Free Republic

A comment by a prominent campaigner has touched off a fevered debate over Russian influence in a former Soviet republic. It's not so often that Romantic poets set social media alight. But that's exactly what happened when the subject of Alexander Pushkin came up on a Russian TV programme. The interviewee, Alexei Navalny, is an anti-corruption campaigner who has long been one of the leading figures opposing Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a conversation on the independent Russian Dozhd TV channel, Navalny and presenter Ksenia Sobchak suggested that Pushkin - one of Russia's great cultural figures - was largely unknown...

A secondary school has been forced to apologize to parents after an English teacher asked students to draft a suicide note for homework as part of a module on Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. More than 60 pupils at Thomas Tallis school, Kidbrooke, London were asked to pen an imaginary final note after reading one of the play’s most celebrated scenes, when Lady Macbeth takes her own life. Having conspired with her husband to murder King Duncan, Lady Macbeth commits suicide by “self and violent hands” after being driven mad by guilt and violent imagery of his murder. The pupils were asked...

WORD FOR THE DAY! ======================================================================== In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of “Word for the Day”. Rules: Everyone must leave a post using the Word for the Day in a sentence. The sentence must, in some way, relate to the news of the day........ DOGGEREL [daw-ger-uh l, dog-er-] adjective 1. comic or burlesque, and usually loose or irregular in measure. rude; crude; poor. noun 2. doggerel verse. Origin of doggerel: 1350-1400; Middle English; see dog, -rel; cf. dog Latin British Dictionary definitions for doggerel: noun...

Working for Barack Obama can be a career maker, but Hebrew readers have been puzzled by the explanation for the path that one former staffer took. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Michael Slaby, whom the newspaper described as “among the key tech gurus for Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns,” has founded a startup called Timshel that helps not-for-profits and activist groups use digital tools to increase their analytic capabilities. Sounds good. But where, exactly, does the name Timshel come from? “It’s a reference to [Steinbeck’s] ‘East of Eden’ — the Hebrew word for “Thou mayest” from the Bible [in the...

Meet James Patterson's newest co-author: former President Clinton. Patterson and Clinton are co-writing a thriller titled "The President Is Missing," which is scheduled for release in June 2018. The book is about the disappearance of a sitting president.

"Forbidden Thoughts" is a conservative and libertarian science fiction anthology. What are the pros and cons of this book most notable for Milo Yianapolis writing the foreword?

A gargantuan spiderweb hangs across the steep dirt road. It shimmers, translucent in the sunlight, slack lines nearly imperceptible. As I duck the web and trudge further up the road's corkscrew turn, the thick brush, thistle, weeds and poison oak part, revealing an ancient looking stone bench on the shoulder above the road. Finally. More than a year after I first searched for it, I have found the mysterious, nearly forgotten memorial to legendary California novelist Frank Norris in this far corner of the Santa Cruz Mountains. A simple cross and a crooked, barren flag holder crown the semicircular, mission-style...

Cadain's Watch is the last book in the Storms of Transformation series, tracing the journey of a family fleeing an oppressive state to save their illegally born daughter. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this Christian fiction book?

Washington D.C., Mar 19, 2017 / 04:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Raymond Arroyo has an impressive resume.He’s a New York Times bestselling author several times over. He’s an award-winning journalist and producer. And his weekly EWTN show, The World Over Live, reaches more than 350 million global households and 500 U.S. radio affiliates.So when Arroyo says his Will Wilder series of books for young readers just might be “the most important work I’ve ever done,” it’s quite a statement.What makes these books so important, in his view? The lifelong impact that they can have on kids.“When an adult reads your...

Solomon Bull: When the Friction Has Its Machine is a modern mystery/adventure book by conservative author Clayton Lindemuth. The adventure and personal challenges of the main character take center stage, while conveying important messages on self-reliance and survival.

Mr. Podhoretz, the former editor at Commentary magazine, looks back at the fierce, argumentative parties of New York’s intelligentsia.“These parties I mentioned,” Norman Podhoretz said the other day, “everybody gave parties. And there was a lot of drinking. Some visiting literary celebrity would show up, Partisan Review would make a party or I would make a party. Everybody came. And it was a really passionate intellectual life. It’s hard to imagine today, but people actually came to blows over literary disagreements.” It was a cold morning, and Mr. Podhoretz, 87, was recently back from the hospital after minor surgery, recuperating...

You ever have one of those days when you can’t quite tell if something is satire or not? That’s what we’re going through right now. Normally you can check the source’s url—if it’s the Onion or some other funny-sounding publication, you can write it off as a joke and move on. But what happens when the source is the most prestigious university in the world? In case you missed it, the College’s Implementation Committee for the Policy on Membership in Single Gender Social Organizations (oh god we’re never writing that again) released its recommendations today. If you’re looking for a...

"So You've Been Publicly Shamed" is a book by Jon Ronson that goes back to visit the victims of various internet shaming scandals, as well as studies the survivors of older scandals, psychologists who discuss the long term impact of seeming rejection by society and recovery methods for individuals and society as a whole.

Valentine’s Day is here, and with it, the usual slew of literary and pop culture reminders of what love does to us. Pick your poison—Jane Austen, Nicholas Sparks, the Brontes, Old Hollywood, 90s rom coms, BBC bodice rippers—we are saturated by reminders that a rewarding life includes a worthy, rewarding and, above all, romantic relationship. I don’t hate the romantic canon. But I want to convince you that we should broaden it by reviving an underrated masterpiece: Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. (The novel has also been made into a beautiful movie, although, full disclosure, I’ve not seen...

That’s Maths: Mathematical concepts influenced the structure and style of many of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories The world has been transformed by the internet. Google, founded just 20 years ago, is a major force in online information. The company name is a misspelt version of “googol”, the number one followed by one hundred zeros. This name echoes the vast quantities of information available through the search engines of the company. Long before the internet, the renowned Argentine writer, poet, translator and literary critic Jorge Luis Borges envisaged the universe as a vast information bank in the form of a...

Mr Kipling's exceedingly good art: Lockwood Kipling emerges from his son Rudyard's shadow in the V&A's splendid new exhibitionVictoria & Albert Museum, LondonUntil April 2 You certainly wouldn’t call Lockwood Kip­ling a household name. If he’s remembered at all, it tends to be incidentally: as father of the Nobel Prize-winning author Rudyard. A splendid new exhibition at the V&A, however, reveals what an interesting Victorian ­figure he was in his own right. Born in 1837, Lockwood was the son of a Methodist minister, but – inspired by a teenage visit to the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace – he opted...

I was wondering if there were any freepers here who are fans of the Red Gambit novel series, by Colin Gee. It's a series dealing with World War III, but set shortly after the end of World War II. In it, Stalin basically decides to stab the Western Allies in the back and restart the war with a eye to taking over all of Germany, and perhaps Western Europe as well.To stop this new enemy, the Allies must seek the help of their former German adversaries.

A book of short stories titled “Forty Minutes Late” has been returned to a San Francisco library -- 100 years late. ... Johnson’s great grandmother had checked it out from the city’s old Fillmore branch in 1917. She passed away a week before the due date, and the Fillmore branch is no longer around. Johnson found the 1909 book, by F. Hopkinson Smith, in an old steamer trunk in 1996. He assumed the library wouldn’t want it back, but a recently announced “fine forgiveness program” that runs through Feb. 14 inspired him to return it.

Most of you will probably remember Kathleen Donohoe, an Irish-American writer and New Yorker-and full disclosure, my cousin-from previous posts on this website. This year saw the publication of her debut novel, Ashes Of Fiery Weather. The title is taken from a poem by Wallace Stevens, Our Stars Come From Ireland, which celebrates the importance of place as a facet of memory. It’s a fitting entry point to this book, which explores how geography-both in New York City and Ireland-contours our worldview. Ashes also recognizes the importance of history, both on a collective and individual level, which-as the son of...

Llena Holodny December 30, 2016 William Shakespeare wrote a lot of great plays, but he also coined and popularized a lot of words and phrases that we still use to this day. We put together a list of our 21 favorites. Check them out: "Puking" "The Seven Ages of Man: The Infant" by Robert Smirke, derived from a monologue in Shakespeare's "As You Like It."Wikimedia "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At...