Culture

Being an eclectic chap, Cockburn has sampled his fair share of music. And he’s not ashamed to admit, contrary to Al Michaels’s suggestion that Taylor Swift only appeals to teenage girls, that he considers himself a “Swiftie” — not least of all because Swift makes repeated reference to one of his favorite activities: drinking alcohol. Swift just released her new album, Midnights, along with an official music video to accompany her catchy and oh-so-clever song, Anti-Hero. The video tells you all you need to know about Swift’s preferred method for dealing with her problems. Though she never mentions booze by name, she appears in the video taking shots and desperately shaking the last drop from a bottle of wine directly into her mouth.

For much of my life, I confess I didn’t pay much attention to Queen Elizabeth II. My Muslim upbringing in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia meant that the idea of a female figurehead was utterly foreign to me. How could a woman be the head of a church or the leader or embodiment of a nation? This was not what my god taught. Allah, for me, was the ultimate patriarchal ruler. He would certainly not countenance a figure like the Queen. But once I left Islam and became a convert to the ideals of the West, I came to appreciate her. The massive crowds following her coffin as it wound its way down from Balmoral, through Edinburgh, to London and finally to Windsor show that I am far from alone. The Queen was beloved.

At the beginning of 1962, President John F. Kennedy had high hopes for a peaceful year with the Soviet Union, the United States’ most dangerous adversary. On December 30, 1961, Kennedy issued a statement offering his good wishes for the new year to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet people. Ten months later, in October of 1962, the US and the Soviet Union were on the brink of war. The Soviets had moved missiles into Cuba, which initially went undetected by US intelligence. On October 14, an American U-2 spy plane took pictures showing missile base construction taking place in Cuba. The next evening, American analysts realized the implications of what that construction meant.

Candace Owens's latest foray into the sphere of defending antisemitism ought to be something everyone can easily condemn. Discussing rapper Kanye West's controversial post, which has gotten him locked out of his social media, Owens said Monday: "If you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic. You did not think that he wrote this tweet because he hates or wants to genocide Jewish people. This is not the beginning of a Holocaust." https://twitter.

Progressives at the zenith of privilege and power have steered US civil rights, education, and welfare policies almost exclusively for fifty years. What does the nation have to show for it? Recent answers include federalized transgender protections, academic collapse, and the expansion of a dependent, often disreputable underclass for whom permanent government-based custodial care is the only feasible option. Food Stamps, Medicaid, Section Eight, and other public income support evidently sap incentive and enterprise, but what’s the alternative now for the structurally unemployable? Anti-white indoctrination is rife in tax-funded schools. Price inflation and declining social mobility haunt the millennial generation’s future.

Spotify once took a run at Joe Rogan. YouTube banned Dan Bongino. Twitter permanently suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene. Twitter also famously canceled Donald Trump, and for a while, me. As with the suspension of Trump (and on a much, much lesser scale, me) progressives cheered the deplatformings the way public lynchings used to attract a picnicking crowd. The left controls social media (as well as most mainstream media) and so day by day their unreal world becomes ethically more cleansed, more free of things they do not like, and with all the bad news (Hunter Biden) made to go away. The world online is the way they want it to be, with the real world held at bay behind the screen. Like living in The Villages in Florida, or maybe in the Matrix.

If there is one celeb to not rally behind right now, it’s Kanye West. Over the past few years, the rapper's mental health has steadily declined and his outbursts have become more regular. As he becomes more unhinged, friends who used to come to his defense have realized it’s in their best interest to quiet down. Yet in spite of all that, Cockburn can't help but notice that House Republicans have embraced Kanye. A tweet, which somehow has not been deleted, was posted on Thursday by the House Republicans Twitter account. It reads, "Kanye. Elon. Trump." Not only was the tweet ratio'd within minutes — with quote tweets such as "who are three people we really don’t need to hear from ever again?

Tucker Carlson has tackled a question that has long puzzled Cockburn: is Kanye West crazy? Ye has had his fair share of controversial moments: he appeared on a 2006 cover of Rolling Stone mimicking Jesus Christ with a crown of thorns. He infamously stormed the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards stage to tell Taylor Swift she didn’t deserve her award. For the past couple years, he's been battling ex-wife Kim Kardashian and her family, during which time he also became religious, started hosting Sunday Services and bought a ranch in Cody, Wyoming, which he tried to sell but then took off the market. Most recently, Ye incited establishment ire by wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt alongside conservative firebrand buddy Candace Owens at Paris Fashion Week.

Portland is one of the nation’s most beautiful cities, positioned at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers. But fading livability hangs over it like a raw gray drizzle. After years of political mayhem and an explosion of drug-related homelessness and crime, the city’s fabled quality of life is plunging. Every taxpayer in the 2.5 million metro area knows it. Portlandia had its lure and charms, and yesterday’s salons and eateries still look modish. But they’re closed, chairs stacked, thank you for your patronage. Those Patagonia-clad tourists and corporate executives on generous expense accounts won’t be coming back soon. On a warm, cloudless autumn day, the city’s once spotless downtown should be bustling but...and it takes a while for this to click...

Close to a century ago, in 1928, Alfred E. Smith, the governor of New York, became the first Catholic nominee of a major political party. A predominantly Protestant America was suspicious of Smith, who, among other things, opposed Prohibition. New York lawyer and Episcopalian Charles C. Marshall published a letter questioning Smith’s fitness for office. Among other criticisms, Marshall quoted papal encyclicals that denied the legitimacy of religious freedom as popularly understood by most Americans. “What the hell is an encyclical?” Smith is reported to have responded. Concerns about the irreconcilability of American republican government and Catholicism were nothing new.

We're all in major trouble anyway, so may as well throw another culture war onto the bonfire. How about this: specialists versus generalists. You can picture it now: the specialists refuse to fight except through a very esoteric discipline that only they understand and won't shut up about. While the generalists fight any way they can, on the beaches, on the landing grounds — and badly all around. The debate between specialists and generalists is an old one, and these days it isn't much of a debate at all. The specialists have all but routed their generalist foes, and are busy dictating terms (in extremely technical language with plenty of appendices).

An unfortunate milestone has been passed in the United States as it is reported that for the first time ever there are more marijuana smokers than cigarette smokers in our once great nation. To put it bluntly, so to speak, this societal transformation has taken iconic American glamor, the Marlboro Man, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and replaced it with Cheech, Chong and Otto the school bus driver from The Simpsons. Here in New York City, where once men in suits and hats and square dames in heels hustled, cigarette betwixt fingers, plowing ahead to the future, it now just smells like weed. Everywhere. Rockefeller Center? Smells like weed. Subway stations? Smell like weed. Washington Square Park? Well, OK, Washington Square Park always smelled like weed. But you get the point.

Eliza Fletcher was abducted and murdered on her morning run last Friday. The mother of two young boys was up at 4:30 a.m. to squeeze in a workout before a hectic day of prepping her kids for school and teaching kindergarten. Many working moms understand why Fletcher was out running so early. There was probably no other time in her day to do it. Many runners understand why she was running in the dark. Training takes time and discipline, so pre-sunrise hours are popular to get in necessary miles. Fletcher was a serious runner who had qualified for the Boston Marathon and was heavily involved in the running community online. A chilling video image of Fletcher, dressed in purple shorts and a pink sports bra just before the abduction, left female runners nationwide gripped with fear.

Every writer from the New York area who lived through 9/11 has to write about it, right? Not long after the terrorist attacks — I was about eight years old, keep in mind — I came up with a game, which my mother indulged. I called it “Pilot.” I would approach my mother, and I might or might not have a little puzzle piece or something hidden in or under my clothes. My mother would then pat me down, trying to find it. If she found it, I would be “arrested.” If I hadn’t hidden it, I’d walk into the next room — “boarding the flight” — with no incident. But if I had hidden it and slipped it past security, I’d “board the flight” and then knock over a “skyscraper” I’d built out of wooden blocks. Yes, at age eight, I was pretending to be Osama bin Laden.