Education has, fittingly, been acknowledged as the central battlefield of the culture wars in recent years. And Virginia has been in the middle of it all, most strikingly illustrated by the campaign and election of Governor Glenn Youngkin. But the fight carries on in local school boards and libraries. TAC editorial assistant Gavin Hamrick reports from the front lines in Front Royal, where parents concerned by the pornographic material available to their children in the local library have successfully organized to hold their local officials, elected and unelected, to account—and to protect their children.

We call the latest print magazine the Vice Issue. First in the titular packet to be featured on the website is managing editor Jude Russo’s essay “Runaway Horses.” It is a look at the expansion of gambling nationwide, especially online sportsbook, through the lens of a legacy sports betting opportunity: horse racing. “The explosion in gambling reflects a familiar trend in American life—gutting complex systems rooted in the physical world for increasingly abstract and pure economic activities.”

The American novelist Cormac McCarthy died last week at the age of 89, the last of a definitive generation of writers and the last to achieve wide recognition and success. In “McCarthy, Joyce, and the ‘Culture of Death,’” Nora Kenney traces a throughline from Ulysses to McCarthy’s late works, The Passenger and Stella Maris. “Both Ulysses and McCarthy’s twin final works are preoccupied with the same overarching themes, such as consciousness and suicide,” Kenney suggests. “And both are also concerned about society’s relationship to the next generation.”

Best,
Micah Meadowcroft
Web Editor

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar: Burkean Conservatism in Space

Grayson Quay