June 2007 -- The April 16 massacre on the campus of Virginia Tech by a lone gunman has become another bloodstained entry in the ever-expanding ledger of mass murders, here and abroad. Headlines about slaughters in schools, post offices, and other public places blend in with daily news reports of terrorist assaults worldwide on civilians, reports so frequent and ghastly that eventually, unavoidably, they leave us numb.
The Music Never Ends. Featuring Clint Eastwood, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Martin Scorsese, Arthur Penn, Bill
Lee Child is the bestselling author of what Publisher’s Weekly calls “arguably today’s finest thriller series.” Its huge, and hugely popular
As redemption tales, boxing movies more than hold their own alongside war pictures, Bible epics, and tough-guy teachers who turn around
When I’m with friends, a favorite party drinking game is watching “Behind the Music” on VH1. The show usually profiles some graying rock
Clint Eastwood is arguably our greatest living motion picture director. Thirty-five years after his directorial debut in the Hitchcock
Critics are of two sorts, it has been said: Those who make you want to read the work they are analyzing; and those who make you want to
July/August 2007 -- In recent columns and articles, I have found it useful to differentiate between bourgeois individualism and Romantic
Who really wants to see another feel-good movie about a tough educator who takes on both the most violent juvenile delinquents and “the
In the first chapter of his eleventh bestseller, Bad Luck and Trouble, nameless men hover over the California desert in a Bell 222 helicopte
In 1969, after working as a high school intern at Goddard Space Flight Center on the Apollo 11 moon landing, I became an astronomy major in
The institutionalized discrimination against women and religious minorities, the denial of the freedom of conscience, the deeply rooted
December 2007 -- The first question to ask upon starting up a vehicle should be: “Where are the brakes?” The first question to ask upon
December 2007 -- As the story is told, a scientist was discussing with the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand how her vision of a laissez-faire society would affect scientific projects. She explained that all such projects (apart those undertaken for the limited functions of government) would have to be privately funded, either through corporate research-and-development departments or through foundations.
January/February 2007 -- In her famous speech at the 1984 Republican convention, the late UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick famously attacked those whose reflexive reaction to anything bad happening anywhere on earth was to “blame America first.”
January/February 2007 -- Rigidity is the besetting sin of old age, as zealotry is of youth and cynicism of maturity. That is why, having embarked on my sixtieth year to heaven, I accepted Robert Bidinotto’s offer to write a regular commentary column for The New Individualist. It gives me a motive to survey the passing scene, not just to proclaim what is good and true and beautiful (everyone in the Information Age does that), but to reflect critically on the lifelong beliefs and attitudes by which I have typically formed such judgments.
January/February 2007 -- Will Robert Gates change anti-terrorism tactics? The Sentinel is informed by associates of incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates that in the ongoing war against Islamist terrorism, he will depart from past policy of drawing clear moral lines of “good” versus “evil,” and instead approach the war with crafty pragmatism—perhaps even blurring clear lines between ally and enemy.
The legendary Billy Wilder is my all-time favorite director. Many friends and those who read my reviews wrongly assume that Alfred Hitchcock is, and that’s understandable. No other director, before or since Hitch, has had as intuitive a grasp of film as a visual medium, or of how to use not only the camera but also the editing to tell a story.
What is the importance, to an individualist, of his people, his culture, his nation, and his country—and what, for an individualist, is the importance of the future of those things?
