2022-05-05 11:49
One of the most stylish of American directors, Michael Mann, who made Heat and The Insider (earning three Oscar nominations), is now producing the HBO series Tokyo Vice and has directed its… Read More
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The PowerBlog is managed by the Acton Institute, a non-profit think tank dedicated to promoting a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.
2022-05-04 12:23
Virtually every sphere of American culture—from the university to the church to the mass media to multinational corporations and Big Tech—has become host to hotly contested debat… Read More
2022-05-03 12:05
Who’s in charge in Hollywood? Surely studio bosses, well-compensated executives, A-list actors, and celebrated writers and directors set the agenda in the American entertainment indust… Read More
2022-04-28 11:44
I will close this series on film noir with Laura, because it’s altogether more beautiful and it has something of a happy ending. In being the most beautiful noir, it also involves the… Read More
2022-04-27 11:51
John Calvin (1509–1564) was a towering figure of the Protestant Reformation. The author of the magisterial Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in numerous editions between… Read More
2022-04-26 11:45
According to an old Hollywood commonplace, nothing can beat the plot of a good sci-fi film when it comes to predicting the future. Many of the promotional taglines that accompany these featu… Read More
2022-04-22 11:29
Love him or hate him, it’s almost impossible to ignore the philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973). Few individuals have drawn out so thoroughly some of the implications of phil… Read More
2022-04-21 11:29
Classic film noir wanted to reveal to America the depth of the problem of ambitious men in a democracy through crime stories—detectives, criminals, and victims caught in the quest for… Read More
2022-04-20 11:45
For those who’ve heard the word a lot but are still not sure what it means, cryptocurrency is a digital asset used to make purchases. It operates using a computer network, often a bloc… Read More
2022-04-19 11:48
Disney, world famous entertainment and media conglomerate, is now at the center of controversy—in all kinds of ways.
The state of Florida recently enacted the Parental Rights in Educat… Read More
2022-04-14 11:41
Before beginning his earthly ministry, our Lord Jesus Christ, “led up by the Spirit” (Matt. 4:1), wandered in the desert for 40 days, fasting, praying, and finally being tempted… Read More
2022-04-13 11:52
Literary Hub is one of the most widely read websites devoted to literature and the arts. Recently, it completed a poll of the nation’s academic presses. Its aim was to find out which o… Read More
2022-04-12 12:13
I settled into my seat just a few rows back in the mezzanine and surveyed the crowds surging across the performance hall. As I had expected, the audience was composed largely of young adult… Read More
2022-04-08 11:30
In July 2020, then–presidential candidate Joe Biden stated that “it’s way past time we put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism.” What precisely he meant by th… Read More
2022-04-07 11:53
A great deal of ink has been spilled over the declining character of American higher education. From critical theory to extremism among college student bodies, many issues have reached tempe… Read More
2022-04-06 12:00
My first film noir essay was on The Maltese Falcon, whose ambitious protagonist, private detective Sam Spade, chooses justice over an uncertain promise of happiness, the love of a dangerous… Read More
2022-04-05 12:08
In a classic 1976 episode of All in the Family, the TV character Archie Bunker took it upon himself to baptize his grandson at his local church. He did this secretly, as he explained to God… Read More
2022-04-01 12:10
To say that the Western world is increasingly secular and materialistic is news to no one. But our modern tragedy isn’t “godlessness” but rather what has filled the void of… Read More
2022-03-31 12:00
Thirty years ago, the world was in a transition that felt almost euphoric. The Soviet Union had been disbanded and communism in much of the rest of the world was in retreat. Continue Reading… Read More
2022-03-30 11:30
Recently I spoke at Hillsdale College on film noir as part of a program that introduced audiences to four of the most impressive movies in the genre that defined the tough detective in Ameri… Read More
2022-03-29 12:13
Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues. Ukrainian resistance so far has been fierce, but Russian forces retain a huge advantage in firepower. A victory by Moscow would mean installation… Read More
2022-03-28 12:39
In his “Parable of the Madman,” Nietzsche, reflecting on the death of God, observes that “this tremendous event is still on its way,” continuing that “deeds, th… Read More
2022-03-25 12:19
In the Genesis account of creation, we read that God “looked at all he had made and found it very good.” Today’s feast, which celebrates the Annunciation to Mary and the In… Read More
2022-03-24 17:00
Three Ukrainian oligarchs, a shadow Triumvirate as it were, stand on a balcony overlooking a gorgeous town square. An election for president is imminent and they’re tired of wasting mi… Read More
2022-03-24 11:50
Christian philosophy and morality were far from my intellectual radar during the 1970s when I decided to focus on economic studies. At the time I was captivated by the writings of Ayn Rand… Read More
2022-03-23 11:51
My long series on Oscar movies is coming to an end with angry words about Hollywood. To summarize, I liked Wes Anderson, loved Paul Thomas Anderson, was amused by Ridley Scott, disappointed… Read More
2022-03-22 11:58
Are economic sanctions morally permissible? That question has been asked by many people since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of a range of economic sanctions on Russia… Read More
2022-03-21 12:04
Anyone looking for an engaging overview of what modern Catholic social teaching (CST) has to say about economic matters will find it in Anthony Annett’s book Cathonomics: How Catholic… Read More
2022-03-18 18:00
The Batman plunges us straight into the middle of a crisis of faith. Gone is Bale’s confident and charismatic playboy. Robert Pattinson’s Batman hasn’t slept for a week. He… Read More
2022-03-18 11:48
Another Black History Month has come and gone, and the country has heard, once again, a great deal about the likes of Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King Jr. Continue Reading… Read More
2022-03-17 11:58
We may live in benighted times, but consider the world of just over a hundred years ago. Recurrent cultural or political shock, and often premature or violent death, was quite familiar to th… Read More
2022-03-16 13:47
There is almost no institution in the past 100 years that has more profoundly shaped American public life than the Supreme Court. As a result, the composition of the Supreme Court has become… Read More
2022-03-15 18:00
In the fable of “The Bell and the Cat,” a group of mice discuss how best to protect themselves from a rapacious, predatory cat who has been hunting them down. One mouse suggests… Read More
2022-03-15 12:09
Among the rarest qualities of the late American filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who died in January at age 82, was his conviction, repeatedly stated and consistently in evidence in his work, th… Read More
2022-03-14 11:59
It’s 1934 and Gareth Jones (James Norton), journalist and foreign adviser to British prime minister Lloyd George, is trying to convince a room full of stuffed shirts with fancy governm… Read More
2022-03-11 13:13
Allegations of abuse appear to be only the tip of the iceberg in the case of disgraced Biden administration official Eric Lander. According to Politico, the Office of Science and Technology… Read More
2022-03-10 13:17
The story begins on Halloween, almost exactly 20 years after the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. A new killer—an internet sensation, as it turns out—is on the loose, violently… Read More
2022-03-09 12:49
It has become commonplace in America’s elite institutions to attack and delegitimize our forebears for various crimes, some of which are undoubtedly real, while others are more imagine… Read More
2022-03-08 13:12
In case you missed it, there’s an official trailer out for the next (and supposedly final) installment of the Jurassic Park saga. Jurassic World Dominion, in theaters June 10, may… Read More
2022-03-07 13:26
The group Open Doors USA figures that 360 million Christians last year lived in countries where persecution was “significant.” Roughly 5,600 Christians were murdered, more t… Read More
2022-03-04 12:58
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of natural law is the phrase itself: “natural law.” For many people, the word “natural” implies human biology or the physical enviro… Read More
2022-03-03 12:48
Guillermo del Toro won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Shape Of Water (2017), a movie infamous for a leading lady so desperate for intimacy that she makes love to a fish, proba… Read More
2022-03-02 13:11
Near the beginning of the Netflix series Midnight Mass, released in late 2021, an Ash Wednesday service is faithfully shown, complete with a young priest’s effective and moving sermon… Read More
2022-03-01 12:52
If it had not been for the railroads, I would never have gotten beyond the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged. Having had a vague idea of what Ayn Rand believed in, I was pleasantly surpri… Read More
2022-02-28 13:09
I love productivity books. I’ve read all the big classics on the subject, from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to Cal Newport’s Deep Work. I am a de… Read More
2022-02-28 12:57
The mask has been torn off. If anyone had any doubts that some governments will do literally anything to suppress anyone who protests what they regard as unreasonable measures by the state t… Read More
2022-02-25 13:27
“All human societies face about the same problems,” claim David Friedman, Peter Leeson, and David Skarbek in their fascinating and peculiar book Legal Systems Very Different from… Read More
2022-02-24 12:54
My series on cinematic nostalgia continues—after Wes Anderson’s Francophilia, Ridley Scott’s Italian farce, and Spielberg’s Puerto Rican fiasco, here’s a Califo… Read More
2022-02-23 12:53
What would Kurt Vonnegut have made of the accordion-style cycle of lockdowns and other restraints imposed on us by the seemingly permanent American sanitary dictatorship devoted to the relig… Read More
2022-02-22 12:35
Charles Schulz believed that life was hard and lonesome.
That is why he believed that life was best experienced with others. Only through the sharing of burdens and triumphs and fears and jo… Read More
2022-02-21 13:18
Cancel—as in noisily toppling George Washington’s statue and striking his name off of buildings? In 2020, one group demanded the removal of his statue from the campus of the Univ… Read More
2022-02-17 13:10
Steven Spielberg has recently made a number of movies nostalgic for midcentury liberalism, Bridge of Spies and The Post, especially, very mediocre stories that won him Oscar nominations and… Read More
2022-02-16 22:37
So by now you’ve heard that P.J. O’Rourke, journalist, essayist, and, of course, humorist, has died at the age of 74. Those who knew him and those who read him have been pouring… Read More
2022-02-15 13:25
For those of us who have dealt with compulsive behavior or addiction in our families or our own lives, there are clues—perhaps too seemingly unrelated for some to notice—that tip… Read More
2022-02-14 13:51
Economics is the study of human action; it’s the study of individuals making choices. As a result, we can use the “economic way of thinking” to understand the decisions peo… Read More
2022-02-13 18:00
The Joe Rogan Experience is one of the world’s most popular podcasts and, for the past two weeks, the world’s most controversial. Launched in 2009 by comedian and martial arts en… Read More
2022-02-11 13:59
A year ago Burma’s military staged a coup. The junta has since killed at least 1,500 people and detained another 12,000, of whom nearly 9,000 remain in custody. A couple thou… Read More
2022-02-10 13:48
In Henrik Ibsen’s seminal play A Doll’s House, protagonist Nora Helmer, a hitherto devoted wife and mother, walks out on her husband and their three children, significantly slamm… Read More
2022-02-09 12:47
Ilya Shapiro, a Russian émigré, a serious scholar of the American Constitution, and formerly of the libertarian Cato Institute until he was scheduled on February 1 to begin run… Read More
2022-02-08 13:06
My first Oscars essay presented Wes Anderson, the Hollywood dandy’s Francophilia, The French Dispatch, and gentle criticism of liberal intellectual pretense. The 2022 Oscar contenders… Read More
2022-02-07 13:26
I love watching men’s college basketball. Three games come to mind that I’m so thankful to have seen on TV—Chris Jenkins’ buzzer beater to lift Villanova over North C… Read More
2022-02-06 19:54
The media world is not a principled one, and its decisions are often not moral in nature. Standards of coverage are rarely dictated by the metric of right versus wrong but by popular versus… Read More
2022-02-04 12:53
Progressives are finally waking up to the reality that men and boys are struggling in America. On January 27, Andrew Yang posted a Twitter thread observing that “there’s a crisis… Read More
2022-02-03 12:59
Who needs another version of Macbeth on film? You may find yourself asking this question with the release of director Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which stars Denzel Washington… Read More
2022-02-02 19:49
A worldwide coalition of Christian leaders submitted a petition to Carrie Lam, chief executive of Hong Kong, asking her to grant amnesty to individuals charged under the city’s repress… Read More
2022-02-02 13:02
These are strange times in the United States. We are now living under the second consecutive presidency whose legitimacy is disputed by a significant proportion of the American people. The t… Read More
2022-02-01 12:49
I offer you a series on Hollywood as seen by its artists, on the occasion of the impending Oscars. I don’t mean the dominant liberal arrogance that has doomed cinema, but rather the ef… Read More
2022-01-31 12:48
Jordan Peterson, the bête noire of the left, resigned his position at the University of Toronto in enviable fashion: on his own terms while issuing a blistering condemnation of the ide… Read More
2022-01-29 12:00
“The central question we face today is: Who decides?”
That’s the opening line of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence to the Supreme Court’s Jan. 13 opinion strik… Read More
2022-01-27 13:13
In the classic way of religious institutions, the pope picked up the term just as it seems to be going out of regular usage. It feels a bit like yesterday’s news. Continue Reading Read More
2022-01-26 13:12
Men and boys in America are struggling, and if we don’t do something about it soon, we’ll see the disintegration of the very institutions that allow for sustainable human flouris… Read More
2022-01-25 12:54
Fair play and the rule of law are essential conditions of our civilization, regulating private and public life. We would be ashamed to look for success, prosperity, victory without them. Peo… Read More
2022-01-24 13:25
Each morning’s headlines in the British press bring new details of parties happening inside Boris Johnson’s government while the rest of the United Kingdom and much of the world… Read More
2022-01-21 14:39
“I broke sharply with all questions of religion,” said Vladimir Lenin, with typical vituperation. “I took off my cross and threw it in the rubbish bin.”
Such was a me… Read More
2022-01-20 12:41
Political theorists have engaged in much debate concerning the “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,” such quarrel evidence of the opposing claims of the two worlds. Leo… Read More
2022-01-19 13:01
The techno-gossip that passes for objective knowledge these days assures us that the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up was watched extensively—more than 321.5 million hours streamed. D… Read More
2022-01-18 13:21
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is completing the destruction of the old Hong Kong. The last vestiges of free expression and democratic choice are disappearing.
On Janua… Read More
2022-01-17 12:48
Today we mostly associate the idea of reparations for America’s black population with left-wing politics, and that’s no surprise. Only Democratic candidates for president, such a… Read More
2022-01-16 13:00
One of the sadder deaths in 2021 was that of former Kansas senator Bob Dole. Wounded war-hero and long-serving politician, Dole was widely respected from people across the political spectrum… Read More
2022-01-14 12:00
Humans are incredibly skilled at rationalizing sin. We prefer to gloss over sin rather than face it. And for good reason! To grapple with the true weight of our sin is a heavy burden indeed… Read More
2022-01-13 13:52
Peter Bogdanovich has died, America’s only famous chronicler of Old Hollywood, a young friend of Orson Welles and an admirer of John Ford, and a director in his own turn of celebrated… Read More
2022-01-12 13:16
On April 29, 2021, the prosecutor general of Finland decided to bring charges against me and Member of Parliament Mrs. Päivi Räsänen. We will be summoned to the Helsinki distr… Read More
2022-01-11 13:11
The tweet heard ’round the world last week involved a clip of Dave Ramsey arguing that a Christian landlord can, ethically, raise rents to market levels even if it means that the rente… Read More
2022-01-10 19:51
Today, January 10, 2022, is Lord Acton’s 188th birthday. This difficult era of a global pandemic, a crisis in institutions, and civil unrest seems a strange time to… Read More
2022-01-10 13:39
In superhero movies, it’s a given that the good guys will try to save innocents from the bad guys. Sometimes they save individuals, sometimes they save cities, and all too often—… Read More
2022-01-07 14:16
January 7, 2022, marks the fifth anniversary of the death of a man who played a major role in spreading throughout Latin America the key ideas that underpin the free society. Continue Readin… Read More
2022-01-06 19:07
Every month, the One Free Press Coalition issues its “10 Most Urgent” list, ranking the most harrowing challenges to press freedom from around the world in order of urgency. Jimm… Read More
2022-01-06 13:42
Elizabeth Holmes has been found guilty on four of 11 federal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy, after promising revolutionary blood test technology from her corporation, Theranos. The pro… Read More
2022-01-05 13:16
Communism has spawned only one full-scale monarchy: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. On December 17, 2011, 70-year-old Dear Leader Kim Jong-il died. That very same day, Kim&r&hell…Read More
2022-01-04 19:06
Prominent Hong Kong media mogul and pro-democracy advocate Jimmy Lai, along with six of his former staff members, were charged by prosecutors with an additional National Security Law (NSL) v… Read More
2022-01-03 16:00
Earlier this month the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Carson v. Makin. The appellants in this case, co-represented by the Institute for Justice and my firm First Libe… Read More
2022-01-03 13:41
Hong Kong was once a beacon of opportunity, of democracy. It was a political refuge, a blip in a territory controlled by communist China.
Seemingly overnight, 7.5 million Hong Kongers have h… Read More
2021-12-31 12:00
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 th… Read More
2021-12-30 12:00
For over 20 years, the Acton Institute’s Rome office has enjoyed a number of extremely impressive academic fellows as part of its prestigious scholarship programs offered to graduate s… Read More
2021-12-28 14:45
At this point, most have heard about Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who leaked documents to the Wall Street Journal this fall detailing how Facebook knew about many of the downsides of it… Read More
2021-12-24 13:52
Hong Kong prosecutors lost their appeal against a magistrate’s decision in September 2020 that cleared charges against media tycoon Jimmy Lai on “intimidating a reporter from a r… Read More
2021-12-23 13:52
My Christmas movies series has hitherto considered church (The Bishop’s Wife), work (The Shop Around the Corner), and family (Christmas in Connecticut), the communities that constitute… Read More
2021-12-22 18:12
We arrive at the Christmas stable. We have prepared. The Christ child is come to us—Immanuel.
We begin by taking a step back. The candle that is lit for the final Sunday of Advent remi… Read More
2021-12-21 14:21
The latest Pew Research Center survey on American religion reflects a familiar trend in recent years: declining levels of Christian affiliation and growing numbers of religiously unaffiliate… Read More
2021-12-20 16:57
Conservatives tend to be skeptical of the uses of the word diversity, but they love variety. They believe that American higher education is better when you have a rich choice among schools&m&hell…Read More
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