First Things

Life expectancy has increased in the U.S., rising a decade since 1950 and three decades since 1900. Good thing, right? Not altogether, argues Samuel Moyn in his recent Gerontocracy in America. While the modern world celebrated youth, innovation, and novelty, we extended life spans and so inadvertently robbed the young of their chance to shine. An aging society preserves instead of progressing.

Leslie Poles Hartley famously dubbed the past “a foreign country.” This summer, for the first time, I sensed that the present can be one too. My annual visit to the land of my childhood and youth exposed me to a culture very different from the one that nurtured me.

Around the time nineteen-year-old Alice began cutting ties with her family, she announced on social media that she was bisexual and grateful for her “found family.” The phrase was new to her parents, Greg and Tammy, but the sentiment wasn’t. Alice had acquired a new group of friends and had become intensely political. She chopped her hair, developed a hard sartorial edge, and became easily angered and agitated by her parents and siblings. They tiptoed around her.

In the ​latest installment of the ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein, Bishop Robert Barron joins in to discuss his new film, Heaven in Stone and Glass. Watch the trailer here. The conversation is embedded below. For your long-term convenience, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Darializa Avila Chevalier—upper Manhattan’s new congressional candidate, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and endorsed by Mamdani—is shaping up to be one of the most dangerous students I overlapped with at Columbia University. Although she graduated from our alma mater in 2016, she later returned to become a key presence on campus as a leader of the Gaza encampment, which took place during my senior year.

For conservative Christian nerds it is a hammer blow. Imagine the grief and shock if Taylor Swift were to announce that she was giving up songwriting to focus on her acting career, and you will have some faint notion of the impact of Ross Douthat’s departure from the New York Times in order to become a TV correspondent at the new Bari Weiss–run 60 Minutes.

The death of Sir Anthony Kenny on August 3, at the age of ninety-five, broke one of the last direct connections to an unparalleled period in the history of philosophy in Britain, and to an era when the humanities consisted of disciplines rather than “studies”; when liberal arts academics were to varying degrees familiar with classical culture, Judeo-Christian Scripture, the high points of literature, and visual arts and music; and when university education was conceived as an introduction to...

On today’s episode, writer Kelly Chapman joins Virginia and Germán. According to the discourse, it’s fashionable to be religious. There’s also a lot of talk about returning to traditional modes of life—emphasis on getting married, having kids, and going to church. All of this is transgressive according to the liberal default of our wider society, but there’s something lost in all of this talk.

The Lost Boys, a Broadway musical adapted from the 1980s vampire flick, opens with a flickering specter. A doomed cop is searching a condemned warehouse when a TV suddenly brightens. On the screen is Ronald Reagan, delivering a Christmas speech on family values: It’s in the family that we must all learn the fundamental lesson of life. Right and wrong, respect for others, self-discipline, the importance of knowledge, and, yes, a sense of our own self-worth.

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