Journalism ‘by Answering the Phone’ “The next 10 to 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.” — David Simon in 2009, crime reporter and creator of HBO’s “The Wire.”  A NEW STUDY warns that without a newspaper your town is more vulnerable to corruption.  Brad Greenwood, a Notre Dame graduate and a former student of our adjunct Barry Keating, has done a masterful job delineating the…

‘No Kings’: A Prologue to Farce We can avoid the cataclysm anytime we choose to, by returning to reality, to reason, to ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.’” — Notre Dame’s Robert Reilly in “America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding” I AM DISHEARTENED that 5,000 of my neighbors in one of the most staid places on earth thought it a good idea to wander out on a cold, wet June Saturday to proclaim . .…

Reimagining Dr. Naismith’s Game “The only thing that is exactly as it seems is professional wrestling.” — Unknown OK, I’M GOING TO SAY IT: The play of the National Basketball Association is unwatchable. Look, I’ve tried, especially this week as the Pacers make a historic bid for a championship.  But the definition of a sport includes standard rules. Otherwise, it is mere physical combat, a melee. That is what I see watching the NBA — huge “athletes” banging into…

Getting Serious About Crime HAVE WE FINALLY REACHED the tipping point on violent urban crime? A Crime Stopper info-commercial playing on the local airwaves is encouraging in that regard. Such info-commercials don’t usually provide much in the way of crime-fighting strategies. They explore root causes, delve into social concerns, making certain to respect all cultures while pleading for cooperation with police, that sort of thing.   But Ken Fries, the northeast Indiana coordinator for Crime Stoppers,…

by Mark Franke If nearly all economists agree that tariffs are bad, why are they so popular? This was the focus of last month’s gathering of my Socratic discussion group. To help us dissect this apparent paradox, we were joined by two academic economists as subject-matter experts. Our guests provided a short primer on the history of tariffs, especially those used and abused by the United States. It began with a reference to Milton Friedman,…

Beckwith Is Right SOMEHOW, the Declaration of Independence has become controversial once more. When written, of course, it was highly so, laying out the rationale for a people to break free from what was then the default — an oppressive king and a state religion.  But we had assumed — wrongly, it seems — that the Founder’s point had been proven by now, specifically that men should be free to worship as they please, a post-Enlightenment…

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. In the last 20 years of teaching business ethics, I asked my students to read Pope Leo XIII’s essay, “Rerum Novarum” (On the New Things). If they did the reading, they encountered ideas from John Locke and Adam Smith. Therefore, that the new pope chose to be named Pope Leo XIV bodes well, suggesting he will follow the ideas and reasoning of his namesake.  Pope Leo XIII, reigning from 1878 to 1903, faced…

By Kyle Gough To write “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson conducted what is perhaps the most pertinent investigation in the American political theater since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate scandal.  But unlike Woodward and Bernstein, who exposed President Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate burglary, Tapper and Thompson merely and inexplicably conclude what the reader already knows — that attempting…

Yo-Yoing: It’s Coming Back  THIS IS THE BEST NEWS I expect to hear this year: An elementary school in my town has begun a yo-yo club. Those of you in my generation will remember that every summer the yo-yo professional (18-year-olds primarily) would come to town. These pimple-faced teen-agers were celebrities to us. They were actually paid to travel around the state spinning the newest yo-yo models. Can you believe it?  I can see in my mind’s eye the day…

Racism: The Rawest of Politics  NO AMERICAN should be denied employment or property because of the color of his skin, the modern dictum reads, unless he is white. The exception was explained recently by Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago. The mayor, as a matter of official policy, says he favors blacks over whites for municipal positions and for contractural awards. His reasoning is threefold: 1) because blacks are “more generous” in protecting the rights of all others; 2) because blacks are…