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"In his debut poetry collection, The Nature of Things Fragile, Peter Vertacnik depicts a world fraught with vulnerability and loss. Utilizing a wide range of both received and nonce poetic forms, including sonnets, villanelles, triolets, a sestina, epigrams, blank verse, and word-count, he confronts the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, both recent and long past ("Face Value," "Odd Elegy," "Trace,"); the memories of old houses and towns left behind ("Departure," Sugar Beets," "Mourning Doves"); and the vanishing of once-ubiquitous analog particulars ("Apology to Candles," "Dial Tone," "In Praise of Blank Cassettes"). It is indeed a book of elegies, but one that also celebrates the people, places, and things it laments, preserving their names and details while laying them to rest"--

When COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan, China under mysterious circumstances, the Communist Party of China covered up its existence for as long as possible. It is now apparent that there is more to COVID than what the authorities wish for us to know. Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life details the decades-long pursuit by the Chinese Communists to dominate the biotechnology industry—to control the very building blocks of life on Earth—to further their political control at home and their supremacy abroad. More appalling than the egregious cover-up that China’s rulers engaged in with COVID-19 is the fact that Western scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and research labs have contributed to China’s rapid (and dangerous) growth in the biotech industry—so much so that China, not the United States, may become the seat of the biotechnology industry. The Chinese leadership believes that biotechnology is a critical industry for the Communist Party to achieve its goal of becoming the world’s dominant superpower by 2049. In China’s biotech sector, truly macabre practices are being developed, from ambitious cloning programs to the creation of potential pathogens that China’s military plans to use in “specific genetic attacks” against Beijing’s growing list of political enemies.To stop the threat, author Brandon J. Weichert proposes the world’s nations create a comprehensive set of treaties for regulating biotechnology research and development. Further, Weichert calls for Washington to slow the transfer of advanced biotechnology knowledge and funding from the United States to China using means like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Unless an all-of-government (and society) approach is taken to curbing irresponsible biotech development in China, then another—deadlier—COVID-19-like pandemic could be at hand.

"The melting pot metaphor has been the prevailing ideal for integrating new citizens throughout most of America's history. Yet contemporary elites often reject it as antiquated or even racist and advocate replacing it with multiculturalism. This book informs the debate over multiculturalism and the melting pot with an essential international and historical perspective. It evaluates how the melting pot and multicultural models have worked out in other societies around the world over 2,500 years of history: it provides a multicultural look at the melting pot and multiculturalism"--

"The U.S. and China are locked in a tech struggle that will determine the course of our era. America is already behind in critical areas. Gordon G. Chang outlines what has happened and what must be done"--

"Liberal education, if it does not discover how to speak to society in ways our culture understands, and if it cannot make its virtues apparent to the democracy in which we live, will make itself smaller and smaller, lose the audience it wishes to hold, and die by diminishment. The liberal arts are dying because most Americans don't see the point of them. They don't get why anyone would study literature or history or the classics-or, more contemporarily, feminist criticism, whiteness studies, or the literature of postcolonial states-when they can get an engineering or a business degree. Americans have two serious concerns regarding the value of a liberal arts education: first, the personal good of a liberal education, its value to the future life of the student, which is no longer as evident as it once was; and second, that except for academic ideologues on the left who passionately believe the liberal arts can be used to bludgeon students to become "social justice" activists, we more old-fashioned instructors are so frightened of speaking the language of usefulness and relevance that we come across less as citizens helping to promote the wider good and more as cloistered, inward-looking intellectuals. If we have the capacity and the will to be of real use to society, we have hidden it under a bushel. My point is that the liberal arts are, at their best, not only of immense value-let's even say of "use"-to each of us as individuals, but also to America at large. Part of the greatness of the Founders was that they were much more hesitant than we are to believe that liberal education could not be useful or that other forms of education could not be liberal. If Jefferson could think of a fully educated man as one who understands farming and philosophy, if he had no trouble moving from classical studies to writing a tract upon which a nation would be built, why are we Americans today so rigid in our separation of the theoretical from the practical, the scholarly from the civic?"--

In the 1970s, John M. Olin, one of the country's leading industrialists, decided to devote his fortune to saving American free enterprise. Over the next three decades, the John M. Olin Foundation funded the conservative movement as it emerged from the intellectual ghetto and occupied the halls of power. The foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars fostering what its longtime president William E. Simon called the ?counterintelligentsia? to offset liberal dominance of university faculties and the mainstream media and to make conservatism a significant cultural force. Among the counterintellectuals the foundation identified and supported at key stages of their careers were Charles Murray during his early work on welfare reform, Allan Bloom as he wrote The Closing of the American Mind, and Francis Fukuyama as he was developing his ?End of History? thesis. Using exclusive access to the John M. Olin Foundation's leading personalities as well as its extensive archives, John J. Miller tells the story of an intriguing man and his unique philanthropic vision. He gives fascinating insights into the foundation's role in helping the CIA fund anti-Communist organizations during the Cold War and its extensive help to Irving Kristol and others as they moved from left to right to found the neoconservative movement. He tells of the foundation's early and critical role in building institutions such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, which served to transform conservative ideas into national policies. A Gift of Freedom shows how John M. Olin's ?venture capital fund for the conservative movement? helped develop one of the leading forces in American politics and culture.

The wonders of progress are all around us, so commonplace that we usually take them for granted. Moved by curiosity and compassion, we have built a world that satisfies many deep human needs, especially the desire not to stand so naked in the face of nature's many malignancies. To cancer, we say chemotherapy; to infertility, we say in vitro; to depression, we say Prozac. Without technology, man is impotent, and only a fool would romanticize the age when mothers and children died regularly in childbirth, when keeping warm and staying fed were life's central struggles, and when the visible afflictions of the body had no other explanation except the hatred of the gods. Of modern progress, there is much to be proud.