He wrote nothing. Not one line that we can hold in our hands and call his own composition. Everything the world knows about Epictetus comes through a student who sat in his classroom at Nicopolis, on the Adriatic coast of Greece, and took notes fast enough to keep up with an old man talking. That student was Arrian of Nicomedia, later a consul and a historian of Alexander. He says plainly what he was doing: ...
A tribune of the praetorian guard arrived at a country house four miles from Rome in the evening, surrounded the building with soldiers, and told the man inside that the emperor required his death. The man was at dinner with his wife and two friends. He did not argue, and he did not run. He asked for tablets so that he could write his will, and when the officer refused him even that, he turned to his friends and told them he had nothing left to leave them except the pattern of his life. (Tacitus, Annals 15.61–62, trans. Church and Brodribb, 1876) ...
On the Danube frontier, sometime in the early 170s, the most powerful man in the world sat down with a wax tablet or a scroll of papyrus and wrote a note to himself in Greek. He was in his fifties. His empire was fighting on two fronts, a plague was killing people in the cities behind him, and several of his children were dead. The note was not a decree and not a letter. It was a reminder to get out of bed. ...
There is a temptation, when a country under invasion keeps doing impossible things, to call it a national character. The Ukrainians are resourceful, we say, as if resourcefulness were a temperament that some peoples are born with and others lack. It is a flattering explanation, and it is the wrong one, because it removes from the story the one part that can be learned. Ukraine is not resourceful because Ukrainians are a certain kind of people. Ukraine is resourceful because it was given no alternative, and the resourcefulness is the shape that this particular necessity took. When the penalty for failing is national extinction, a society reorganizes itself around not failing, and the inventiveness that follows is not a miracle. It is a method, improvised under load, and it is worth describing plainly because the mechanism is transferable and the sentiment is not. ...
The presidency has been ranked for eighty years. Schlesinger started it in 1948, Siena has run it seven times, C-SPAN four times, and there are two dozen surveys in between. You can find a president’s standing on ten named characteristics, with the per-category scores, on a live web page. The Speakership has been ranked once. In 1998. By a master’s student. That is the whole of it. Dennis Roy Still, at Iowa State, mailed a questionnaire to sixty congressional scholars and asked them to rate fifty Speakers on four questions. His abstract calls it, accurately, “the first attempt to rank the U.S. House Speakers” (Still, Ranking the American Speakers, Iowa State University Digital Repository). Nobody has repeated it in the twenty-eight years since. Still’s scholars could rate only thirty-eight of his fifty, and the six Speakers who have held the gavel since 1998 were not in his survey at all. Eighteen of the fifty-six people who have been Speaker have never been rated by anyone. ...
I have graded all forty-four presidents, and I want to show the work. What follows is the whole method, written out so that someone else can reproduce it, attack it, and see exactly where my judgment enters. The short version: the letter grades are mine, and the underlying scores are not. Every number below comes from C-SPAN’s 2021 Historians Survey, and the transcription was checked three independent ways before I used any of it. ...
Nearly every comparison of Barack Obama and Donald Trump is really a verdict on two men, and the verdict is usually the one the reader walked in with. Ask whether the forty-fourth president was better than the forty-fifth and you learn nothing you did not already believe. There is a comparison underneath that one, and it is more interesting, because it can be decided with evidence instead of affiliation. Both men held the same office, inherited the same accumulated powers, and operated the same machinery. What differed was what each of them said about his own right to use it, and whether he left behind a standard by which he could be judged. ...
He will not let the building be repaired unless his name goes on it. That is not a characterization. It is his own sentence, posted on September 15, 2026: the renovation “cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” and if the ruling goes against him and the Supreme Court does not reverse it, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place” (Truth Social, 2026). To reporters the next day he was more explicit. “For me to get involved, and to take on long term, and to carry it, I think the Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” he said. “Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down” (AP, 2026). ...
Profiles in Courage John F. Kennedy, 1956 Executive Summary Kennedy’s premise is that the Senate is a body designed to punish independent judgment. A senator who follows his conscience against his party, his state, or his contributors does so knowing the cost is his career, and the book is a study of eight men who paid it. It was published in January 1956 by Harper & Brothers, won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and became the single most effective piece of reputation-building in American political history. The thesis: the health of a republic depends on the willingness of individual legislators to lose their seats rather than their judgment. ...
On Friday, September 11, 2026, an entire generation of Americans will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of a day they never lived through. This year’s Patriot Day proclamation put it plainly: “an entire generation of Americans has now come of age with no living memory of that fateful day.”1 For those of us who do remember, the day is not history. It is a scar that still aches in certain weather. And the question this anniversary asks is not only what we remember, but what we learned, and what we owe. ...