THEY CAME FOR CHAUCER. 

Late last January, the U.K.’s University of Leicester sent out a staff email proposing that authors prior to the year 1500 be dropped from the English curriculum to make room for “a selection of modules on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity, a decolonised curriculum and new employability modules.” That would put Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Thomas Malory, and Beowulf on the chopping block. Just what students expect from an English degree, Micah Mattix wryly observed at The American Conservative: “politics and vocational training.” 

How We Got to the Moon: The People, Technology, and Daring Feats of ­Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Adventure by John Rocco

We know the story, or think we do: The Soviets beat us to space, NASA was born, JFK made a speech, and eight years later Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. Most Americans who watched the historic moment on television could not imagine the countless problems solved to accomplish a feat we now take for granted. In 250 lavishly illustrated pages, John Rocco challenges that complacency.

“I am ugly and I speak funny. … But like you I was made carefully, by a God who loved what he saw.”

“CRITICAL THEORY” is the umbrella term for various branches of academic thought that grew out of 1980s postmodernism. A basic tenet of critical theory: All the arts and social sciences—and to some extent hard sciences—can be understood as a vast scheme of oppression by a privileged group (chiefly straight white males). Children’s literature largely escaped the influence of critical theory until 2017, when the push for youth activism opened the floodgates. Here are several examples.

President Barack Obama was fond of locating himself “on the right side of history.” He also liked to quote this saying from Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That’s the perfect tagline for a speech—hopeful, virtuous, and stirring—and King used it more than once. 

I said yes.

Back in the days of the late Roman Empire, a monk journeyed from his home in rural Asia Minor (now Turkey) to visit the great city of Rome. Out of curiosity, he joined a crowd headed into the Coliseum. After finding a seat, he was horrified to see men fighting each other to the death for spectators’ amusement.