Discourse Magazine

1 week ago | discoursemagazine.com | Addison Del Mastro

I love figuring out what old buildings used to be. “Informal, hyperlocal history” is a phrase I used in a piece on a curious old building (an old secret military contractor office that later became a print shop), to describe how I think about these stories: What always surprises me a little bit when I go down the rabbit hole digging for information is the sheer number of memories and anecdotes people have about every place under the sun.

1 week ago | discoursemagazine.com | John Mueller

It has often been proposed that a ceasefire should take place in what Donald Trump has aptly labeled the “ridiculous” war in Ukraine. If a ceasefire takes hold and continues, extended negotiations can then be held in comparative quiet to deal with other outstanding issues, including, in particular, the country’s partition. Key to these negotiations would be to take Russia’s security concerns seriously. And connecting Russia to NATO in some way might be helpful in assuaging those concerns.

2 weeks ago | discoursemagazine.com | Jon Gabriel

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “[M]an everywhere appears as a worshiping creature.” This applies not only to the faithful, but to the unbeliever as well. A person who rejects the divine merely redirects his worship to something else: money, politics, ideology, romantic love, knowledge. The list goes on. In a peaceful, prosperous nation, it’s easy to live that way. But what happens when the West’s centuries-long experiment with secularism proves each of these replacement faiths to be tin gods?

3 weeks ago | discoursemagazine.com | Michael Puttre |Michael Puttré

If comedy is harder than dying, as somebody supposedly once said, satire is the hardest subspecies of screen comedy. Satirists not only take on the burden of moral authority in targeting aspects of society perceived as overweening—such as politicians, the military, high finance and Hollywood itself—they must do so with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw. There is nothing duller than broad satire. On the other hand, if a shibboleth is skewered in a theater and nobody buys a ticket, is it still funny?

3 weeks ago | discoursemagazine.com | John Mueller

Lists can be dangerous because they sometimes lull readers into a false sense that they are seeing the totality of something. A case in point is Wikipedia’s tally of “plays with anti-war themes.” It begins with three plays from ancient Greek authors and then skips ahead a few millennia to a largely forgotten British play from 1928, after which there are dozens of entries.