"Moral Emptiness"

"A candidate who's conservative on spending, values, and national security is under attack for courting Democrats, having been being unmarried in his thirties, refusing to vilify Dr. Fauci, affirming that black lives matter, and acknowledging that House Republicans tried to overturn the last election. In 2022, these are the taboos that define the Republican party. Win or lose, McMullin has exposed them."

Will Saletan at The Bulwark asks, "What exactly does the GOP stand for?"

Did Me Some Talkin' to the Sun

"'You go in cloaked in anonymity and with your future a huge question mark,' Soderbergh said. 'You come out of the end of it and people know your movie and are asking, "What do you want to do now?"'"

Chris Lee in the Los Angeles Times ponders the Sundance Film Festival upon the event's twenty-fifth anniversary.

"I Dig a City Called Salt Lake"

"As he admits, the question of whether Latter-day Saints can be considered Christians does not yield a universally acceptable or historically obvious answer, no matter what Mormons may claim. You might say that the answer depends on who is asking the question, and when. Throughout their church's relatively brief history, Mormons have been torn between a desire to separate themselves from other Christians and other Americans and a desire to assimilate and be accepted. The 'dynamic tension' that Givens detects between these poles runs like an electrical current through all the other paradoxes and contradictions that he believes define Mormon culture."

In Salon, Andrew O'Hehir reviews Terryl L. Givens's People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture.

In The Journal of American History, Jan Ships reviews Richard L. Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, and Bushman responds.