Krannawitter on Thomas

Polyhymnia Senior Fellow Thomas L. Krannawitter gives his thoughts on Clarence Thomas’s recent speech on progressivism and the Declaration of Independence, and the sad, predictable response by the mainstream media. You can find it right here: https://tkrannawitter.substack.com/p/irreconcilable-differences

To Bigotry No Sanction

by Thomas L. Krannawitter What George Washington’s promise to the Jews in Newport still means for America. I am not Jewish. Many of the people dearest to me are. Two of my most important intellectual mentors were Jewish; their teacher was Jewish. I have close friends and trusted business partners who are Jewish. So I …

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The Future of Opera at the Kennedy Center

by Joshua T. KatzAmerican Enterprise Institute For New Yorkers, one hard thing about moving to Washington, D.C. is that there aren’t world-class concerts every day. Both the nation’s capital and what is sometimes called the capital of the world have outstanding museums: a great boon for my wife and me as well as for our …

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The Widening of the American Mind

​​by Thomas L. Krannawitter The bell rings. Students settle into their seats with the practiced choreography of the modern classroom: a laptop flips open; a phone disappears—mostly—into a hoodie pocket; someone asks whether the assignment can be submitted as a link. Then the teacher writes a question on the board: What is justice? A few …

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Lord Balfour and the Power of Art

Artworks are powerful conveyors of ideas and values. They demonstrate that cultural artifacts are one place where the rubber hits the road, as it were, with respect to how images and ideas relate. In these protests, art’s power to propound ideas and embody values is being used as a weapon to oppose certain events and ideas some find objectionable.

Front and Center: The Place for Classical Music in the Curriculum

Music in the academy is at risk. The decline in its status, presence, and reach can be traced to the cultural shifts beginning in the 1960s. Western classical music—with its unassailable history of accomplishment and undeniable pedagogical, cultural, and spiritual significance—has fallen prey to the assault on standards and hierarchies embodied by the era’s ethos of: “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ. has got to go.”