This issue: January 14, 2013 (Vol. 18, No. 17)

The Constitutionalist

BY TERRY EASTLAND

Robert H. Bork, we all know, didn’t sit on the Supreme Court. His legacy thus cannot lie in votes cast and opinions written. You have to look elsewhere, and you certainly could begin with his earliest work at Yale Law School, which was in antitrust. In a series of law review articles and ultimately a game-changing book, The Antitrust Paradox, published in 1978, Bork worked out a powerful critique of the case law. In showing its defects, he influenced the movement toward deregulation.

As important as Bork was to that development, however, his name will forever be associated with the great debates of the past half-century regarding the Supreme Court and its exercise of judicial review. And it is here that his achievement was especially remarkable.

By the 1960s the power of federal courts to examine government actions for their constitutionality, known simply as judicial review, had ...

Dug In

Partisan warfare in the 113th Congress.

BY JAY COST

Last week the 113th Congress met for the first time, with Republicans in control of the House and Democrats in charge of the Senate. The Obama administration is optimistic that it can work its will over this legislature, driving a hard bargain on sequestration and the debt ceiling and pushing through reforms on immigration and gun control.

This is extremely unlikely. In fact, for a host of reasons, expect the new Congress to resemble the one that just finished—mired in stalemate with the president, lurching from one short-term, ad hoc budget deal to the next, with none of the biggest issues facing the country being addressed.

The most significant impediment to legislative action is ideological division. With 234 House Republicans and 55 Senate Democrats, the 113th Congress will be the most ideologically polarized in recent memory. ...

Pop Goes the Culture

One man’s quest to preserve and defend the good, the true, and the beautiful

BY ANDREW FERGUSON

Ken Myers grew up in a conservative Christian household in Beltsville, Maryland, during the 1960s. When he was in tenth grade, two important things happened to him.

His high school music teacher introduced him to the music of Bach, taking eight months to teach Myers and the rest of the boys’ choir how to sing the motet Jesu, meine Freude. And he fell upon a copy of the Saturday Review.

Saturday Review is pretty much forgotten today. (A number of people still remember Bach.) The magazine began in the 1920s and flourished in the postwar years. Its writers ranged widely over the arts, from music and literature to painting and drama, cultivating a readership of strivers​—​professional and college educated, if not brainy by nature​—​who were eager for self-improvement and a kind of intellectual diversion that was sophisticated and accessible. The ...

Starting from Scratch

An infinite number of theories of existence.

BY LAWRENCE KLEPP

In Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, there’s a wistful character named Prendergast, who had been a contented rural curate until he was suddenly beset by  “Doubts”—not about God’s existence, but:  “I couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all.” His bishop tries to reassure him, saying that “he didn’t think the point really arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned.” But Prendergast resigns his living and ends up teaching at a dismal school in Wales.  

Jim Holt, a writer who hangs out at the intersection of science and philosophy, is vexed by similar doubts. Why is there Something rather than Nothing, which would have been so much simpler? What is the universe doing here? Who invited it? Exactly how did it get here, and why, in this somewhat disheveled condition? But Holt, instead of resigning his living, just writes a book, and it’s far from dismal, despite circling ...

Slick Subscriber

Joseph Epstein, magazine marauder

BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN

I'm a sucker for a cheap subscription. For years I subscribed to Vanity Fair because I was able to get it for $1 a month. I paged through each thick issue, gazing upon countless pages of advertising for gaudy watches, men’s colognes, hideous Italian suits, and other merchandise I should not care to own. I did not so much read as glimpse the magazine, ending, always, on a note of slight disappointment, with the Proust Questionnaire or brief celebrity interview at the back of each issue. When they raised the subscription price to $36, I bailed out.

I ponied up 12 bucks for a one-year subscription to a magazine called Details, which, as I recall, also gave me a gym bag along with my subscription—so handy for a man who doesn’t go to any gym. I soon enough discovered that male vanity was featured in the pages of Details: moisturizers, Prada garb, $900 shoes, and all that. God, the architects say, is ...

The Sean Penn Piñata

You could tell it was a vacation week because The Scrapbook found itself, one idle afternoon, reading an essay by the actor Sean Penn on Huffington Post. These are two activities—perusing HuffPo, imbibing the wisdom of Sean Penn—that The Scrapbook customarily avoids.

But like any new experience, it had its rewards and it had its frightening moments as well. Mr. Penn has a reputation as a “thinking” actor—the New York Times once hailed him as “the actor of his generation,” and we always enjoy listening to worshipful interviews of him on NPR—so we settled down to read his essay in the spirit of friendly inquiry.

We were not disappointed. Bearing the slightly mysterious title “Breached Piñatas,” it began with an allusion to the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School—a predictable, but certainly defensible, choice of subject—but ...