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1 week ago | 
newcriterion.com | Mark Judge |Robert Erickson |Andrew Shea |Douglas Murray
In 2020 a brilliant novel was published called The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures, by Jennifer Hofmann. Kirkus called it “a remarkable first novel that reads like the work of a seasoned pro.”Despite great reviews, Standardization did not hit the bestseller lists. At the time of publication, the country was focused on the George Floyd riots and the fallout from COVID. Still, for those of us who read the book, it left a lasting impression.
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1 week ago | 
newcriterion.com | Brian Anderson |Andrew Shea |Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball
Show AllShow ArticlesShow DispatchShow TNC+ MultimediaAll Authors, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Abel, LionelAbowitz, RichardAdams, HarryAdams, J.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Heather Mac Donald |Douglas Murray |Daniel Oliver |Roger Kimball
Rankings are often controversial. For example, the latest Michelin Guide considers the best two restaurants in Washington, D.C., to be minibar and Jônt, whereas the magazine Washingtonian chooses Albi and Dо̄gon. And while U.S. News & World Report ranks Princeton the country’s number one “national university,” the QS World University Rankings call MIT the top institution of higher education in the world.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
Volatility today leads us to look at the foundations of the international world that is now being transformed. The key decade was the 1940s, the period of the establishment of American superpower status, the destruction of the German, Italian, and Japanese empires, the expansion of the Soviet empire, and the Communist conquest of China.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
Employed in my youth at John Wanamaker’s department store, an institution in Philadelphia until it disappeared, I was sometimes cheered by encountering employees who told me of their fascinations with history. One such colleague I remember was a burly black shelf-stocker. “My girl,” he told me, “is Queen Victoria. She got her family on thrones all over Europe.”So she did, to the point that she was considered the “grandmother of Europe,” through marriages rather than military conquests.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
“Modern American conservatism has two founding fathers: Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr.” The description is Charles Krauthammer’s. There are other paeans.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
In 1874, the eighteen-year-old John Singer Sargent and his American expatriate parents moved to Paris, from Florence, where he was born in 1856, partly in quest of better art teaching for the preternaturally talented teenager. Sargent spent the next decade based in the French capital, until he moved to London, where he lived until his death in 1925.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 24, 2025, honoring Heather Mac Donald with the twelfth Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society. I would like to thank The New Criterion for this generous honor—hugely undeserved, I would say, but who am I to question Editor and Publisher Roger Kimball? Throughout 2024, you see, Roger spoke confidently about the outcome of the November election.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
With an immense literary production and his remarkable public presence, Victor Hugo (1802–85) remains best known in the Anglophone world for his novels. But he was also a poet, playwright, politician, literary critic, and—perhaps least known—a visual artist. One of the foremost figures of Romanticism, with a reputation owing as much to his complex character as to the formal aspects of his work, Hugo’s presence towered over European cultural life for much of the nineteenth century.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Roger Kimball |Andrew Shea |James Tuttleton
Charles Dickens, that quintessential Victorian novelist, was actually born seven years before Princess Victoria, in 1812—for comparison, Madison was then in the White House—and was already twenty-five when she became queen, having lived through the last years of George III and the entire reigns of George IV and William IV. He was an infant at the time of the Luddite riots and three years old when the Battle of Waterloo was fought.
