Human flourishing

December 31, 2021

Resolve this New Year to visit Billy Wilder’s The Apartment

Christmas movies tend to be sentimental, to emphasize the struggles that define our society and our souls, but ultimately they are hopeful and even joyful. Humanity triumphs at the end of the story—for evidence, read my series of essays on The Bishop’s Wife, The Shop Around the Corner, Christmas in Connecticut, and Miracle on 34th Street. Continue Reading...

December 17, 2021

Christmas in Connecticut: the holiday movie that promises you can’t have it all

I continue my series on old Hollywood Christmas movies. After a movie about church as a community, The Bishop’s Wife(1947), and the workplace as a community, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), I turn to a movie about family, the smallest but most natural community: Christmas in Connecticut (1945), starring Barbara Stanwyck, one of the great Hollywood stars, Sydney Greenstreet (the Fat Man from The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca), and Dennis Morgan. Continue Reading...

December 08, 2021

Christmas 1991: The birth of freedom in the death of the evil empire

“You can have a very quiet Christmas evening,” wished Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to American President George H. W. Bush. “I am saying good-bye and shaking your hand.” It was a long-distance handshake, done via telephone. Continue Reading...

December 07, 2021

The problem of the atheist economist

There is much in the classical liberal economist that I find attractive. By classical liberal, I do not mean the sort of political liberalism that defaults to certain presumptions of big government. Continue Reading...

December 02, 2021

Give thanks for economic efficiency

I have never been to an event or cocktail party where raising the issue of economic efficiency engendered a particularly emotional discussion or any level of enthusiasm. I have never been to a Thanksgiving dinner table where someone gave thanks for GDP growth. Continue Reading...

November 29, 2021

The forgotten victims of COVID-19: 7 groups punished by lockdowns

COVID-19 is the most deadly global pandemic since the 1918 influenza outbreak, claiming more than 5 million lives worldwide and counting. Well over 700,000 of these deaths occurred in the United States, which is comparable to the number of lives lost in the American Civil War. Continue Reading...

November 23, 2021

Planes, Trains, and Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a distinctively American holiday, unlike Christmas, and yet we have very few popular movies about it. Maybe this is a good thing—it’s a family affair, not necessarily a public spectacle. Continue Reading...

November 15, 2021

Does Hollywood love beauty more than profit?

Beauty has the power to spellbind everyone—the proof is Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. His last three movies, Dune (2021), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Arrival (2016), have earned him a reputation as a visionary and a sensitive director, despite science fiction as his genre, which normally is considered either too sophisticated for the broad audience to follow or too simplistic to be worth attention, instantly forgotten. Continue Reading...

October 30, 2021

Discovering human dignity in Villeneuve’s Dune

With an opening weekend revenue of $41 million, director Denis Villeneuve’s Part 1 of his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic Dune has succeeded in getting Warner Bros. to greenlight Part 2, set for a 2023 release. Continue Reading...

October 26, 2021

Beyond material prosperity, economic freedom fosters virtue and relationship

In defending the cause of economic freedom, it can be easy to focus only on the material fruits, whether it be new innovations and efficiencies or the ongoing expansion of opportunity and abundance. Continue Reading...

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