Discovery Institute

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God’s Splendor in the Universe

We invite you to save the date for God’s Splendor in the Universe — the 12th Annual Westminster Conference on Science & Faith, scheduled for September 20–21, 2024 in the Philadelphia area. This 2-day conference will explore the finely-tuned design of the cosmos, the uniqueness of our solar system and planet, and implications on faith. Speakers will include philosopher Jay Richards Read More ›

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Street-level September

American History teachers sometimes send me letters asking for advice about textbooks. I make suggestions — for example, Thomas Kidd’s American History (B&H, 2019) is a good main text to use — but also emphasize use of old newspapers to see how people in their own eras viewed important developments. As a teenager I started doing that on my own Read More ›

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August Reading Suggestions

Recommendation of the month: If you want to learn about both black history and current opportunities for progress, read Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America (Emancipation Books, 2022). Authors Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher cover the free market tradition in Black America and the racist tradition that Jim Crow laws encapsulated. There’s no need Read More ›

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COSM 2023

Is AI “generative” or degenerative? Does it usurp humans, or save us from new perils? This year’s COSM Technology Summit, to be held November 1-3 in Bellevue, Washington at the Bellevue Hyatt, will transcend these limited visions.COSM is an exclusive national summit on the converging technologies remaking the world as we know it. Read More ›
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Casablanca at 80: Greatest-Generation America

Released November 26, 1942, the film’s debut neatly coincided with the November 8, 1942 Allied landing in North Africa, and the British stopping Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps at El Alamein on the same day (an event alluded to in Bogart’s next film, Sahara). The film opened in Los Angeles on Jan. 23, 1943, the penultimate day of the wartime Casablanca Conference featuring FDR and British PM Winston Churchill, noted for its demand for “unconditional surrender” by the Axis powers. Read More ›
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Summertime, and the Reading is Easy

It’s July and we’re ten days away from publication of a new Daniel Silva novel, so I’ll skip my mention of new books and recommend five authors who in six series have produced 73 novels since 1981. I’ve read three-fourths of them during the past decade and can testify to their excellence for beach, deck, armchair, or Kindle-when-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night bed reading, Read More ›

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On Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

So much from the left (and also the right) is predictably roaring and boring. George Packer for two decades, though, has provided unexpected insights through his biting writing in The New Yorker and now The Atlantic. His Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) displays egalitarianism but does not accept the traditional left/right spectrum. Read More ›

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On The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the independence of modern Israel. Few in 1948 thought it would last as long, surrounded as it was by a hostile Muslim world, now only partly hostile. The U.S. has been crucial in that survival, and Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish Read More ›

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The Mideast Menace: Israel’s Multi-Front Existential Challenge

Please join us on Thursday, June 15 for an immersive discussion with John Wohlstetter on the current geopolitical situation vis-à-vis Israel and the Middle East. Wohlstetter is an expert on matters of foreign policy and national security and is author of the books Sleepwalking with the Bomb and The Long War Ahead and the Short War Upon Us. Read More ›