“The academic humanities today resemble the medieval universities as the Renaissance humanists saw them: an entrenched and insular guild, more obstacle than venue for the flourishing of the intellectual life.” Benjamin Storey argues we may need to look beyond the institutional confines and discursive forms of modern universities to revive genuine intellectual life.

Before he joined the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas wrote three eloquent essays on the Declaration of Independence, the 14th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act. Adam J. White returns to this writing to illuminate the influences and themes that have shaped Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence of constitutional self-government.

The slow progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive has generated increasing skepticism about the course of the war. But Frederick W. Kagan, writing with David Petraeus, explains why we would be wise to temper our pessimism about Ukrainian prospects: “This will be a long war, and we need Ukraine to prevail.”

Are Americans saving enough for retirement? Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Andrew G. Biggs breaks down the flawed methodology of a new, overly pessimistic report from the Government Accountability Office and provides his own answer to the question.

In an age of shortened attention spans and declining enrollments, does literature as an academic discipline have a future? Reviewing John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Christopher J. Scalia surveys the state of the troubled field and argues literary studies must stop overpromising and under-delivering.