In December I reviewed Jane Leavy’s audaciously-titled Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It. Howard Husock’s The Projects: A New History of Public Housing (NYU Press, 2025) comes from an academic publisher, which almost guarantees a boring title. A better title would have been: Make Me HUD Secretary: I Know What’s Wrong With “Affordable Read More ›
Karl Zinsmeister’s Sweet Charity (Mountain Marsh Media, 2026) has the semi-misleading subtitle Why private giving is so important to America (and must not be wrecked by politics). Semi-, that is, because while Zinsmeister’s opening chapter makes a cultural and political argument, the bulk of this delightful book is a travelogue of community-bolstering charities in Philadelphia and Florida, some wonderful, some Read More ›
Leo Damrosch’s Storyteller (Yale University Press, 2025) is a valentine to Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), whose life could have been co-designed by the novelist’s bipolar Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson, best known for Treasure Island, combined a strict Scottish Presbyterian upbringing with a love of South Seas sensuousness. Damrosch describes how Stevenson rebelled against Christianity but “a gnawing sense of conscience Read More ›
Cornerstone University will host Discovery Institute Vice President and Senior Fellow Dr. John West for a Community Chapel on Wednesday, March 4 at 10 a.m. to speak on the premise of his forthcoming book, Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul. A book signing will follow in the chapel lobby. The event is free Read More ›
Discovery Institute is pleased to announce that our annual Intelligent Design Education Day is returning to Spokane, Washington with thanks to our hosts at Great Northern University. The question at hand this year: Are humans merely another species in the animal kingdom? We share many physical traits, instincts, and even genetics with our fellow creatures. But is that all there is Read More ›
Jenny Taylor’s Saving Journalism (Pippa Rann Books, UK, 2025) ably chronicles the rise and fall of public interest reporting, and what we have lost as the powerful can now operate with fewer restraints. She notes how western culture’s journalistic innovators until about 1900 were “typically outsiders, religious dissenters who lived by a specific narrative: a narrative of reality and of Read More ›
Dr. Michael Egnor, CSC Senior Fellow and Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at Stony Brook University, will speak at Cornell University on the premise of his new book, The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. This event is sponsored by the Heterodox Academy Campus Community at Cornell University and Chesterton House and is both free Read More ›
December is midway between the end of the baseball season in October and spring training reawakening in a Florida or Arizona February, so here’s a baseball book that can keep us warm at night. Jane Leavy’s Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It (Grand Central Publishing, 2025) includes many proposals including my favorite: Read More ›
Thanksgiving week is the best time of year for homeless persons looking for food handouts—but why are they homeless? Addiction, alcoholism, and mental illness are leading causes, but Michael Ullman’s Household Deformation: The Rise and Permanence of Modern Homelessness (National Homeless Information Project, 2025) also shows the impact of family non-formation and deformation. Divorce and loneliness contribute to an increase in Read More ›
Intellectuals who paid attention when Molly Worthen became a Christian—see Olasky Books for August—should note as well the publication this month of Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously (Encounter). In it the formerly agnostic scholar gives reasons, including “the brute facts of the big bang,” for his new belief in God. Much of the book details Murray’s exploration of Christian claims. Read More ›