Patrick Keeney

4 days ago | newenglishreview.org | Patrick Keeney

By Patrick KeeneyIn his trenchant essay, “The Average College Student Is Illiterate,” Hilarius Bookbinder sounds the alarm over the precipitous decline in student literacy. It is a sobering account. Bookbinder (a pseudonym) teaches in the humanities and draws upon years of classroom experience. He observes that many of his students are functionally illiterate. They are unable to engage with serious adult literature and often find the very act of reading tedious.

5 days ago | theepochtimes.com | Patrick Keeney

CommentaryIn his trenchant essay, “The Average College Student Is Illiterate,” Hilarius Bookbinder sounds the alarm over the precipitous decline in student literacy. It is a sobering account. Bookbinder (a pseudonym) teaches in the humanities and draws upon years of classroom experience. He observes that many of his students are functionally illiterate in that they are unable to engage with serious adult literature, and often find the very act of reading tedious.

1 week ago | newenglishreview.org | Patrick Keeney

And that, perhaps, is the point. In the Canada imagined by Justin Trudeau — a self-declared “post-national” state with no core identity, no binding mythology, and no shared memory — Mark Carney is not merely a suitable leader; he is its perfect heir. He embodies the very ethos of the post-national project: technocratic rather than democratic, globalist rather than patriotic, managerial rather than visionary.

2 weeks ago | newenglishreview.org | Patrick Keeney

By Patrick KeeneyThe American actor and director George Clooney recently appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes to promote a new Broadway adaptation of his 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck. Both the stage play and the original film chronicle the story of Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS newsman who, in the 1950s, challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy during the height of the Red Scare and helped define television journalism as a force capable of speaking truth to power.

3 weeks ago | newenglishreview.org | Patrick Keeney

By Patrick KeeneyIt’s curious how the places we love—even briefly—leave their mark. When they suffer, something in us stirs. When I heard about the earthquake that struck Burma, it felt less like a news event and more like a terrible tremor through memory itself. For me, it was not merely a natural disaster, but a kind of metaphor.