike Tyson at Madison Square Garden, got into a tabloid-grabbing late-night street fight...

The zany and joyous female embrace of an extreme kind of porn-scripted sexuality is a new literary trend, or maybe a new life trend, seen recently in Miranda July’s All Fours, and now in the disturbing grunge confection Paradise Logic, by Sophie Frances Kemp. Early accolades have hailed Kemp’s heroine, Reality Kahn (get it?) as the manic pixie dream girl of the Gowanus Canal, and editor Olivia Taylor-Smith’s introduction letter to my advance reader’s copy says we have a lot to learn from her, such as learning to “live with an open heart, love earnestly and...

The Trump Administration wasted no time fulfilling their promise to slash diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) infrastructures. Within a month of the inaugural, the President signed an executive order demolishing these regimes within numerous federal agencies, the military, and higher...

As you delve into the pages of this book, you'll be embarking on a journey that stretches across continents, dips into the very soils that nurture the tobacco leaves and rises with the fragrant smoke of a freshly lit cigar. But more than that, this journey will take you into the heart of human experiences—the shared rituals, the legacy of craftsmanship, the profound connections made in the haze of cigar culture, and the timeless beauty of slowing down, reflecting, and truly being in a moment. The parallels to the gastronomic world, where every bite tells a story and every flavor carries...

I first learned of Sophie Madeline Dess’s work when a friend sent me her story “Unfathomably Deep,” then just published in The Drift. It was sent without comment, though with the implication, I think, that here was something striking and original, that stood out from the crowd, without my friend quite knowing what to make of it. Or so I soon surmised. Reading it, I entered a Cronenbergian tale of trainee gynecologists (I since have it on reasonably good authority that Dess does not know Cronenberg’s movies) and of the female narrator’s lust for one of them,...

A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what’s right and wrong with modern America—written by an acclaimed journalist and Army Ranger who, after returning from Iraq to a painfully divided country, rediscovered its core values in the bleachers of a minor league ballpark in Batavia, New York.What happens when a minor league team—the heart and soul of a Rust Belt town in western New York—is shut down by the billionaires who run Major League Baseball? Author WILL BARDENWERPER has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s...

One of the most beautiful paintings in the Caspar David Friedrich show The Soul of Nature, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, shows a roiling ocean crashing against a rocky coast by moonlight. The tiny figure of a monk stares out into the void, alone. The juxtaposition of terror and poetry brings to mind a line from the memoirs of François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, a contemporary of Friedrich’s and a fellow Romantic: “Not a day passes when, reflecting on what I have been, I do not see in my mind’s eye the rock where I was born, the...