The American Conservative Culture

Culture Au Revoir to the Good Life in Paris The City of Light is not what it once was—nor are the Americans visiting it. TakiMag Bereft of air conditioning, Americans in Paris last week cursed the locals for their antediluvian ways. Parisians did not exactly take it with a wry Gallic smile. Stomach-churning entitlement and sheer effrontery, they answered I w

Culture The 84 Club  RIP George Rowlett. For two superstitious reasons, I believe that I shall die at the age of 84.  The first is that 84 is the mean age of my parents at death. Such a mean is only a rough guide to one’s longevity, of course; if it were more exact, the life expectancy of populations could not change, but history demonstrates that it does cha

Culture Gordon Wood, the Bard of the American Revolution The eminent historian died last week. The preeminent historian of the American Founding, Gordon Wood, died last week as the result of a traffic accident. Wood, a long-time professor at Brown University, had a profound and prolific effect upon the historiography of the American Revolution and the Founding in an

Culture The Little Auteurist  From an early age, I’ve interpreted movies as mysterious manifestations of one person’s consciousness. Dear readers of TAC: Does anyone else remember the VHS cassette tape of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that was accented with a horizontal green strip across its top? That I can distinctly recall it confirms both my aged stat

Culture Among the Moguls VMFA’s finest display on one of the most elite empires.  (Photo by Pallava Bagla/Getty Images) “India’s Great Mughals: Art, Power, and Opulence,” currently showing at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, is a great and rare exhibition that will be hard to replicate in the near future for various sociological reasons.

Culture Springsteen—and America—Have Lost the Spirit of Unifying Rebellion Privileged celebrities exploit partisan outrage and pose as martyrs. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images) Stephen Colbert is off the air. I waited to write this to make sure that our democracy, despite warnings from Colbert and his regular guest Bruce Springsteen, remains intac

Culture Ohio Water Torture Bad as Chinese schools can be, there is something more sinister in the U.S. Two unrelated events collided recently: President Donald Trump went to China, and I learned that the boy who bullied me in high school died. The two events connected in my mind in an unexpected way. The media, bullies themselves, of course found the China trip la

Culture Generation AI Has Its Doubts Young Americans raised alongside artificial intelligence are growing uneasy about the future it promises. Gloria Caulfield had expected a different reaction.  Speaking at the University of Central Florida’s commencement ceremonies last weekend, Caulfield, the vice president of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development,

Culture In Search of Undead Malls The sacred endures, but all things profane pass away. (Photo by Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images) Last month, when I was in the Washington, DC, area for a week, there were two places I knew I wanted to make the time to see: the Washington National Cathedral and the Tysons Galleri

Culture More Sport, Less War The Olympics should be a unifying occasion, not an outlet for political acrimony. The vexed question of the role of politics in sport has surfaced yet again at the Winter Olympics in Milan. The Ukrainian skeleton skier Vladyslav Heraskevych wanted to wear a “helmet of remembrance” displaying 24 fellow athletes killed during the Russian in

Culture The End of the War-Hero Writer Expect no great man of letters to emerge from the bloodied fields of Iran. TakiMag Modern warfare does not a good movie make. Nor a good book, I suspect. Drones zipping about like flies and being chased by other drones and interceptors are not the same as John Wayne charging with his Marines onto the beach at Iwo Jima, no

Culture Should We Build a National Women’s Museum? A centralized museum in Washington is liable to be excessively ideological and historically garbled. On February 10, the House Committee on Natural Resources held a legislative hearing on the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. The Women’s Museum itself was authorized in 2020, but Congress still needs to aut

Culture Taki Among the Royals The stupidity and sleaze of the British great and good are breaking into the open. TakiMag

Culture Very Early It Was Too Late The ghosts of ghosts are the only remains of yesteryear’s glamor. TakiMag

Culture Dress for the Weather Wearing windbreakers during winter suggests a certain disconnection from reality.

Culture The Tender Mercy of Robert Duvall  From Mac Sledge to Col. Kilgore, Duvall’s characters embodied the soul of our nation. Back in the old America, where country music still mattered and real men donned decent blue jeans and 10-gallon hats and sang until their hearts turned blue, Robert Duvall crooned beneath the heavens in front of a 40-foot wide Lonestar

Culture Taki’s Love Letters In the time of text messages, romance has fallen on hard times. TakiMag (Arthur Grimm/United Archives via Getty Images) In today’s cynical, unromantic times, it has gone with the wind, replaced by coarse texts and other such vulgarities. I am, of course, referring to the love letter, once upon a time the gold extrac

Culture The Unscratchable Itch Human nature’s affinity for complaint just won’t go away. TakiMag Without complaint, journalists would have no work—and, come to think of it, daily conversation would be much impoverished, if not stopped altogether. We are enjoined to count our blessings, of course, but as La Rochefoucauld pointed out more than three centuries ag

Culture Public Speaking Who needs elocution lessons when you can go to the movies?