Joseph Bottum
Free Beacon
Hot Springs, SD, United States
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Past articles by Joseph:
Oh, the Place You'll Go!
Joseph Bottum was commissioned this year to write the Phi Beta Kappa poem, an annual part of spring graduation events at Princeton University. "Autumn" is the final section, in blank-verse pentameter, of "Four Seasons," the poem he read at the induction ceremonies for Princeton's new Phi Beta Kappa members on May 23—which he used to remind the graduating students not of their great futures but… → Read More
P.J. O’Rourke (1947–2022)
The Right writes better than the Left, in the aggregate. That is, if aggregation were something you could get writers to do. Generally speaking, you can’t. They’re not team players. Still, if you corralled enough conservative writers to put together a ballclub, it would be, say, the 1981 Dodgers: Solid, long-lasting infield. Sharp pitching. Good bench. Got the job done. But lacking the… → Read More
Review: ‘Cold Warriors’ by Duncan White
When he fled Spain in the summer of 1937, one step ahead of the secret police, George Orwell lost his personal copy of a pamphlet by Stalin. → Read More
Review: Roger L. Simon’s ‘The GOAT’
It was three or four years ago that the word GOAT finally gnawed through the fence of minor sports blogs and started gamboling in greener fields. → Read More
Review: 'It Came From Something Awful'
We're now a good 40 years into the computer revolution, and maybe the best way to understand what's happened to us is to construct a scatter plot → Read More
Review: 'For the Good of the Game'
All right, let's get the bad news out of the way, right off the bat: This is a disaster of a book, by a man who was a disaster at his job. → Read More
Review: 'The Vagabonds'
We live like kings these days, even while we bemoan our state like beggars. Generally speaking, the members of the American middle class possess a material splendor that would put to shame an 8th-century chieftain. Or a 12th-century princeling. Or even an early 20th-century industrialist. → Read More
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
"Beyond the circle of the moon," Aristotle observed, "there is no evil." It's one of those curious lines that reveal the divide between what we once were and what we now are—a divide marked by that almost over-famous "one small step" Neil Armstrong took on July 20, 1969, as he stepped out of the lunar module and walked upon the moon. → Read More
Killer Instinct
25 years later, can we separate O.J. the athlete from O.J. the murderer? → Read More
Herman Wouk, 1915-2019
Herman Wouk was a good writer. He could spin a compelling tale, and he could embroider some serious ideas onto that tale. His prose was clean, and his characters recognizable. But he wasn't Proust. Or Tolstoy. Or Saul Bellow. He was just good, producing—with The Caine Mutiny (1951), for example—solid American middlebrow work much better than, say, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit… → Read More
No Thanks
The negative reviews of Bret Easton Ellis's new book are almost enough to make one want to defend it. Perversity may be underrated as a motive for humans → Read More
The Boys of Summer
Tthe season turns at last from winter to provide us what we are always given, this time of year: the cloying metaphors of baseball columns. → Read More
The Wound in American Education — Review: recent debate on free speech in the academy
The failure of American colleges to promote free speech and intellectual diversity is like an open wound. It stains the imagination, obscuring paths of investigation with a sick puss. It drains the vitality of thought, leaving the mind weakened. And it strains intellectual discourse—the Socratic ideal of conversation—by making us fearful, anxious, and self-censoring. → Read More
Mutiny, Sedition, and Treachery — Review: 'The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington' by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch
Review: 'The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington' by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch → Read More
Home for Christmas
You remember the scene of the schoolchildren—field-mice schoolchildren, naturally—caroling in "Dulce Domum," the Christmas chapter in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows? → Read More
Bah, Humbug
It might be worth remembering an indisputable truth about Christmas art: The single most successful bit of seasonal fiction is A Christmas Carol. → Read More
Greatness in History — Review: 'Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster' by H.W. Brands
It's hardly surprising news—more of a book-review section's perennial subhead—to say that the University of Texas professor H.W. Brands has published a new book on American history. The man is a machine of popular historical writing, and his works appear at a rate only slightly faster than the average person can read. Thus, now as always, Brands has published a new book—this one called Heirs of… → Read More
Too Little, Too Late
According to a recent report in the New York Times, the celebrated French postmodern thinker Bruno Latour is back at age 71 → Read More
Not Our Kind: The Problem of Book Reviewing Through Tribal Identification
So, here's a story. You probably saw it in the news, in the dueling op-eds, in the outrage that swirled around it. But the story is still worth revisiting as a microcosm, a little diorama, of our cultural situation. This past July, The Nation published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee called "How-To," narrated by a panhandler offering advice to other panhandlers, explaining how to gin up sympathy… → Read More
Mere Creature of the State
It all starts with a good dose of anti-Catholicism. In 1922, voters in Oregon passed a referendum that banned private education. → Read More