Nic Rowan

3 days ago | theamericanconservative.com | Nic Rowan

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... A few months ago, President Donald Trump made passing reference in a long address before Congress to Lesotho—“a country nobody has ever heard of.” His remark stuck in my mind, not just because I have heard of Lesotho, but because I have been there. Well, sort of. I have never actually traveled to the landlocked country completely encircled by South Africa and recognized as a sovereign state by the United States since 1966.

1 week ago | theamericanconservative.com | Nic Rowan

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Let it never be said again that Washington, DC is a city without any native culture. The fact that its professional football team, against all odds, is at last returning to the site of RFK Memorial Stadium puts that myth to rest. The Commanders may have shed their true name, but they have regained their old city. That the team is returning from the suburbs at all is incredible. The trend runs almost exclusively in the other direction.

2 weeks ago | theamericanconservative.com | Nic Rowan

Culture One Half-Tipsy Yank with a Typewriter F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby at 100. Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Shirley Hazzard once observed that at a certain age memory protects one from the burden of experience. A vivid scene, with the interval of several decades, becomes little more than a word, a gesture, perhaps the way the light fell on a certain afternoon long ago.

1 month ago | theamericanconservative.com | Nic Rowan

Art The Sit-down Comic A new exhibition on Franz Kafka misses the point. Featured in the May/June 2025 issue Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... When David Foster Wallace popularized the idea at the turn of this century that Franz Kafka was a funny man, he probably did not know that he was inaugurating a major revisionist project.

2 months ago | thedispatch.com | Nick Catoggio |Claude S. Fischer |Daniel N. Gullotta |Nic Rowan

America’s uncertain foreign policy. Published March 10, 2025 This weekend, for the first time, I felt a twinge of nostalgia for the Trump 2016 campaign. Or a moment from the campaign, anyway. Whenever candidate Donald Trump talked about building a border wall and took flak for it from Mexico or the Democrats or whoever, he’d bellow, “The wall just got 10 feet higher!”In the end, the wall did not get 10 feet higher.