History

Finding music that conveys struggle and eventual triumph is difficult because, to depict true triumph, one has to study it intensely and perhaps experience it firsthand. But such music is a wonderful tool of inspiration and empowerment.

In Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explore the connections between such phenomena as “shoutdowns,” “canceling,” and identity politics on the one hand and the philosophical doctrines taught in America’s universities on the other.

I once found it difficult to relate to the excitement travelers expressed at walking the same streets their heroes did centuries earlier. Not so after walking through cities where a hero of mine revolutionized art and science.

The fundamental cause of the atrocity on 9/11 was acceptance of faith as a means of knowledge. This cause set all of the other, derivative causes in motion.

Exemplars of Enlightenment thinking, Deborah Feldman, Yeonmi Park, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali escaped oppression in pursuit of freedom, rational inquiry, and the life these values make possible. They are models for us all.

Keats’s life was cruelly short and marred by tragedy, unrequited love, and ill health. But his frail body held a formidable soul. That soul lives on through his poetry and inspires us to make the most of our own opportunities for joy.

The bravery of today’s Hong Kong protestors is nothing short of incredible. Confronting the massive forces of the world’s largest and most bloodstained dictatorship, they stand for freedom against overwhelming odds. Yet they remain undaunted.

Sandefur’s well-trained and wide-ranging mind, brought to bear on a subject of deep personal interest, has delivered prose that is both graceful and direct. What emerges from his biographical portrait is the closest any of us now can get to one of the great humanistic minds of the previous century.

In the tradition of Ayn Rand’s essay “For the New Intellectual,” Osborne explains that knowing the history of how we got where we are today can teach us what we need to do to reestablish America’s original spirit—and the freedoms that flow from it.

In this excellent video, Timothy Sandefur tells the story of the great American hero Frederick Douglass, one of history’s most influential advocates of freedom.