James J. Kilpatrick has been on my mind lately — partly because he figures in Nancy MacLean’s excellent history of economist James M. Buchanan’s role in the long-game political project of Charles Koch and his fellow travelers on the radical right, and partly because he figures in my own education, an early influence in my long apprenticeship as a writer. When I was in junior high and high school, our local newspaper carried Kilpatrick’s syndicated column, “The Writer’s Art.”  I read this with great interest – it was one of the first places where I encountered the idea of writing Read more