Carrying the torch
The honor and responsibility of growing up.
This summer, I’ve had the incredible opportunity to write for National Review as one of its editorial interns. Were I to describe all the aspects I love about NR, and the extent to which I love them, this post would be unbearably long and so saccharine that it would strain credulity.
Suffice it to say: I am having a blast, learning a lot, and slowly becoming a better writer.
Much to my surprise, one of my longer pieces, “Undermining American Capitalism,” a rebuttal to American Compass’s “Rebuilding American Capitalism,” was linked to by Jonah Goldberg in The Dispatch, quoted by Prof. Don Boudreaux in Cafe Hayek, and referenced by Dominic Pino in Capital Matters. To have my writing read and cited by such prolific, renowned, influential intellectuals is a surreal experience. These are men whose clarity of thought and quality of writing I aspire to emulate—they’re my superiors, not my equals.
Nonetheless, they are reading, considering, and agreeing with my thinking to the extent that they are willing to refer to it in their own writing. To be embraced by older expositors of liberty is an incredible honor. It is also a humbling, frightful thing. Are my friends and I really to fill the shoes of such titans? Such a task seems impossible but, in the immortal words of JFK, “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
"These are men whose clarity of thought and quality of writing I aspire to emulate—they’re my superiors, not my equals."
Well said