The Frank Forum

One of my favorite television shows growing up was  The Wonder Years . It was a nostalgic show that today works for me on two levels. Its pilot debuted just after the Super Bowl in January, 1988 and the show ran through 1993, covering a narrative time span about twenty years prior. And while it works on that level, it has a secondary layer of nostalgia today because it cannot be found in its original version in high-quality, modern-day home viewing. Understandably, music rights to this classic show became prohibitively expensive after its initial airing and most updated releases of the show have included different songs, which totally changes the experience. So in many ways, this additional layer of nostalgia has to do with a show that has essentially become "lost." Perhaps fitting of its coming-of-age themes. While the protagonist and narrator (voiced by Daniel Stern) was Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage), the Arnold family itself and specifically the Dad, Jack Arnold (Dan Lauria),...

I keep on hearing writers say that we are in the midst of a "loneliness epidemic". Westerners - Americans especially - have become dangerously atomized and dislodged from society. Our social fabric is tattered. So much so, that it is beginning to look like Akakiy Akakievitch's overcoat in that classic short story by Nikolai Gogol. Our sense of community is threadbare.  Thankfully, I am starting to see more literature on our decline in community. A problem cannot be solved unless it is first addressed, right?  I recently wrote a piece about our problem of unbelonging and atomization for National Review a few days ago. You can read that here .  And while writing about the problem is a good start, it is, in and of itself, insufficient. We need prescription. We need a course of action. A fundamental question that we should all ask ourselves: how can I become more involved in my local community?  We can't snap our fingers and hope that Americans undergo a civic renewal wi...

Bill Kristol, Donald Trump Dr. Daniel Pitt, a fantastic conservative thinker, writer, and professor of politics at the University of Sheffield, is well worth a follow on Twitter. His tweets connote a kind of conservatism that I like to call "positive conservatism", free of partisan platitudes and unnecessary combative rhetoric.  I've written about him for my blog before. You can find that here.   Here's a sanguine post of his from a few days ago: #Conservatism is about love.❤️ pic.twitter.com/AGGcg65s9X — Dr Daniel Pitt (@DanJTPitt) April 30, 2023 I'm afraid, though, that many so-called conservatives don't understand this point. Conservatism, to many social media provocateurs, seems to be less about love, and more about nasty internal skirmishing.   Right now it is the NatCons (a term that derives from the Edmund Burke Foundation's National Conservatism project) and more libertarian-adjacent conservatives that are feuding relentlessly. I've heard som...