Jace Yarbrough: Is America still the home of the brave? There are some good reasons why it shouldn’t be.

Zachary Crippen: Manned space isn’t on the agenda, nation-building has lost its appeal, and huge government programs are hardly conservative. But there are upsides to national goals.

I used to worry that there were weird creatures lurking in my room at night. I avoided stepping on cracks, so as to save my poor mother’s back. But I never believed I would hear a New Yorker say this about a proposed skyscraper: “It’s an abomination.” Or this: “This is the time to call […]

A painful anecdote: I recently re-watched the 2006 German film “The Lives of Others,” and I was moved yet again by its quiet poignancy.  The story is set in Cold War East Germany, where the secret police monitor anyone perceived to be a danger to the party (which, in practice, means anyone the powerful folks […]

Political theory, when it is interesting, deals with issues of human nature and how to organize it. A conservative will often point to the horrific failures of the most idealized systems, precisely because those polities refused to acknowledge human nature. But what happens when the people who make up the polity do change in some […]