Life

Thursday

Bridget Arsenault

A playwright who went from stage to screen, then set aside scripts to pen a novel. Its themes? Escape and reinvention

Lila Raicek likes a big swing. Just last year the New York-based playwright and screenwriter debuted My Master Builder in London’s West End – only a matter of months after the first draft landed on director Michael Grandage’s desk. Most writers wait a lifetime to catch even a whiff of a Broadway or central London staging (especially one starring Ewan McGregor and Elizabeth Debicki). But for Raicek, this warp-speed ascension is something of a pattern. “I wrote a play at Columbia,” says Raicek of her college days. “It was my senior graduate school thesis. And that play was seen by a couple of people in Hollywood.” Bang, that script gets optioned for the screen and lands Raicek in a Los Angeles writers’ room.

Eric Walker

A cup of gas station coffee that’s worth traveling for

In the early days of the motor car, if you wanted to cross the high-altitude Upper Engadin in Switzerland, your vehicle had to be pulled by horses. Because up to 1925, the townsfolk of St. Moritz had a ban on driving. When it was lifted, Shell opened a petrol station. It also funded the paving of the straight road between this and a sister Shell stop at Samedan. The head of the company, Henri Deterding lived at Suvretta, just outside St. Moritz, and staged speed trials along this three-to-four-kilometer stretch. There is still a Shell petrol station on the St. Moritz site. It functioned for years before slipping into disrepair.

Friday

Bill Kauffman

Reflections on the Moon

We Americans have been instructed to burst our buttons with pride over Artemis II’s drive-by of the Moon. But out here in cratering America, far from Mission Control, we remain buttoned-up. This is not due to our skinflint nature or lack of imagination; nah, it’s just that Big Science – “corporate socialism,” as the late parsimonious populist Democratic senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin termed the space program – is spiritless, mechanical and inhuman.

Josie Cox

Adieu, Dinosaur the pigeon

On one of the first warm Saturdays of this year, hundreds of New Yorkers flocked to the popular High Line, the railway-turned-public park that extends over 22 blocks of Manhattan, to bid farewell to a T-Rex-sized pigeon. The pigeon, cast out of aluminum and named “Dinosaur,” had been a resident of its elevated perch since 2024. As so many New Yorkers will tell you, though, part of what’s magical about living in this city is that the experience is often transient. In the words of Baz Luhrmann, you should “leave before it makes you hard.” There’s nothing worse than a hard pigeon and so it was that on that glorious day last month, I joined throngs of people eager to get one last look at the monstrous, departing bird.

Peter Watson

How the movies improve your mental health

If you subscribe to The Spectator, there’s a fair chance you are a committed reader. Of books, I mean. Books are your friends, they don’t frighten you. Even long books. But here’s a behavioral oddity that I’ve noticed in others, and in myself. We tend not to read many books twice, but we do often watch movies twice, even more than twice. Of course, length may have a lot to do with it; movies are rarely more than two hours long; books can often take days to finish. But is there something more to it, something deeper? Down here on the beaches in Florida we now recognize something the psychologists are calling “cinematherapy.

oil
Melissa Kite

How far would I go for oil?

The oil delivery man had way too much swagger and, as he waved his nozzle about, I realized that he might be expecting a little something. Oh dear, I thought, as he pushed the nozzle into my oil tank, pressed the button on his truck and spent less than ten seconds giving me the amount of oil I could afford. Oh dear, what if the oil crisis is now at such fever pitch that desperate housewives in remote places are offering a little something on the side to get more oil? I had two French cyclists who ran the shower in the en-suite for so long I thought they had fallen asleep Ten seconds’ worth of oil did feel like the end of the world. Usually, I can afford to let the truck fill the entire tank and it comes to about a grand.

Aidan Hartley

The cattle rustlers have returned

Kenya When a mob of Somali cattle I bought in Kenya’s far north arrived on the farm in February, we quarantined them in a remote corner. To protect them against lions they slept in a boma with high drystone walls topped with treacherous thorns, guarded by a fierce police-licensed guard named Joseph. The Somalis are great stockmen, though these beautiful beasts, known as Awai, are more long-legged and rangy than our traditional ranch Borans. My truckload of cattle had survived a two-year drought on rocks and dust and they could walk hundreds of miles to water, yet they were randy and highly fertile. These are ancient cattle, of the sort that you see in petroglyphs and ochre painted on rock faces across Africa. I have fallen in love with them.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

The banality of Meghan the Martyr

The great Dolly Parton once quipped “get down off your cross, honey, someone needs the wood.” This remark, aimed at attention-seeking self-described martyrs, could almost have been dreamt up for the Duchess of Sussex. Meghan, along with her ever-subservient husband Prince Harry, is currently bringing the gospel according to Meghan to Australia. During her quasi-royal tour to promote a wellness weekend that she is the keynote speaker at, Meghan has invented a new catchphrase – “Call me Meg” – and has been photographed smiling and looking appropriately radiant. The Netflix cash might be drying up, but enough has been banked for her to look a million dollars in the various Instagram-friendly outfits she has been sporting.

Meghan

Tuesday

Philip Patrick

The great soccer World Cup swindle

Tickets for this summer’s soccer World Cup are the most expensive in the tournament’s history. Or the history of any sporting event for that matter, with the possible exception of one-off extravaganzas like the Mayweather-Pacquiao showdown in 2015. The face value of tickets at this American tournament are a staggering five times higher that of the previous World Cup in Qatar. The most expensive seats for the final match have reached wallet-busting levels, affordable only to plutocrats and corporate boondogglers. And that’s just face value. What about the quaintly named secondary market? I occasionally peruse Fifa’s resale site, where the custodians of the game double dip from the buyer and seller to act as an official tout.

The soccer World Cup trophy sits in front of President Donald Trump

Thursday

Kelly Chapman

No one in the DC political class is cool

No one in the DC political class is cool. For all our American spirit of independence, democracy still defers to the majority, and power compels even the most singular, Machiavellian mind to mold itself in the image of the people. Politics drains the blood out of the individual, replacing him or her with a bland and legible product, flattened into the image of at least 50 percent of the population. Prediction markets are a perfect example of this effect, shining the brightest lights into the caverns of cool, calcifying opinions into trends, trends into probabilities, and probabilities into certainties. There is nothing that poses more of a threat to cool than this, and no market hungrier for it than the politicos of Washington, DC.

Ruaridh Nicoll

Road-tripping across blockaded Cuba

My wife Camila doesn’t drive, but she does direct. Studying the map, she’ll say, “This road!”, and before I know it, we’re off down some track, startling locals who haven’t seen a “yuma” – technically an American but really any foreigner – for years. Cuba is a country that lends itself to country road adventure. Besides drinking daiquiris, it’s perhaps my favorite thing to do. And it’s what I miss most now that it’s impossible: the US oil blockade that began in January means there is no gasoline. ‘Is this ceviche the red snapper or the snook?’ I asked. The waiter shrugged, ‘Once it’s ceviche it’s hard to tell’ Few others seem to do it.

Josie Cox

My search for the perfect New York therapist ended badly

Before moving to New York City, I had a particular vision of what my life as a writer in this fabled land of opportunity would look like. I’d wear sleek, black turtlenecks and skinny jeans. I’d go to diners and eat bagels. I’d defy the caloric calculus and stay svelte. I’d write at my window like Carrie Bradshaw, getting paid at least $2.50 per word. I’d go to book parties and stroll through the West Village, occasionally bumping into a semi-famous friend. We’d spontaneously drink wine. Perhaps most importantly, I’d have an excellent therapist – someone who had many leather-bound books, a calm and reassuring presence that could effortlessly calibrate my mental state. He’d look a bit like Wallace Shawn or maybe Barbra Streisand.

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Is ‘international law’ practical?

The acceleration of history and the increasingly rapid advancement of the postmodern project, aimed at the transcendence of humanity by itself, makes consideration of the fundamentals of the progressive project necessary, but also inevitable. Among them is its dedication to the hectic search for hitherto unsuspected “human rights” and their instant realization in the name of “natural law,” a subject the French historian and political philosopher Pierre Manent has studied in depth and brilliantly illuminated in a number of works, most recently Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason.

Peter Watson

Palm Beach gets a European twist

In these parts, it is always said that the most disappointing aspect of Palm Beach life is… well, the beach itself. Yes, it has sand, sea, minimal surf (and, as often as not, “dangerous marine life,” as the deep purple flags flown at the lifeguard stations indicate). But that is all. There is nothing like what you get, for example, in the north shore of the Mediterranean where, from Gibraltar in the west to Bodrum in Turkey, thousands of miles to the east, every few hundred yards you have a chic café or a ritzy restaurant, or boutiques selling everything from bikes to bikinis. No, the beaches of Palm Beach are socially inept, empty of entertainment, where the most exciting thing I have seen (twice) is a seven-foot shark caught on a line, which is a touch off putting for bathers.

Gage Klipper

My barn dog is a Chow Chow

Even if you’re not a dog expert, you probably know enough to laugh at the breed of my resident barn dog. Chow Chows are not exactly cooperative, and while they are bred as territorial guard dogs, their cat-like laziness makes them, at best, capriciously protective of their owner. These little balls of fur are, however, pretty damn cute. My three-year-old, Winnie, embodies all of these traits – or at least she did as a puppy, with the occasional tendency to regress. But growing up around horses on an unfenced property shaped her more than any innate breed characteristics. Having owned pretty much all the conventional breeds, I can safely say she’s now more or less exactly what you look for in a farm dog.

Bill Kauffman

Robots are ruining baseball

FanDuel and DraftKings ads spice the early spring airwaves, robots deliver their unimpeachable verdicts on human actions and a family of four shells out 500 bucks for parking and tickets to attend a game. Major League Baseball has returned! At least this year MLB scheduled its Opening Day game – a March 25 interleague (yech!) contest between the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants – to be played stateside. Mixing America Last-ism with corporate-culture imperialism, six previous Opening Day games have been played on foreign soil. That other countries might have sports of their own annoys the panjandrums of professional baseball and football, who seek to impose spectatorial homogeneity on a diverse planet.

Sunday

Ben Clerkin

Muzzleloader season

Climbing into the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia with a muzzleloader slung over my shoulder was a journey back in time. This was the gun that the colony's first settlers used when they too trod the same ground 400 years ago to hunt deer and bear. It helped tame the state and then the entire country. As I pushed my way through undergrowth at the base of the mountain range by the light of the moon at 5 a.m. on a bitingly cold and bitter January morning, unseen branches and briars clawed at my face in the dark. This was the last day of the hunting season that had been extended – as hunting seasons across the US often are – for muzzleloaders. To keep this heritage weapon alive and to give the animals a sporting chance.

muzzleloader

Saturday

Ruaridh Nicoll

Life under blockade in Havana

Now, I’m here to write about life in Havana, about daiquiris, fishing and salsa. But it’s fair to say life in Cuba has been getting a bit intense. Not as tense as it is elsewhere, but we’re very definitely on the list of countries where the US wants regime change. Washington has cranked up its 64-year trade embargo on the island into an all-out oil blockade. Donald Trump said he is hoping to conduct a “friendly takeover” of the island. The Habanos cigar festival, which I had been planning to write about, has been “postponed.” So I find myself pushing aside my notes on the ever-higher prices of Behikes, instead scribbling the word, “siege” on my page. It all seems a little medieval.

havana oil blockade

Thursday

Peter Watson

An ambassador is the American version of a nobleman

America is, famously and proudly, a republic. Everyone is equal before the law. No earls or dukes or even knights of the realm. And a good thing, too. Er… not so fast. As one of the magazines devoted to Palm Beach life recently pointed out, there is one honor available to citizens of the United States that is much coveted because, as with princes, dukes and earls, the honorific comes before the recipient’s full name – and, like nobility (but not in Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s case), it is conferred for life. That title is “ambassador.

Josie Cox

February in New York: where dreams come to die

I probably sound naive, but February always struck me as a month that should be full of hope – brimming with the type of optimism that comes from new beginnings. At least here in New York, though, it was grim. Everything feels more expensive. Everyone’s temper seems as short as the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them daylight hours. And then there’s the weather. The streets are flanked like an Arctic military checkpoint by car-sized mounds of calcified brown snow. The kind of snow that has visible layers, like a geological cross-section of urban neglect. The kind that has already gobbled up who knows how many small dogs. The wind is so ferocious, it makes that chemical skin peel you’ve been targeted for on Instagram look pleasant. New York does sleep. And thank goodness it does.