Sarah Skwire
Sarah Skwire is a fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis.
Related Freeman Articles
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The Eyes Watching You
1984 and the Surveillance State
JUNE 13, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
We'd better hope we're living under a Kafkaesque regime rather than an Orwellian one. In the former, incompetence provides a little space for a life to be lived. In the latter, there is no private space, there are no innocents, and the surveillance State never makes mistakes.
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All This Useless Beauty
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 4
MAY 31, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
Shakespeare upbraids a young man for his refusal to have children; it constitutes, in Shakespeare's analysis, a refusal to engage in the basic human activity of trade and exchange, and amounts to wasting a gift on himself rather than passing it on as intended.
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Hollow Men
MAY 10, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
The Great Gatsby is full of hollow people living hollow lives without any meaningful connection to each other. And that's exactly the point.
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Built on Sand
MAY 03, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
The sprawling, pre-Holocaust family saga of The Brothers Ashkenazi displays the shortcomings of all systematic, simple answers to the problem of being human.
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Extremely Creative and Incredibly Destructive
APRIL 19, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
Donald E. Westlake's crime novel The Ax takes on the question of creative destruction in tough times.
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A Traditional Marriage
APRIL 05, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
Dorothy Canfield-Fisher's novel The Home-Maker (1924) upholds Tolstoy's maxim that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It also offers a clear--and, for its time, innovative--depiction of the ways rigid definitions of gender roles can stifle the ability of women and men to find ways to flourish.
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Binding the Muse
MARCH 22, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
The tension between rules designed in advance and those that emerge from trial and error lies at the heart of the human experience, from poetry to civilization.
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On the Road Again
MARCH 08, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
Edna Ferber's stories about Emma McChesney present the life and struggles of a traveling saleswoman in a time when her job was considered "men's work."
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Book Value: Fairy Tales for Cube Dwellers
FEBRUARY 22, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
A collection of Sinclair Lewis's short stories reveals a writer and a mind too good to have only one view about the world of business and the people who populate it.
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Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
FEBRUARY 08, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
A book on cooking during WWII illustrates the importance of local knowledge, spontaneous order, and emergent knowledge.
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