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2 weeks 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.
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1 month 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.
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1 month ago | 
thedispatch.com | Kevin Williamson |Claude S. Fischer |Daniel N. Gullotta |Nic Rowan
Justice Amy Coney Barrett and ‘loyalty.’ Published March 10, 2025 • Updated March 9, 2025 C. S. Lewis argued that every particular sinful disposition is related to “some good impulse of which it is the excess or perversion.” The appetite for justice becomes wrath, the desire to achieve material prosperity becomes avarice or envy, the normal sexual drive becomes an abnormal one, the impulse toward achievement or excellence becomes pride, the mother of sins.
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1 month ago | 
thedispatch.com | Victoria Holmes |Daniel N. Gullotta |Nic Rowan |Alastair Roberts
Published March 9, 2025 Last Easter, more than 1,300 people joined the Catholic Church in Washington, D.C.—many of them young conservatives. With Catholicism gaining influence in right-wing politics and leaders such as Vice President J.D. Vance embracing the faith, is Catholicism becoming the backbone of the conservative movement?
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1 month ago | 
thedispatch.com | Nic Rowan |Michael Reneau |Scott Salvato |Victoria Holmes
For most Catholics in late medieval England, confession was an annual affair undertaken during Lent. Lines were long, and priests and penitents alike were impatient to get it over with. “Pastoral realism therefore demanded that the confession be kept within manageable dimensions,” wrote the Irish historian Eamon Duffy in 1992. “In a time-honoured formula the penitent was to be brief, be brutal, be gone.”James M.
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1 month ago | 
theamericanconservative.com | Nic Rowan
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The question of DC statehood is once again up for debate, not that anyone is taking it too seriously. This time it was provoked by Donald Trump. In his usual offhand way, the president suggested last week that because there is “too much crime, too much graffiti, too many tents on the lawns” in Washington, control over the city should revert to the Congress and the federal government.
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2 months ago | 
theamericanconservative.com | Nic Rowan
Politics
Delaware Faces Difficult Assisted Suicide Battle
The new governor promises to sign a controversial bill shot down last year.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Last August, John Carney, then the governor of Delaware, considered a bill that he knew he couldn’t sign in good conscience. It was the state’s End-of-Life Options Act, which had been circulating among lawmakers in Dover for nearly a decade.
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2 months ago | 
theamericanconservative.com | Peter Tonguette |Nic Rowan
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... All sensible and right-minded people can agree that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is in need of a serious infusion of greatness, but what about the Kennedy Center Honors? Yes, President Donald Trump has made a compelling case for the paucity of good, wholesome, or even mildly edifying programming at the performing-arts complex on the Potomac River.
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2 months ago | 
theamericanconservative.com | Matthew Walther |Nic Rowan
Culture
Close Encounters
What is an alien, anyway?
Featured in the February 2025 issue
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... A few weeks ago I was asked whether I would like to join various “experts” in submitting a question to Robert Kennedy, Jr. in advance of his confirmation hearing in the Senate. Finding the offer flattering, I suggested asking what RFK thinks about the use of laptops in elementary school classrooms.
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2 months ago | 
theamericanconservative.com | Nic Rowan
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... When I saw President Donald Trump’s announcement on Friday that he is cleaning house at the Kennedy Center and naming himself chairman of the board of trustees, I couldn’t help but smile. The thought of a man whose temper can only be soothed by the Cats soundtrack imposing a “Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture” on the capital’s largest fine arts center, an “American Jewel,” is highly amusing.
