Free Republic

Nearly 2,000 years after it was buried in Mount Vesuvius ash, a charred Roman scroll has revealed its author and title without even being unrolled. Title revealed on PHerc. 172 using ink detection model. - Vesuvius Challenge The scroll, named PHerc. 172, is one of hundreds unearthed in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, which was entombed in volcanic debris when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, one of history’s most infamous eruptions The scroll was scanned in July at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire. Unusually, traces of ink appeared in the X-ray images, enabling...

Shauna Niequist's mom had spent almost all of her adult life being a pastor's wife, mother, and homemaker. She excelled in all of these roles. But 17 years in, she walked into a counselor's office and said, "I don't know who I am anymore. Something has to change." Through counseling, friendships, and prayer, says Niequist, her mother unearthed the gifts and passions that had drawn her to a social work degree. "I found my voice in my 40s and my vocation in my 50s..." Betty Friedan would have been proud. Surprised, too, perhaps, to see her ideas—dissected and debated for...

Marvel Comics’ Pride celebration returns this June with six all-new Pride Variant Covers drawn by superstar cover artist Meghan Hetrick. For the fifth consecutive year, Marvel’s Pride Variant Covers spotlight the LGBTQIA+ community with stunning portraits of LGTQIA+ characters—ranging from iconic heroes to recently introduced breakout stars. The covers can be found on Deadpool #15, Exceptional X-Men #10, Immortal Thor #24, New Champions #6, Runaways #1, and X-Men #17 throughout June. The characters featured this year are: KITTY PRYDE, beloved X-Man and pillar of the mutant community! Kitty is currently guiding a trio of new mutants in the critically-accalaimed Exceptional...

Conservatives, not liberals, are best positioned to build—and in many cases, are already doing so. The Democratic Party is in total disarray. Its exhausted leadership has struggled to focus on any single front to concentrate its fire on the new administration, while AOC and Gavin Newsom do their warmups for the 2028 primaries. DOGE cuts and trade wars could give Democrats a launchpad for retaking the House in 2026, but it does not give them a positive platform in any meaningful sense. Perhaps that is why a new book from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has captured the policy world’s...

In the seventh century BCE, the Greek poet Homer wrote the Odyssey. This fascinating tale of adventure and loss would captivate readers for centuries, even millennia. It tells the story of Odysseus attempting to travel home after the Trojan War. One of the most intriguing things about this lengthy poem is that there is significant controversy surrounding the locations mentioned throughout. Based on the best available evidence, where did Odysseus really travel to in the Odyssey? Does the Odyssey take place all over the Mediterranean? The most common belief is that the Odyssey takes place over a very large area....

Hey folks. Some time back I submitted the first few chapters of a book I'm writing (with an idea initially created by a friend). I had a few reviews, but the one that I found most useful was a private email, outside of Free Republic, that started: "I made it to page 28. Not gonna sugar coat this... it was a slog. " ...and, frankly, it was. When I re-read it, it was almost horrible. No real conflict to speak of. Chapters that simply made NO sense to the overall arc. So I re-wrote it. I punched it up quite...

Today we have a new audio book release, this time from Edward Bernays with his 1928 work "Propaganda". Download the audio here. There is a lot to learn about progressivism in this book. Among other things (prior post on this) Bernays believed the following items which were captions on a newer reprint cover: As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented(Page 39)Nowadays the successors of the rulers, those whose position or ability gives them power, can no...

What you don't know that you NEED to know. The Gathering Storm is a groundbreaking initiative addressing the critical gaps in our nation’s preparedness for emerging terror threats following the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Through an unprecedented public-private partnership, this project fosters collaboration across federal, state, and local levels to identify threats and implement best practices. We have partnered with the top Global War on Terror intelligence professionals and special operations veterans to inform YOU on the potential for a terrorist attack in YOUR community. The mission of The Gathering Storm is not to create fear as happens in legacy media...

Megyn is joined by David Zweig, journalist and author of An Abundance of Caution…

Writing a novel is hard. Writing one in a month is insane. Unless you are William Faulkner, who wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, between the hours of midnight and four in the morning. Indeed, the author himself claimed, “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” Faulker said he did not change a word in the end. Some might say Faulkner was touched by the Divine. Lucky him!...

Karmelo Anthony's mother says family has been "under attack," that her daughter has been afraid to sleep in her own bed, and that her husband's "mental health is deteriorating day by day."

A panel of experts gathered in Washington D.C. last week to discuss how their creative industries are coping with technological disruption cited AI as the latest challenge in a decades-long struggle to maintain sustainable careers in the digital era. The panel was part of "The Story Starts With Us," a day-long forum that addressed the threat generative AI poses to copyright law and the creative industries. It was co-hosted by the Association of American Publishers and the Copyright Alliance. The panel was moderated by Alex Reisner, a freelance journalist and contributing writer for The Atlantic who has written extensively about...

Peter Lovesey, the crime novelist, who has died aged 88, was a pioneer of the period whodunnit, as the creator of the Victorian sleuth Sergeant Cribb. Although there had been a few one-off historical mysteries before the advent of Lovesey in the 1970s (including Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End, set in Thebes in 2000 BC), he was generally regarded as the first author to set a successful detective series in the past. Sergeant Cribb paved the way for other period detectives such as Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael, Lindsey Davis’s Falco and C J Sansom’s Shardlake. The sub-genre now...

copacetic adjective co·​pa·​cet·​ic ˌkō-pə-ˈse-tik variants or less commonly copasetic or copesetic Synonyms of copacetic : very satisfactory And his smile told him that everything was copacetic. —Robert Bloch Did you know? If you’re living the life of Riley, strolling along easy street, or wallowing in hog heaven, your circumstances may be described as copacetic. A word of obscure origin, copacetic has for over a century satisfied those who’ve had a hankering to describe that which is hunky-dory or otherwise completely satisfactory. (If "of obscure origin" leaves you feeling less than copacetic, the note here will undoubtedly remedy that.) Life isn’t...

WASHINGTON—Just days after Kristi Noem took office as President Trump’s head of Homeland Security, she accompanied U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials on a predawn raid of several neighborhoods in New York City. “Live this AM from NYC. I’m on it,” she posted on Jan. 28 at 4:43 a.m. on X, with a photo of herself sporting an ICE baseball cap and getting into a car. The problem: The raid was still ongoing when Noem posted about it, undercutting the element of surprise, according to people familiar with the operation. Noem’s handling of that early raid was emblematic of the...

In 2000, I published a book called “Rules for Aging,” a sort of how-to guide for navigating the later years of one’s life. I was 60 at the time and thought that I knew a thing or two about being old. Twenty-five years later, I just finished a sequel, which reflects my advice for growing very, very old. (I have been doing a lot of that lately.) It took me 85 years to learn these things, but I believe they’re applicable at any age. 1. Nobody’s thinking about you. It was true 25 years ago, and it’s true today. Nobody...

The time has come to cancel or move the 2025 Seattle Worldcon. And to cancel or move the 2026 Los Angeles Worldcon. It has to be done, in order to honor a century-old tradition of science fiction. From its beginnings as a recognized genre in 1926, science fiction has warmly embraced writers and readers from around the world. Hugo Gernsback happily published letters from foreign readers in his magazines and featured stories by several foreign authors. When he established the Science Fiction League in 1934, he included chapters in other nations. The first major science fiction convention in 1939 was...

On the exact 100th anniversary of the publication date of “The Great Gatsby,” the Library of Congress is producing a full reading of the novel, livestreamed from our Thomas Jefferson building on Capitol Hill. Be an old sport and join us in-person or online to experience this classic American novel which entered the public domain in 2021.

The Trump administration has sacked a senior NATO official who was recommended by a conservative research group to be fired as part of a broader effort to purge wokeness from the Pentagon. Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the only woman on NATO’s military committee, was dismissed from the alliance over the weekend without explanation, according to multiple reports. She is one of only a handful of female Navy three-star officers and was the first woman to lead the Naval War College, a job she held until 2023. Chatfield reportedly got a call from Adm. Christopher Grady, the acting chairman of...

So last week, the word was out that Netflix is playing host to a reboot of “The Chronicles of Narnia.” On top of that, talks are apparently in the works to have none other than Meryl Streep voice Aslan. Yes, they are coming for Narnia in the same way they came for “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings.” A galaxy far, far, away is not safe, nor is Middle Earth; why should Narnia be sacrosanct? Deadline reports:In the novels, Aslan is a talking lion who serves as Narnia’s guardian and a guide for the human children. Generally portrayed...