Of Course Clark is Right | Ep. 519 Words & Numbers
Clark Neily joins James and Antony to discuss the thorny matter of constitutional interpretation.
Articles
Training and the Liberal Arts
Academia should be able to provide both vocational training and a liberal arts education, particularly given the absurd costs involved.
Anthony Fauci (Finally) Discovers the Bill of Rights
Fauci’s Fifth Amendment silence before Congress sits uneasily beside FOIA emails showing how hard he worked to shut down COVID dissent.
Mozart’s New Old Notebook
Mozart’s newly discovered notebook offers a rare glimpse into the composer’s creative process. But should every rediscovered manuscript be celebrated, or were some pages never meant for the public eye?
The Real Independence Day | Ep. 513 Words & Numbers
Historian Rob McDonald joins Antony to discuss the actual facts of America’s founding.
What Do You Meme? | Ep. 512 Words & Numbers
Discussion on why bad memes gain steam, with stops for food taxes, a nod to historian Gordon Wood, whether AI corporations deserve legal personhood, and the claim that capitalism gives us billionaires instead of universal healthcare.
Happy Juneteenth, 2026
Tom Krannawitter joins Polyhymnia senior fellow Antony Davies and COO James Harrigan to discuss a holiday, Juneteenth, that should receive a lot more attention than it does.
Polyhymnia’s Jefferson Lives! Opera receives NEA Grant
Teatro Grattacielo Receives NEA Grant for Jefferson Lives! — Polyhymnia’s co-producer has been awarded $24,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the world premiere.
Artificial Sanders Socialism | Ep. 510 Words & Numbers
Ant and James change things up a bit this week by talking about a great idea from Bernie Sanders.
The Girlfriend Experience | Ep. 509 Words & Numbers
Polyhymnia Senior Fellow Antony Davies and COO James Harrigan talk about how kids these days seem not to be all that interested in dealing with the opposite sex. It turns out that a significant number of them…mostly boys…seem to have given up on dating entirely, opting instead to have emotional relationships with AI chatbots.
Trade, Trust, and the Prosperity of Strangers
The more complex the world gets, the more we depend on people outside our tribe. That’s not a weakness—it’s how progress works.
Stripes of Blood, Stars of Liberty
Flag Day is more than a holiday—it’s a reminder that the Stars and Stripes has never stood for a nation alone, but for the ideas that built one: liberty, freedom, and the absence of coercion. As the colors wave, look beyond what is flying.
Semiquincentennial Plus One
It was late May in 1775 when Captain James Jack left Charlotte Towne, North Carolina and set out on a long journey on horseback to meet fellow North Carolinians in Philadelphia. The document he carried, dated May 20th, stowed inside his coat for protection, was of the utmost importance. And it was treasonous. By carrying …
Teatro Grattacielo Receives NEA Grant for Jefferson Lives!
The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Teatro Grattacielo a grant to support the world premiere of Jefferson Lives! Read on for details about the production and what the grant makes possible.
Why Do English Departments Hate Literature?
Liza Libes argues that Columbia’s English department has replaced literature with ideology, turning great books into tools for political critique. From Orientation Week onward, she found theory and identity politics overshadowing beauty, humanism, and the transformative power of literature.
To Bigotry No Sanction
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 do not regard the …
The Future of Opera at the Kennedy Center
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 young daughter, not least because so …
The Widening of the American Mind
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 students stare as if …
Dimenuendo: Classical Music and the Academy
How is the tradition of Western classical music faring on our university campuses? Before answering this question, it is necessary to understand what has transpired with classical music in the wider culture, as the relationship between the two is so strong.
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.
DEI Ruins Excellence in Orchestral Programming
The problem with the LAO guide is that it destroys meritocracy in the orchestral repertoire, and places a heavy burden on artistic organizations to choose diversity over compositional merit.
A Review of Wynton Marsalis’s Moving to Higher Ground
The artistic and creative personae of a performer or composer is a manifestation of his entire life experience, everything that he has listened to, and his basic constitution, and his personality. Whereas in the hard or social sciences we care little about the person who discovers a truth, because it is “out there,” with the arts, we wish to know about the painter or composer, because it comes from “inside,” it is of “them.”
Andy Warhol: Unconventional, Catholic, Traditionalist
It was Andy Warhol, who through Pop Art transformed the wedded cults of celebrity and consumerism into icons for our national and international contemplation.
A Multi-Layered Drama
Thus past, present and future converge to create an artwork whose meaning is immediately accessible but whose spatial and semantic depth successfully merge to produce one of the greatest works of art ever created.
Kim Ki-chang: The Korean Caravaggio?
Is it conceivable for such a deeply rooted art from an Asian culture to inform the spirituality of the American or European viewer? Quite possibly.
The Hidden Symbolism within Leonardo’s Last Supper
Five hundred years after the artist’s death, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has continued to inspire both believers and non-believers alike. The artwork seems to have tapped into in our collective consciousness. How so?
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