William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming,” written a hundred years ago, sounds today like prophecy: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the…

Charles O’Neill’s poem, set to the tune of “The Banks of the Mourlough Side” and titled, “The Foggy Dew,” speaks of England calling young men to come serve in World War I in order that “small nations might be free.” (Whether Luke Kelly or Paddy Reilly sang it better is…

The Texas law banning abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy has been the center of discussions across the political spectrum in the media, social and establishment, and among activists since taking effect at the start of this month, especially as the U.S. Supreme Court is the farthest to…

Politics as practiced in the United States broadly has the character of team sports in which Democratic and Republican voters show concern more for the letter that appears in parentheses after a politician’s name than about policy.This claim will shock many readers on the first pass, but consider the attitudes…

Eddie tensed his muscles, then feeling himself shake, let go. “I’ve told you to be still.” Mr. Lamb lifted the three inch wide leather strop from the side of the barber’s chair. “I’m not going to tell you again.” Being still was impossible. Eddie glanced from the bottles on the…

Anyone who tells you that writing is easy wants to relieve you of your money — or doesn’t object to the production of drivel. Writing is a kind of blood sacrifice, an act of pulling out a line of words from the mind of the writer and affixing it to…

The contemporary American cliché holds that we are a U-shaped country with two teams, the right and the left, facing each other across a widening gulf. After years of having Donald Trump’s bloviations on the political stage, going back in recent memory to his attention-seeking attacks on Barack Obama’s birth…

The Wild West, along with the stories of the Bible, is a defining mythology of the United States — of America even before our founding as an independent nation. Many of the people who immigrated here came because they were forced or because of their desperate circumstances in their homelands…

According to gun control advocates, it is pointless for Americans to own rifles like the AR-15, since owners could never realistically defeat the U.S. military with personal small arms — though they do not often know that word and instead refer to such weapons as toys. …