Bøger udgivet af Encounter Books,USA

Did the Covid virus jump naturally from an animal species to humans, or did it escape from a laboratory experiment? In this essay, science writer Nicholas Wade explores the two scenarios and argues that, on present evidence, lab escape is the more likely explanation. His inference is based on specific research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Institute's lack of adequate safety precautions, together with the continuing absence of any direct evidence to support natural emergence.The essay discusses the failure of the mainstream media to penetrate the self-interested assurance of virologists that lab escape was a dismissible conspiracy theory. It also notes how the politicization of discussion impeded consideration of the scientific facts.

"With a new preface by the author and an introductory note by Henry A. Kissinger."--Page 1 of cover.

Is the Electoral College ¿racist¿ and a ¿scam¿ as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims? Or was Alexander Hamilton right when he declared that ¿if it be not perfect, it is at least excellent¿?In this Broadside, Trent England explains why we have the Electoral College, how it shapes American politics, and why preserving it is necessary to maintain our republican form of government.With an organized campaign trying to hijack the constitution¿s state-by-state system in favor of a direct election, now is the time for Americans to come to the defense of the Electoral College.

The German Model is running out of steam. Both America's college and university system, and its K-12 education system, were originally created based on German approaches in the 19th century. Now that it's the 21st century, Glenn Harlan Reynolds suggests, it's time for a change. Higher education in America is facing a bust much like the housing bubble. It is the product of cheap credit, coupled with popular expectations of ever-increasing returns on investment and, as with housing prices, the cheap credit has caused college tuitions to vastly outpace inflation and family incomes. Now this bubble is bursting. Reynolds explains the causes and effects of this bubble and the steps colleges and universities must take to ensure their survival. As students become less willing to incur debt for education, colleges and universities will have to adapt to a new world of cost pressures and declining public support. Economist Herb Stein famously said that something that can't go on forever, won't. For decades now, America has been putting ever-growing amounts of money into its K-12 education system, while getting steadily poorer results. Now parents are losing faith in public schools, new alternatives are appearing, and change is on the way. As the best students abandon traditional public schools, "The New School" provides a succinct description of what's wrong, and where the solutions are likely to appear, along with advice for parents, educators, and taxpayers.

"At least since Oedipus met King Laius on the road from Delphi to Thebes, the image of a crossroads has signaled a dramatic and morally fraught turning point. It was with that cargo of significance in mind that The New Criterion decided to publish a special series of essays on "Western civilization at the crossroads" throughout this fortieth anniversary season. Featuring contributions by Conrad Black, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Andrew Roberts, and other luminaries, this book collects the ten special essays from The New Criterion's fortieth-anniversary season to assess where Western civilization is now, and where it's going"--

Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hanna Arendt, Norman Mailer, and Lillian Hellman -among the other things these writers and intellectuals all had in common is Norman Podhoretz. With them Podhoretz was part of "The Family," as the core group of New York intellectuals of the 50s and 60s came to be known. And in Ex-Friends, he has written the intellectual equivalent of a family history- a sparkling chronicle of affection and jealousy, generosity and betrayal, breakdowns and reconciliations, and ultimately of dysfunctions impossible to cure. Ex-Friends is filled with brilliant portraits of some of the cultural icons who defined our time. Yet anyone who has followed Norman Podhoretz's career as a writer and editor and above all one of the leading controversialists of our time will expect more than just another fond memoir of literary alliances and quarrels, brilliant talk and bruised egos. Indeed, while Ex-Friends has some of the elements of a personal diary, it is also a journal de combat describing the intellectual and social turbulence of the 60s and 70s and showing how the literary living room was transformed into a political battleground where the meaning of America was fought night by night. Against this backdrop, Podhoretz tells how he left The Family and undertook a trailblazing journey from radical to conservative, a journey that helped redefine America's intellectual landscape in the last quarter of the 20th century and caused his old friends to become ex-friends. If there is a nostalgia in Ex-Friends, it is not only for lost friendships but also for a time of wit, erudition, and passionate argumentation. Norman Podhoretz bodies forth a world when people still believed that what they thought and wrote and said could change the world.

Secular humanists and other "progressives” have been predicting the demise of religion for the past 250 years. But they keep running into a problem: those who were supposed to be liberated by the secular gospel that God is Dead aren't buying it. Except for some parts of western Europe and in countries culturally destroyed by Communism, secularization in the radical sense has not occurred.While it has not obliterated the religious impulse, however, the drive towards "progressive irreligion” has, Robert Royal believes, encouraged ignorance of religion's central role in the development of the West. In The God That Did Not Fail, Royal offers an original reading of religion in ancient Greece and Rome, of Christianity and Judaism, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation, the several modern Enlightenments, culminating with a profound assessment of our current postmodern moment. He concludes that since religion is a permanent part of human nature and of the particular character of the West, our efforts should be directed not into a quixotic effort to deny the undeniable, especially as we face challenges from Islamic fundamentalism, but into promoting a well thought out and dynamic interplay of faith, reason, and modern freedoms.

Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before "fake news" became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That's because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it's woke. Today's newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including "antiracism," intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be?It all has to do with who our news media is written by-and who it is written for. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century-from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers. With the rise of the Internet and the implosion of local news, America's elite news media became nationalized and its journalists affluent and ideological. And where once business concerns provided a countervailing force to push back against journalists' worst tendencies, the pressures of the digital media landscape now align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades.The truth is, the moral panic around race, encouraged by today's elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. Bad News explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.

What is culture? Why should we preserve it, and how? This book defends Western culture against its internal critics and external enemies, and argues that rumours of its death are seriously exaggerated. It shows our culture to be a continuing source of moral knowledge.

Explains how European intelligentsia turned on Western civilization and paved the way for hedonism and Islamism to run roughshod over a once proud European culture.

"Behind the deeply contentious 2020 election stands a real story of a broken election process. Election fraud that alters election outcomes and dilutes legitimate votes occurs all too often, as is the bungling of election bureaucrats. Our election process is full of vulnerabilities that can be - and are - taken advantage of, raising questions about, and damaging public confidence in, the legitimacy of the outcome of elections. This book explores the reality of the fraud and bureaucratic errors and mistakes that should concern all Americans and offers recommendations and solutions to fix those problems"--

"Our Cloistered, Elite Supreme Court starts by establishing just how different today's Justices are from their predecessors. The book combines two massive empirical studies of every Justices' background from John Jay to Amy Coney Barrett with short, readable bios of past greats to demonstrate that today's Justices arrive on the Court with much narrower experiences than they once did. The modern Supreme Court specializes in cloistered and elite lives. Today's Justices have spent more time in elite academic settings (both as students and faculty) than any previous Courts. Every Justice but Barrett attended either Harvard or Yale Law School, and four of the Justices were tenured professors at prestigious law schools. They also spent more time as Federal Appellate Court Judges than any previous Courts. These two jobs (tenured law professor and appellate judge) share two critical components: both jobs are basically lifetime appointments that involve little or no contact with the public at large. The current Supreme Court is packed with a very specific type of person: type-A overachievers who have triumphed in a long tournament measuring academic and technical legal excellence. This Court desperately lacks individuals who reflect a different type of "merit." The book examines the exceptional and varied lives of past greats from John Marshall to Thurgood Marshall and asks how many, if any, of these giants would be nominated today. The book argues against our current bookish and narrow meritocracy. Healthier societies offer multiple different routes to success and onto bodies like our Supreme Court"--

"James Burnham's 1964 classic, Suicide of the West, remains a startling account on the nature of the modern era. It offers a profound, in depth analysis of what is happening in the world today by putting into focus the intangible, often vague doctrine of American liberalism. It parallels the loosely defined liberal ideology rampant in American government and institutions, with the flow, ebb, growth, climax and the eventual decline and death of both ancient and modern civilizations. Its author maintains that western suicidal tendencies lie not so much in the lack of resources or military power, but through an erosion of intellectual, moral, and spiritual factors abundant in modern western society and the mainstay of liberal psychology. Devastating in its relentless dissection of the liberal syndrome, this book will lead many liberals to painful self-examination, buttress the thinking conservative's viewpoint, and incite others, no doubt, to infuriation. None can ignore it. "--

"The George Floyd protests that have occasioned great changes throughout American society were not spontaneous events. Americans did not suddenly rise up in righteous anger, take to the streets, and demand not just that police departments be defunded, but that all structures, institutions, and systems, all our supposedly racist, be overhauled. The 12,000 or so demonstrations and 675 related riots took organizational muscle. The ideological grip on all things from the classroom to the ballpark required ideological commitment. That muscle and commitment were provided by the various Black Lives Matter organizations. The leaders are avowed Marxists who say they want to dismantle our way of life. They and their activists make savvy use of social media to spread their message and organize the marches, sit-ins, statue-tumblings and riots. They seized on the video showing George Floyd's suffering to unleash nation-wide the insurgency. This book will look at who exactly these leaders are, something the media has so far refused to do"--

"America's current political divisions are backed by vitriolic anger on all sides--anger that is rooted in a long-term change in American character. A nation that once regarded unbridled anger as a personal weakness has become a nation that regards anger as self-empowerment and a tool for positive social change. But anger remains what it was always was: a force that can sweep away judgment and carry us, as individuals or groups, into foolish confrontations. The power that an angry person feels on social media or in the street is a largely an illusion. Anger in politics serves a deknite purpose: it turns simmering resentments into collective purpose. But once this kind of anger is ignited, it burns its own path. No one really controls it. Anger in our personal lives often takes a self-destructive path, destroying relationships and isolating the angry man or woman from friends, family, and fellow workers. Peter W. Wood, an anthropologist, explains in this extensively revised and updated edition of his 2007 book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, how our "new anger" took shape, how it endangers our civic life, and how it can be turned to better purposes"--