Peter Fritzche’s Hitler’s First Hundred (Basic, 2020) begins with a brilliant scene. At 11:15 a.m. on Jan. 30, 1933, conservative aristocrat Franz von Papen meets with Adolf Hitler, who wants to be chancellor of Germany — the CEO. Another key person in the meeting, nationalist media magnate Alfred Hugenberg, is wary of Hitler. The three are late for their meeting with 84-year-old Read More ›
The Center for Science & Culture is pleased to announce that Senior Fellow David Berlinski will be interviewed by Socrates in the City host Eric Metaxas on Berlinski’s latest book Human Nature, published by Discovery Institute Press. We invite you to register for this interview with one of the greatest intellectuals of our time. The issues involved in the evolution debate — Read More ›
Discovery Institute Vice President John West will be speaking on C.S. Lewis, the threat of “scientocracy,” and the relationship between Christianity and politics at three sessions of the Slaying Leviathan Conference on Oct. 28-29 in Tacoma, WA. On Friday night, Dr. West will talk about C.S. Lewis’s views on science and scientism for the Theology Pugcast podcast taped during the Read More ›
Thomas Kidd’s excellent and tightly-written Thomas Jefferson (Yale University Press, 2022) notes that our third president “touted frugality” in government, but his personal life was different. (As John Adams put it, “Jefferson has a habit as well as a disposition to expensive Living…. He could not Subdue his Pride and Vanity.”) This becomes poignant in relation to the slaves Jefferson owned. Kidd notes that Read More ›
Doctors are supposed to live by the Latin phrase generally translated as First, Do No Harm: Primum non nocere. Andrew Scull’s Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (Harvard University Press, 2022) is a history of purported cures for mental illness that have often been worse than the disease. Desperate Remedies is so important and readable that for the first time I’m Read More ›
In Austin, 29 of the 31 days of July featured triple-digit heat. Thus, far be it from me to joke about global warming concern — but reality makes cutting back on oil and natural gas very difficult. Vaclav Smil in How the World Really Works (Viking, 2022) notes that the best offshore wind turbines generate power only 45 percent of the time. Read More ›