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  • ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’: Chesterton’s Beautiful Nightmare

    ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’: Chesterton’s Beautiful Nightmare0

    The endlessly quotable G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was many things in his day: essayist, poet, radio broadcaster, art critic, and novelist. His most popular novel (and my personal favorite) was his novella The Man Who Was Thursday. The book involves rival poets (who serve as archetypes) as they encounter a ring of anarchists who are named

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  • ‘The Last Jedi’ is Awful and Disney is Ruining Star Wars

    ‘The Last Jedi’ is Awful and Disney is Ruining Star Wars0

    In 1964, shortly after the release of Disney’s adaptation of P. L. Travers’ charming 1934 book Mary Poppins, J.R.R. Tolkien sent a letter to one Miss J.L. Curry of Stanford University. In the letter, Tolkien complained about the corrupting influence Walt Disney’s movies had on literary works. “Though in most of the ‘pictures’ proceeding from his

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  • ‘The Last Jedi’ and the Politicization of Storytelling

    ‘The Last Jedi’ and the Politicization of Storytelling0

    There’s been a disturbance in the franchise: Ambivalence, rather than anticipation, has characterized the online response to Disney’s announcement of the deluge of new Star Wars projects we are to be saturated with over the next several years. And while the trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story (scheduled for May) was expected to be

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  • ‘The Hobbit’ Turns 80

    ‘The Hobbit’ Turns 800

    “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” When Tolkien wrote these words, which would become one of the most famous and most memorable opening sentences in all of literature, he could not have known what literary power would be unleashed by his creation of the diminutive hole-dwelling creature, Bilbo Baggins. This year,

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  • ‘The Anxious Generation’ Has the Worst of Both Worlds

    ‘The Anxious Generation’ Has the Worst of Both Worlds0

    In a blockbuster Atlantic piece, “The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood,” my Let Grow co-founder Jonathan Haidt says our culture is getting it all wrong when it comes to kids: We “underprotect” them in the virtual world and overprotect them in the real one. That’s the worst of both worlds if we want to

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  • ‘Summer Slide’ Solutions Focus on the Wrong Problem

    ‘Summer Slide’ Solutions Focus on the Wrong Problem1

    Now that schools are out across the country, headlines abound regarding the seemingly inevitable summer learning loss, or “summer slide.” The National Summer Learning Association, which promotes summer programming, particularly for underprivileged youth, reports that teachers spend much time re-teaching content in the fall that kids supposedly learned the prior spring. Summer learning loss is

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