Benjamin Dueholm

In The Passage of Power, Robert Caro’s fourth mammoth volume on the life of Lyndon Johnson, the newly and tragically elevated president confronts the reality that his slain predecessor’s aggressive civil rights bill is stalled in Congress. Shortly before the assassination, Johnson had argued for moving the rest of the Kennedy agenda through Congress first. […]

Healther Mac Donald, writing in the National Review (via Sullivan): The Times offers several possible reasons for this recent rise in child poverty, including the high-tech, high-skills economy and the greater difficulties of going on welfare following the 1996 federal welfare-reform law. It never articulates, however, what is overwhelmingly the largest predictor of child and […]

There’s a fine scene in the 2009 film An Education in which the schoolgirl-protagonist Jenny (Carey Mulligan) discovers that her older paramour David (Peter Sarsgaard) is a not-especially-scrupulous sort of businessman. Disgusted, she starts to walk away. He catches up and pleads with her, “Don’t be so bourgeois.” Jenny comes back, and eventually learns—at some […]