“The most venerable kinds of faith are more wondrously imaginative, less brittle upon contact with new knowledge, than Mr. Spielberg seems to suppose.” UATX Professor @SpencerKlavan on religion's long history with the question of alien life. @WSJFreeEx wsj.com/opinion/free-express…

My final photo of the 2025-2026 school year might be the best one. 📸 Year 3 loading...

Last day of the school year.

"A dominating drive for equality suffocates the very people whose uncommon talent, courage, and vision could pull everyone else upward." – UATX President Carlos Carvalho

Challenged from without and from within, there's now a real danger that we might be living through the twilight of the West, facing not just geopolitical challenges, but civilisational eclipse as people lose the beliefs that once sustained them. Western Civilisation, especially its English-speaking variant, once seemed unassailable; because what else has produced societies that were free, fair, rich, and safe in a way that no others were. But that restless curiosity and capacity for self-criticism has now metastasised into a corrosive form of civilisational self-loathing. Western Civilisation is worth believing in, and it is worth fighting for. My address to the next generation of Western leaders at @uaustinorg. Read it in full at The Tony Abbott Newsletter: tonyabbott.au/p/5ea360e7-61f…

"That restless curiosity and capacity for self-criticism, that protean capacity for growth and renewal, has now metastasized into a corrosive form of civilizational self-loathing." - @HonTonyAbbott, 28th Prime Minister of Australia

Another day in Austin, where you never know who’s going to stop by. Today it’s former Australian Prime Minister @HonTonyAbbott speaking at @uaustinorg.

As I frequently tell my own students @uaustinorg, the job market is about to be saturated with people like this: people who have been cheated out of their own minds for the stupidest possible reasons. People whose teachers didn’t want to be a burden or a bad guy or worst of all, an elitist, so they just gave up in advance on literature the old fashioned way. Sure, they made up a cock-and-bull story about how obsolete the classics were, how outmoded the old ways of teaching were, how impractical it was to sit with a pen and paper and run through verb conjugations or just puzzle over words. But the truth is they were scared of being that most valuable of beings, the kindly but stern authority figure. And then when the machines came for the books, they had not a leg to stand on. The result is that maybe no other skill will be more valuable in years to come, or more rare, than the ability to sit alone in a room and follow a train of thought from beginning to end. All those drills and disciplines they told you were “useless”? Reading, rhetoric, contemplation? Poetry, philosophy, fine art? Turns out they’re the only training that can mold you into the scarcest resource on earth, which is a functional adult human being. And to beat it all, that’s now just about the one kind of training that can make you proof against the disruptions of the AI economy. Forget who said it but it’s true: “learn to code” was crap advice. Learn to ode.

Tomorrow at UATX with @HonTonyAbbott. Join us!

This spring, students studied crown, cathedral, and crusade: the making of European culture through the fifteenth century.

I saw Ian McKellan do Hamlet, but I think I enjoyed this production more.

Fun fact: that's not make-up. That's accelerating aging, thanks to a rigorous curriculum and absolutely no grade inflation. Toughen up, kids!

Intramural basketball tournament hosted by Nutrabolt.