Ian Pace makes the case for studying music simply because we love it. Listening to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven alongside their lesser-known contemporaries helps us hear what makes their work extraordinary.
A collector’s $4,000 offer for a broken vacuum at an art exhibition raises a larger question: How much of what we perceive as art comes from the object itself, and how much from its context?
What’s the deal with bonds and interest rates? Find out on Words & Numbers, where we will use both words and numbers to get to the bottom of things.
Beauty is not merely decorative, nor must it be sacrificed for utility. In schools, beauty serves an essential purpose: it shapes how students think, connect, and see the world.
How six decades of living beyond our means brought the national debt to $40 trillion.
A priest shows up. Antony doesn’t confess, James doesn’t convert, but they all talk about human dignity.
Boyd Taylor Coolman draws on the medieval idea of intellectual virtue, which holds that reading, thinking, questioning, discussing, and learning have value beyond what they produce.
When government statistics are under question, it gets pretty hard to know what is actually going on. James and Antony discuss the importance of reliable government data, how it’s used, politicized and its death.
Do books about comics need pictures of the comics they discuss? It seems obvious that they do. But Polyhymnia Senior Fellow Blake Scott Ball, author of a book on Charlie Brown and a forthcoming book on Batman, makes a compelling case that they don’t.
For what may be the first time, AI has written a published philosophy paper, raising new questions about authorship, scholarship, and the role of AI in academia.
Why is anti-intellectualism so persistent? Perhaps because it’s not an aberration at all. Andrew Jason Cohen argues that intellectual curiosity runs against some deeply human tendencies, then asks the more useful question: What allows curiosity to survive? His answer points toward education, free thought, free speech, and a society that gives people room to think.
This week Ant and James seem not to have much of a point, but that’s never stopped them before, and it sure didn’t stop them this week.
Wes Westmoreland joins James to cover American Airlines horror stories, goldfish rights, Tim Walz’s gender dolls, a county fair crossbow mishap, Mamdani’s grocery plans, and Fauci pleading the fifth 111 times. 00:00 Introduction 00:43 American Airlines Travel Horror Stories 06:25 Is the GOP Becoming Socialist? 12:34 Goldfish Rights, Animal Rights, and Ethical Contradictions 17:03 Tim …
A young composer once asked me why so much new music seems to have so little to say. Here is my reply, on the difference between writing music and composing art, and why the eraser is a composer’s greatest friend.
Schubert died at 31 but left over a thousand works of startling originality. This talk traces his teenage masterpiece Gretchen am Spinnrade to show how he forever changed the art of song. You may never hear his music the same way again.
What do population growth rates and movement among the states have to do with one another? More than you might think.
This week James and Antony discuss Hollywood, crypto, air conditioning, and birthright citizenship.
Two writers under a dictatorship, one defiant and one compromised, meet after Vaněk’s release from prison. Jeffrey Falk reviews Bricolage Production Company’s immersive staging of Havel’s Protest in a private home above Pittsburgh, and the question of cowardice it leaves hanging in the air.
Patriots’ Day and Juneteenth are uniquely American holidays that celebrate ordinary people who made extraordinary sacrifices in the cause of liberty, offering opportunities to reflect on the shared ideals that unite the nation.
A remembrance of Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American Revolution, who has died at 92.
Composer Daniel Asia reflects on Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues, tracing what separates classical composition from jazz improvisation — and what, in the end, brings them together in “the nature of human life.”
Should insider trading be allowed? It seems like a straightforward question, so how did we end up also talking about sports betting and Polymarket?
Polyhymnia COO and Senior Fellow Antony Davies interview Free the People’s Matt Kibbe on this week’s Words & Numbers.
If there is a central theme to this wide-ranging conversation, it’s the possibility of heroes in the current climate. We can always find villains, but can we really find heroes at this point?
Many people are writing about why Americans have lost trust in universities. There are, of course, financial reasons, including—at least plausibly—the now higher unemployment rates of recent college grads and the ever-increasing cost of tuition. I leave these to the side. Allow me here to quickly lay out what I see as a major reason …
At a moment when American public life often oscillates between exhaustion and abstraction, serious cultural reflection has become increasingly rare. It is therefore worth drawing attention to the work being undertaken through the Omni-American Review by our senior fellow Aryeh Tepper, who serves as the journal’s editor-in-chief.
Max Borders joins us this week on Words & Numbers to answer the question: Where have all the men gone?
Yes, we’re serious. So too are we serious about fixing this problem.
April 12 marks the 250th anniversary of a largely forgotten but significant date in American history. On this date in 1776, the Fourth Provincial Congress of North Carolina met in Halifax and unanimously passed a measure instructing its delegates to the Continental Congress to vote to declare independence from Great Britain. With the Halifax Resolves, …
On this episode of Words & Numbers, Polyhymnia’s James R. Harrigan and Senior Fellow Antony Davies take a hard look at partisanship and what people believe. They conclude that it is not a matter of left v. right, nor is it Democrat v. Republican. It’s the ruling class v. all of the rest of us. …
Polyhymnia Senior Fellow Jay Nordlinger interviews Gregg Nunziata, the executive director of SRL—the Society for the Rule of Law. Nunziata worked in the Justice Department. And for the Senate Judiciary Committee. And for the Senate Republican Policy Committee. And for Senator Marco Rubio. And so on. He was in the heart of the Republican legal …
After a four-week hiatus, Polymnia’s @JamesRHarrigan and Senior Fellow @antonydavies are back with episode 501 of Words & Numbers, wherein they think about four weeks’ worth of backed-up nonsense, President Trump’s leaning all over the Supreme Court during oral arguments of the birthright citizenship case, Congress’s abdication of its constitutional duties, the newly created “Guindex,” …
Polyhymnia’s @JamesRHarrigan recently joined Josh Martens on Good Morning Liberty to discuss what, if anything, we owe one another as members of society. Anarchists love to answer this question with “Nothing!” before moving on. Marxists, on the other hand, are more inclined to answer “Everything!” So what is the right answer? Finding it is trickier …
Over the last few weeks, there has been a simmering ruckus about opera and ballet, the state of affairs with the Washington National Opera, and some musings on contemporary operas. Timothée Chalamet put opera and ballet down. He said he wouldn’t want to work in ballet or opera, because these fields are ones where people …
People have been railing against and misrepresenting liberalism almost since its inception. And yet, despite centuries of criticism and countless illiberal attempts to undermine or redefine it, liberalism has produced more peace, more prosperity, and more egalitarianism than any social or political framework humanity has ever known. The historical record of the Western world over …
Polyhymnia COO, James R. Harrigan, joins Max Borders on Underthrow to discuss international things, including recent events in Iran and Venezuela. There’s no way of knowing where any of this is going to end up, but things are trending in a direction for now. https://underthrow.substack.com/p/death-to-dictators-iran-venezuela
I recently heard Jill Lepore, professor of history at Harvard University, on The Good Fight podcast. In discussing campus culture, she expressed dismay at the fact that some of her students had refused to read the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857), which she had assigned. They refused, apparently, because it would cause them (or …
Richard Lorenc writes in the Boston Herald: “Although political conflict is inevitable, we each have the power to steer disagreements away from name-calling and rhetorical head-butting. If we want the activists and politicians to behave differently, the citizens need to behave differently as well.” Amen. And nothing will change until the citizens demand better, which …
In one way or another, the issue of finding meaning in life lies in the innumerable choices we make everyday. Shakespeare’s existential “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet suggests that the search for a meaningful life has life and death implications. I agree, and believe the visual arts provide part of the …
Blake Scott Ball has done us the honor of becoming a fellow at Polyhymnia. You can get to know him a little bit here. As it turns out, he is a pretty interesting and smart guy. We’re happy to have him on board, and you will be glad to meet him. https://hvilleblast.com/charlie-brown-una-blake-scott-ball/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOO07FleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeQh8Z7O1XCWYHB2syALKdC2DzqAKSI4RhPnG0K5pyXHRiIy0yfrWw04RrMEA_aem_ytsJxALTtgfE9ESZfimcwQ
Apple TV+ subscribers now have the opportunity to peer into the complex mind of filmmaker Martin Scorcese in a five-part docuseries. And readers now have the opportunity to see what Rebecca Miller learned as she made Mr. Scorcese. “He talks a lot about an obligation to tap into a truth about human beings. And that’s …
Polyhymnia Chief Operating Officer James R. Harrigan and economist Antony Davies discuss the two most important sentences in history, one political and philosophical, the other commercial. These two sentences, taken together, provide the bedrock of Western life and have improved the fortunes of man everywhere they have been embraced. And in the end, it all …
Polyhymnia Senior Fellow Jay Nordlinger joins John Daly on the DalyExpress podcast to discuss, among other things, the Renew Democracy Initiative, free speech consistency, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, the Young Republicans chat controversy, and, of all things, public restrooms? You can have a look at the full interview here. https://www.bernardgoldberg.com/p/jay-nordlinger-on-free-speech-consistency
A Review of The Armed Jew by Adam Fuller Professor Adam Fuller’s book, The Armed Jew couldn’t be timelier. As Hamas seeks to find accommodation with Israel through Trump’s peace plan, it is a reminder of their butchery of October 7th, 2023, with the massacre of over 1000, many of them young people, and most …
All questions of candidates, policies, and parties are secondary to the question of what kind of regime We The People will choose, accept, or have forced upon us. Questions about what our regime is, or what it will become, span generations. They are larger in scope than fleeting feelings about individual politicos or the headlines …
Portraiture and John Singleton Copley’s Samuel Adams John Singleton Copley’s 1772 portrait of Samuel Adams in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is among the most important artworks of the American revolutionary period. John Hancock commissioned the work, which hung in his home alongside his own portrait that the artist painted seven years earlier. …
Imagine being called at 9p and being asked to sub in for another performer for an afternoon concert the next afternoon in front of 2000 people. It sounds daunting, but imagine that you had played the piece in concert just a few weeks before. Less daunting. Now imagine you get on stage, and the orchestra …
by Thomas R. Grover I wish I hadn’t looked at X on Sunday night. Earlier in the day, a gunman attacked a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Michigan. He also set fire to the church building, which is a total loss. As of this writing, four congregants are dead, …
David Frisk reviews Lawrence Perelman’s American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Elements of American Character for Law and Liberty. He writes that the book is “a gem, richly insightful on two of Buckley’s deepest qualities—his love of classical music and generosity as a mentor.” It’s the story of how Perelman came to meet …
An April 2025 story in The Art Newspaper contains the headline “Miami dealer charged for hawking fake Warhols.” I must admit that the phrase “fake Warhol” forced an audible laugh; the American Pop Art icon’s work is saturated in “fake,” within the term’s connotations of “inauthentic,” “imitation,” and “unreal.” Warhol “forged” so much of his …
Up today on Words & Numbers, Antony Davies and I are joined by Clark Neily, Senior Vice President for Legal Studies at the Cato Institute, to discuss the weaponization of the Department of Justice, and what that might mean moving forward. The thing you can bet on is that whatever the Trump administration does with …
There is scarcely a person alive who wouldn’t say that music makes life better. Almost all of us, on the order of 90 to 95 percent, listen to music every day. Globally, people listen to over 20 hours of music a week on average. Music is, without question, an indispensable part of life. But sometimes, …
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