Recent Writings
The Next American Awakening Starts Here
Some people say that there has never been a harder time in the United States to be Catholic. One can understand why. Public approval weighs against us: today, a furious secularism repudiates ancient Christian teachings about marriage and family, even as rebellion...
Midge the Magnificent
I first met Midge Decter during the mid-1980s through neoconservative publishing circles in New York, a world as distant from today's as it was, in turn, from the time of the Second World War. Though no one back then knew it, those years would turn out to be the...
Children of the Porn
If pandemic exhaustion, galloping inflation, and talk of World War III haven’t yet gotten you down, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation might do the trick. This is not the fault of author Christine Emba, whose prose in this short book is stylish, engaging, and, above all,...
More, Fisher – and More
On the feast of St. Thomas Becket, it’s fitting to recall just how exacting the clash between religious faith and earthly powers can be. Some ages, like his, create martyrs. Our own age more often bullies people out of martyrdom pre-emptively, as secular intimidation...
2021: Our Year In Books
The stranger the times, the better the books, or so the abundance of 2021 suggests. Several new companions bear special mention to readers of First Things. Jesuit at Large, the posthumous collection of essays by Paul V. Mankowski, S.J., confirms what anyone who read...
Millennials, Put Away Childish Political Things
As the election results of 2021 suggest a chill in the air for the left, the time has come to talk to younger voters—millennials and Generation Z—about America’s future. The message can be distilled in a single sentence: You’ve been robbed. You have been robbed of...

Recent Media
Who are You? Family, Politics, and the Hunger for Identity
In the episode I speak with Mary Eberstadt about her latest book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. She argues that the revolutionary changes to family structure across the western world: fatherlessness, divorce, abortion, single...
Why More People Favor Socialism and What to Do
Eberstadt said that it’s now been generations that a certain kind of anti-Americanism has been dominant, especially on university and college campuses. “What young people need to understand is that there are deep reasons why they’re being fed that narrative. They are...
The Primal Screams of Identity Politics: A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt
Did the sexual revolution create identity politics? Why are young men and women so unhappy? Mary Eberstadt, Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center and Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute, joins Madison's Notes to...
How To Destroy Both Genders In Fifty Years
In Today's "Moment of Truth," Saurabh and Emma sit down with Mary Eberstadt, conservative essayist, former policy planning staff under the Reagan Administration and author of "Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics," to discuss the...
“Truth may be unwanted, inconvenient, resented, mocked in all the best places—even harassed, suppressed, and forced underground. But that does not make it anything other than truth.”
Latest Release!

Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics
Her logic—backed by startling new data—runs as follows: humans from time immemorial have forged their identities within elemental structures of kinship. Today, following decades of social shocks like family shrinkage and widespread breakdown, generations of people have been deprived of the building blocks of identity itself. This dispossession, argues Eberstadt, propels the increasingly frantic flight to membership in identitarian groups. The seemingly constant fury is, in fact, a primal scream for the familial root system of which many have been deprived.
Praise for Primal Screams
George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs
Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University
Mary Ann Glendon, Professor of Law, Harvard University
R.R. Reno, First Things
David Marcus, The Federalist
Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review
Other Books

How the West Really Lost God
Adam and Eve After the Pill
The Last Homily
The Loser Letters
It’s Dangerous to Believe
“A tour de force, essential reading.” – Jonathan Last, The Weekly Standard