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Articles by Alan Wolfe
Polymicrobial Urine Cultures: Reconciling Contamination with the Urobiome while Recognizing the Pathogens
Submitted: 16 February 2025 You are already at the latest version Polymicrobial or mixed urine cultures of more than one predominant microbe confound clinical urinary tract infection diagnosis. The current College of American Pathologists clinical laboratory standard states that a urine sample cultured with more than two isolates with >10,000 colony forming units/ml is to be considered contaminated.
The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (Political Imagination)
Written largely before the recent events in Israel, Shaul Magid’s essays raise some probing questions about the nature of Zionism and its future. Magid, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, aligns himself with a nearly vanished strain of Jewish thought that considers the political goal of Zionism — to establish a Jewish and democratic state — as an impossible contradiction.
Creedal Passions
GETTING ME WRONG Samuel P. Huntington In evaluating a novel, a poem, or a scholarly study, it can be useful and insightful to consider that work in the context of the author's other writings, if those exist. For social science, the relevant questions concern how the recent work embodies continuities or changes from previous works in terms of subject, style, methods of analysis, normative assumptions, arguments, and conclusions.
Economic pieties
Book review of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Topics capitalism | BOOK REVIEW https://mybs.in/2ZbPoEb What does an esoteric concept like Calvinist soteriology have to do with the rise of modern economics? Does laissez-faire have its roots in the arcane Quinquarticular Controversy? Can one find the origins of the welfare state in postmillennialist eschatology? Questions like these, according to the Harvard economist Benjamin M Friedman, are essential to understanding his discipline today.
Libertarianism's Iron Cage
In the past decade, libertarianism in the United States has come in from the cold. Once a fringe political movement associated with cranks, conspiracy theorists, and a few economists, it is now an ascendant force within one of our two major political parties. The change can be measured in the difference between the trajectory of Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who ran for president once as a Libertarian and twice as a Republican, and that of his son Kentucky Sen.
The Unbearable Pointlessness of PowerPoint
Brian Taylor for The Chronicle PowerPoint is everywhere in the contemporary university. And so long as it is, superficiality will eclipse idiosyncratic and original thought. In the academy, PowerPoint originated with the natural sciences. Then it spread to those social sciences such as psychology and economics that deal with large amounts of data or rely on complex mathematical modeling.
Loving the Amish
Patrick Deneen is a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame who is an adherent to a form of conservatism at war with modernity in all its forms. Just to be clear what this means, Deneen’s conservatism has little in common with versions adopted by today’s Republican Party, including, or so I surmise, the Trumpian one.
How the World Sees the Protests
As the turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri, unfolds, questions about the United States’ commitment to human rights are once more headlining news coverage around the world. The uncomfortable international spotlight on such domestic problems should not be surprising. American racial inequality regularly dominated foreign news coverage during the 1950s and 1960s. U.S. policymakers were eventually forced to respond, in part to protect America’s image abroad.
Diaspora is good for the Jews
In the years after World War II, the most important development in the more than two-thousand-year history of the Jewish people took place. I am not referring to Israel’s birth in 1948, significant as that event was. I mean instead that a vibrant, successful, and above all else, secure life has, for the first time ever, become possible in states in which Jews are, and always will be, in the minority.
The Ridiculous Rise of Ayn Rand
When the literary editor of The New Republic asked me to review two new books on Ayn Rand three years ago, I readily agreed. Rand, the Russian-born writer known for her take-no-prisoners defense of capitalism, was beginning to come back into vogue among conservatives, and I recalled hearing that there was a congressman from Wisconsin who was singing her praises and assigning her writings to his staff.
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