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Mar 1, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Helen Andrews |Paul Griffiths |Peter Hitchens |Christopher Caldwell
Most Americans, I think, fancy themselves collectors of something or other. It is the natural consequence of our superabundant material culture; with the specter of famine having shuffled almost out of our living memory, people are free to devote a decent portion of their earnings to whim. Collecting is just rationalized whim.
I am no exception.
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Feb 2, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Christopher Caldwell
Centuries from now, a heroic archeologist may emerge to unlock for his civilization the mysteries of ours. Imagine a future equivalent of the nineteenth-century linguist Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. Suddenly it was possible to understand the belief system of ancient Egypt, and the social system that arose from it.
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Jan 10, 2024 | 
illuminem.com | Christopher Caldwell
“There is no science…that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C. Show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”I suppose it is incumbent upon any host to ensure that a good party has its entertainment. Even still, Sultan Al Jaber left a few jaws on the floor with this one.
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Dec 27, 2023 | 
illuminem.com | Christopher Caldwell
Being a climate tech CEO is a glamorous lifestyle. But amidst all the red carpets and parties, the test-driving of yachts and naming of buildings – that public face of climate mitigation we all recognise from the magazines – I know some of you may want a peek behind the velvet curtain. What is it really like, starting your own clean energy company? Where is the story we don’t get to see? Today is your lucky day.
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Aug 31, 2023 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Allen C. Guelzo |Christopher Caldwell |Douglas A. Jeffrey |Hadley Arkes
Brexit had a theme song, but it wasn’t about Britannia ruling the waves or a land of hope and glory. It was about a lark. This particular lark was The Lark Ascending, a 13-minute musical essay for solo violin and a small chamber orchestra. No drum-set thumping, no karaoke microphone.
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Aug 28, 2023 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Christopher Caldwell |Glenn Ellmers |Christopher Flannery |Hadley Arkes
Download Of the questions that arose last July when the Supreme Court abolished affirmative action for college admissions, the one that most riled the program’s defenders was: why now? In her truculent and powerful dissent in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Justice Sonia Sotomayor described the decision as having been handed down “without any new factual or legal justification.”She seemed to have a point.
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Aug 2, 2023 | 
newstatesman.com | Christopher Caldwell
Mere days after Milan Kundera’s death in France at the age of 94, the ghost of the Czech-born novelist was spotted on the front lines of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Writing in the German weekly Die Zeit under the title “The Man Who Knew the Russians”, Adam Soboczynski claimed the Ukrainian struggle as one Kundera would approve of: “a battle for enlightened central Europe against the irrationality of the east, comparable to the uprisings of Hungary and Poland in the time of communism”.
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Jun 26, 2023 | 
linkedin.com | Christopher Caldwell
Unique. Unprecedented. The greatest challenge in human history. One of the hardest things about facing up to #climatechange is the feeling that we are in uncharted territory. But we aren’t flying completely blind. As Mark Twain said ‘History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes’. Are there climate lessons to be found in our long history of blowing things up and putting them back together again?
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May 31, 2023 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Christopher Caldwell |Jesse Merriam |Carl R. Trueman |Wilfred M. McClay
Forty-nine minutes into a championship-round rugby game in the French city of Agen one night this spring, the lights went out. The stadium and surrounding neighborhoods were plunged into darkness. Players collided on the field. Patrons groped their way out of restrooms. For half an hour the stands glowed with cell-phone screens, as fans sought to figure out whether a generator had burst or a terrorist had struck. They discovered that this was not an ordinary blackout.
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Mar 27, 2023 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Michael Knowles |William Voegeli |Leonard Sax |Christopher Caldwell
Conservatives love little more than to lament the death of the West. Each year brings new books on the subject, almost all soon forgotten. A handful endure: Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1923) comes to mind, as does Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn To Decadence (2000), and now, I’d wager, Spencer Klavan’s How To Save The West.
