Timothy Sandefur's Articles
Good Living, Philosophy, Reviews
Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke
Timothy Sandefur February 8, 2024
The task of justifying a life aimed at self-improvement, flourishing, or ataraxia is a substantial one for writers on ethics. Unfortunately, Tosi and Warmke barely try.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman
Timothy Sandefur January 10, 2024
It’s been almost a century since Edith Hamilton published her classic The Greek Way, and during those years, countless thousands of readers have encountered Greek culture for the first time through her works. Yet despite her achievements, Hamilton has never been the subject of a full biography until now.
Arts & Culture, History
Frank Lloyd Wright: Rebel Architect
Timothy Sandefur November 23, 2023
It would be hard to name an artist whose influence has been as ubiquitous as Frank Lloyd Wright’s. Yet he achieved his status not by lowering his standards but through a devoted pursuit of his ideals—ideals that gave voice to the principles of individuality and aspiration at the center of the American consciousness.
Politics & Rights, Reviews
Against the New Politics of Identity by Ronald A. Lindsay
Timothy Sandefur November 10, 2023
If American culture is to survive the onslaught of identity politics, it will only be through the efforts of such reasonable and courageous thinkers as Ronald Lindsay.
Good Living, Philosophy
Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life by Emily A. Austin
Timothy Sandefur May 18, 2023
Living for Pleasure is a fun and much-needed introduction to the ideas of one of the world’s greatest philosophers. Epicurus’s teachings about reason, desire, and tranquility are as important now as they were twenty-three hundred years ago.
History, Reviews
The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class That Tried to Win the Cold War by Philip Oltermann
Timothy Sandefur February 28, 2023
The Stasi Poetry Circle offers an unusual glimpse of the relationship between communist totalitarianism and the poetic impulses of both its victims and their victimizers.
History, Politics & Rights, Reviews
And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham
Timothy Sandefur February 13, 2023
What many of Lincoln's contemporaries—and many today—mistook for paradoxes or even contradictions more often reflected the prudence of a leader facing the horrendous task of guiding the United States toward a philosophic principle when unprecedented bloodshed made it sometimes seem safer to disregard that principle.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A. E. Stallings
Timothy Sandefur December 3, 2022
A. E. Stallings’s distinctive poetry succeeds because it merges a conscientious focus on meaningful content—saying relevant and powerful things about human experiences—with a painstaking attention to formal design. The results are masterpieces of integration.
Arts & Culture, History
The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, Banned Russian Novelist
Timothy Sandefur October 29, 2022
The life and fate of banned Russian novelist Vasily Grossman is a tragedy worthy of his own novelistic skills. More than fifty years after his passing, we can only imagine what he might have achieved had communist tyranny not stifled him.
Politics & Rights, Reviews
The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman
Timothy Sandefur September 6, 2022
Elliot Ackerman’s The Fifth Act may be the first great book about the Afghanistan war. It uses the nauseating surrender of the United States to the Taliban in 2021 as a point of departure for a series of reflections on the irrationality with which the war was waged and the consequences of that irrationality for American culture.
Ayn Rand & Objectivism, Biographies, History
How Isabel Paterson Helped Ayn Rand Find Atlantis
Timothy Sandefur August 19, 2022
Isabel Paterson considered herself the last survivor of a golden age. But she helped bequeath to us a vision of that free world—and not just a vision, but something more precious: a rational intellectual argument for it.
History, Politics & Rights, Reviews
Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, by Robert Pierce Forbes
Timothy Sandefur August 19, 2022
Robert Pierce Forbes’s painstaking research into the writing and revision of Notes on the State of Virginia is impressive and valuable. But his conjectures about Thomas Jefferson’s goals in writing those portions of the book that still stain the great man’s reputation only perpetuate the mysteries.
Arts & Culture, Politics & Rights, Reviews
Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America by David E. Bernstein
Timothy Sandefur July 15, 2022
Racism is premised on the false and immoral idea that people’s minds are functions of their ancestry and, consequently, that a person’s accomplishments are less morally relevant than the color of his skin. But George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein shows in Classified that racism contains still another layer of incoherence.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
Stories in Paint by Luc Travers and Windows on Humanity: A History of How Art Reflects Our Ideas about Our Lives and World by Sandra Shaw
Timothy Sandefur June 4, 2022
By giving us doorways into a wider world of art and ideas—and doing so without the backing of any major publishing houses—Luc Travers and Sandra Shaw have not only done us all a great service but have testified to the enormous value of art in all our lives.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham
Timothy Sandefur March 24, 2022
Despite occasional oversights, Kevin Birmingham's The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece offers a dramatic and enlightening introduction to the complicated context in which one of literature’s greatest and most horrifying novels was created.