What You Need to Know About 15

Dana Gioia has spent his career making metaphors: drawing disparate things together to reveal the breadth and depth of aesthetic experience, but doing so in a way that has frequently…

Born in 1909 to secular Jewish Parisians, at age 10 Simone Weil was memorizing Racine and marching in labor union protests.  She attended the École Normale and then briefly taught…

Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince while unemployed and in exile following the restoration of the Medici to Florentine rule in 1512. He dedicated it to Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of…

John Lukacs (1924-) is one of the last great narrative historians, to be numbered among Jacques Gibbon, Jacques Barzun, George Kennan and Samuel A. Huntington. Lukacs wrote more than twenty books,…

From the distance of 750 years, Thomas Aquinas can seem quite the stodgy fellow—not just old school but the old school. One needs to look a little closer to realize…

Dwight Macdonald was one of the twentieth century’s great public intellectuals. American culture was Macdonald’s specialty, including government. A journalist by trade, Macdonald’s first professional job was writing for Time…

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing-- say Pimlico... It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut…

Paul Gottfried is among the most important contemporary conservative thinkers. An intellectual historian, since the 1980s Gottfried has been the foremost critic of American conservatism from the perspective of someone…

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about a…

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about a…

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about a…

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about a…

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about a…

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about a…

This is the first entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about…