“People hate being made to think,” the educator and classical scholar Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) once said. Laziness of mind is indeed easy to find, even more so today than in her time. It shows up in vapid social media posts, flippant political rhetoric, superficial media coverage, knee-jerk but sanctimonious opinions, and the widespread absence of critical thinking…

Commentary America’s cultural elites have a pathological obsession with equal representation (meaning equal outcomes) in many areas of our society. Countless schools, universities, and corporations now have some sort of diversity and inclusion director, which is just a fancy title for an overpaid activist who helps shape outcomes based on the idea that when equality…

Commentary Identity politics—the formation of exclusive alliances based on racial, religious, ethnic, or social identity—is manifesting in all cultural corners. It has seeped into school curricula and overtaken traditional Western individualism as the new dominant lens for interpreting one’s place in society. Entire university departments have been rededicated to examining so-called intersectionality, defined as the complex way…

Commentary Given the irked and fearful state of the liberal temper at the present time, many people might find it hard to believe that liberalism used to be fun. During the four years of President Donald Trump, liberals were miserable, sinking ever further into resentment and incredulity, a sense of history and America robbing them…

Commentary We belong to each other, and we learn everything worthwhile by submitting to the authority of a tradition we didn’t invent. We don’t make it up from scratch according to our feelings of the moment. In an essay celebrating the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, David Goldman traces the line of piano teachers descending…