Life

Tuesday

Dot Wordsworth

What’s so fresh about ‘fresh hell?’

“What fresh hell can this be?” Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase? The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837) for a parallel: “He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet. ‘What now, what now?’ said the old man – “What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?’” I’ve been doing what counts, for me, as research. In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens uses fresh twice as frequently as he does in Great Expectations 24 years later.

Tuesday

Michael Simmons

Gossip is good for you… so I’m told

The late Pope Francis hated gossip. In his Christmas message to his Vatican advisors last year, he warned that it is “an evil that destroys social life.” It wasn’t the first time he’d attacked rumor-spreading. He once compared gossips to terrorists because “he or she throws a bomb and leaves.” His condemnations are of particular concern for me because I was recently accused of being a “notorious gossip.” I vehemently reject the charge, but if it were true, at least I’d be following a proud journalistic tradition. In fact, if it were not for gossip, this very magazine might not exist. The original Spectator’s founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, filled the 1711 incarnation by hovering around coffee-houses, picking up gossip for stories.

gossip

Tuesday

Kelly Chapman

The pace is quickening in DC

September in DC is the real new year. The heat hasn’t broken, but the air feels heavier. Congress regroups, summer travelers return to the city and the Hill drones descend on the cafés in their blazers and button-ups, sweating through 80-degree weather. A distinct tension hangs in the air, a carryover from late summer. Donald Trump’s declaration of a crime emergency last month transferred control of the local police to federal authorities, and now, as I make my way down 14th Street, I regularly shoulder past protesters and pass clusters of National Guard soldiers milling beside the wine bars and coffee shops where my friends and I still meet. Couples walk past without breaking stride, avoiding eye contact. I, too, avert my gaze.

DC

Wednesday

Margaret Mitchell

I made the Epstein cookies

Is it wrong to bake cookies from a recipe addressed to a pedophile and sex trafficker? When I found the recipe for chocolate chip cookies on page 169 of Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book, I read and re-read it expecting there to be some sinister inside joke, perhaps a hidden dash of adrenochrome or instructions to “massage” the dough. The surrounding page contains a woman’s redacted photograph and references Epstein’s “mentorship,” while the other 237 feel like a cross between various expressions of human depravity: part ransom letter, part porn magazine and part teenage girl’s diary. Where does an innocent cookie recipe fit in among this?

epstein cookies

Monday

Cockburn

Trump goes tilting at windmills

Donald Trump hates windmills. He’s ranted against them consistently over the last decade. They’re as constant a member of his mental rogues’ gallery as "Gavin Newscum" or "George Slopodapolous." And never is the President’s windmill-hatred more fervent than when he visits Europe, which has been the windmill center of the world since the age of the Quixote. Immediately upon stepping on the tarmac at Glasgow Airport yesterday, Trump said, “Stop the windmills! They’re ruining your countries. I really mean it. It’s so sad. You fly over and you see these windmills all over the place. Ruining your beautiful fields and valleys and killing your birds. If they’re stuck in your oceans, they’re ruining your oceans.” But Trump wasn’t done on this topic.

Wind Turbine

Tuesday

Peter Watson

Who’s buying up Palm Beach?

Donald Trump continues to make news in his hometown. This is what you would expect, but it’s not all plain sailing. For a start, since he won the election, and the local police started declaring his Mar-a-Lago Club a security zone – which stretches for seven blocks, north to south, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway – no fewer than seven properties in the zone have changed hands. And the big question is: are these people moving in, or moving out? It is impossible to be certain, of course, but we do know that the latest property sold for $16.99 million, down from an asking price of $24 million when it first came on the market.

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Friday

Lex Duff

On holiday with Goya

When I’m first invited to a sojourn in Madrid to learn about the life and work of Francisco Goya and the conservation work of Factum Arte, I’m thrilled but also a little apprehensive. While art-themed travel is right up my street and I live a mere train trip from the Spanish capital, Goya’s work is known for being a little, well, dark – particularly during his later years. As a fan of the Botticellis of this world, spending a few days with the artist famous for his "black paintings" was not something I was sure I’d enjoy.  And yet, three days later, as I stand in front of Goya’s grave in La Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida, I find myself moved in a way I never could’ve anticipated.

Goya

Tuesday

Peter Watson

The rise of millionaires, valet parking and facelifts in Palm Beach

The two favored topics of conversation in Palm Beach are money and the place itself, so the latest survey by Henley & Partners, a specialist service which advises wealthy clients where to live, is doubly welcome. It shows that Palm Beach County is among the top five fastest-growing “wealth hubs” in the world, outpacing even Dubai and Silicon Valley. This latest report shows that Palm Beach County cities (that is, Palm Beach, the island off the mainland, and West Palm Beach, on the mainland, separated only by three drawbridges) experienced a 112 percent increase in millionaire residents between 2014 and 2024.

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baseball
Bill Kauffman

How Major League Baseball lost its soul

I highly recommend Homestand, Will Bardenwerper’s new book contrasting the community-enhancing qualities of grass-roots baseball with the soulless corporate product that Major League Baseball has become – and it’s not just because I am a central character therein. The book is at once a beautiful portrait of bleacher-level society and a scathingly effective indictment of the automatons who are destroying the American game. Will spent the summer of 2022 in and around Dwyer Stadium, home of the Batavia Muckdogs, an independent team of college ballplayers. This amateur ball club was the feisty successor to professional teams that had graced our fair city since 1939.

painting
Catriona Olding

The sad decline of painting

What hope is there for artists following the sale last year of the robot Ai-Da’s portrait of Alan Turing, entitled “A.I. God,” for $1 million? Someone has perhaps paid over the odds for a 3D print with a few marks added by a robotic arm and a few more by studio assistants to areas of the canvas Ai-Da couldn’t reach. Innovation wins. In the 1970s, the walls of art-school degree shows were studded with plaster casts of students’ genitals. By the 1980s, students were discouraged from attempting realist painting, but messy gray abstract works were still acceptable. Then it was found objects and piles of stuff. One young studio assistant I knew in the 2000s had a tutor at art school who’d gained top marks in his degree by filming himself pouring a glass of milk over his head.

Wednesday

Peter Watson

How Palm Beach became Wall Street South

Palm Beach, Florida Palm Beach is now, officially, “Wall Street South.” So says the local Business Development Board, which adds that no fewer than 250 financial firms have relocated here in the years since the pandemic. Among the companies included are BlackRock, Citadel, Siris Capital, Goldman Sachs and Elliott Investment Management. Also, a number of medical device manufacturing firms have been attracted – these include Johnson & Johnson subsidiary DePuy Synthes, Precision Esthetics and Modernizing Medicine, along with a strong aerospace sector – Pratt & Whitney, Lockheed Martin, Sikorsky Helicopters, Northrop Grumman.

palm beach
Bill McMorris

The importance of the Band-Aid

Alexandria, Virginia Back in February, the first grader sustained a scrape that left a tiny red dot on her leg. She requested a soft cast and a medevac chopper. She settled for a dollar-store bandage. She shouldn’t have: it turns out she was quietly bleeding to death from the inside. She would have continued to deteriorate had we not been alarmed by a toilet clog the week after she fell. The Band-Aid was invented in 1920 by one Earle Dickson, a New Jersey cotton buyer with a clumsy wife. All her cooking mishaps inspired her exhausted husband to combine his stock with the methacrylates of surgical tape and some crinoline fabric found in petticoats. The J&J website can’t help but note that Mr.

band-aid
Bill Kauffman

The dog that haunts Russ Benzin

Batavia, New York Fifty-five years after his Vietnam-era military service ended, Russ Benzin remains haunted. Not, thank God, by memories of the state-sanctioned mass murder that is war, but by a seemingly intractable and feral military dog he came to love. I met Russ years ago in the third-base bleachers at Dwyer Stadium, where we whiled away many summers watching a set of trained canines – the Batavia Muckdogs of the (now defunct or, rather, exterminated) New York-Penn League. In the manner of ballpark friendships, ours developed over the years: from nodding acquaintance to grumbling exchanges (“why the hell didn’t the third-base coach send that guy?”) to friendship.

dog russ benzin
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Why are Europeans so untroubled by their ignorance of America?

Laramie, Wyoming Americans are infamous on the eastern side of the Atlantic for knowing little or nothing about European culture, history and politics – and for being proud of the fact, as Richard Hofstadter, the late Columbia historian, described in them in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1964. Much less widely recognized is how little Europeans know about America, Americans and their own civilization – an ignorance that troubles them not at all, perhaps because they seem to be unaware of the fact.

prodi italian europeans
Calla Jones Corner

The joy of French school lunches

Since moving to France, one of my greatest pleasures has been rushing to pick up my two grandchildren from the tiny schoolhouse in the village of Monthelie. I can’t wait to hear about what they had for le déjeuner. Le déjeuner scolaire, a three- to four-course lunch, subsidized by the government, is sacrosanct. The French even have a phrase for socializing and eating together: la commensalité. They know that “a family that eats together, stays together.” I remember when America, where I used to live, understood that, too. Rarely do you see the French eating lunch or dinner alone in restaurants, bistros or cafés. The exception is for une pause café or morning coffee, when the French do prefer to be alone with a croissant, newspaper and quite possibly a cigarette.

salmon
Jane Stannus

The beauty and complexity of salmon

Britain’s most popular fish comes with batter, not scales – but America can virtuously say its favorite fish is salmon. Salmon and tilapia, according to AI, but you must never take AI at face value. Nor tilapia, for that matter. Stop me if I’ve already recounted the sad tale in these august pages, but I once – disastrously – tried to serve my relations tilapia. I bathed it in lemon-butter sauce, sprinkled chopped garden-fresh chives on it and nestled it among roasted tomatoes, olives and little baby potatoes in their skins. I even called it whitefish. I really gave it a fair shot. But pointed questions quickly came sailing toward me. What is this fish? What do you mean, tilapia? Where does it live? What does it eat? What are its desirable attributes?

Ross Anderson

The Sazerac: an old favorite… from New Orleans

As the Super Bowl rolled into New Orleans, with Kendrick Lamar and his flared jeans in tow, I was thinking about the many contributions that this small Louisiana city has brought to the cocktail bar. There’s the creamy green Grasshopper, the French Quarter’s whiskey-based Vieux Carré, the tropical rum punch Hurricane and, of course, the comically difficult Ramos Gin Fizz – which blooms up in a tower of egg-white froth. But perhaps the oldest, most widespread and most conventional is the Sazerac: it is considered one of America’s oldest cocktails, having been served in New Orleans from the late 19th century.

alsatian wine
Roger Kimball

Is Alsatian wine primarily French or German?

Among the minor aporia bedeviling the universe is a question about Alsatian wine. “What is it?” someone asks. “Wine from Alsace,” comes the answer. “But where is Alsace?” This is where things get fraught. The answer is not latitude and longitude (for the curious, Grok offers 48.57º N and 7.75º E for Strasbourg, a plausible anchor for the area). The answer is not found in geography either. “West of the Rhine and east of the Vosges mountains” is all well and good. But it does not impinge upon the real question, which is a question of identity. Not to belabor the point, but should we think of Alsace as primarily French or primarily German? With that, as Jeeves might have said to Bertie Wooster, rem acu tetigimus.

Wednesday

Magdalene J. Taylor

Harry Sisson and trial by TikTok

This week, a story emerged about a dozen or so young women who each thought they were monogamously dating 22-year-old Democratic influencer Harry Sisson, albeit digitally. The 11 women, all around the same age as Sisson, claim that he had convinced each of them separately that they were the only woman on his “roster”; that they were the only women he was speaking to. He spoke to many of them for months at a time, with the conversations often being erotic in nature. Nudes were exchanged. But while each woman claims they believed to be the only person Sisson was doing this with, via social media, they have now come to learn that this wasn’t the case – he’d been flirting and sexting with several women at a time.

harry sisson

Thursday

Peter Watson

Trump’s security, dress codes and airport romance in Palm Beach

With President Trump spending so much time away from Washington at his home and club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, there are good spin-offs and not-so-good spin-offs for Palm Beachers. One of the good ones is for the local hotels: his security guard is of such a size that they are being billeted all over town. Less good is the sheer cost of security. The city council has this month had to transfer $20 million to the sheriff’s department for the costs incurred so far, and anticipates a further $25 million expenditure in the course of the year. It expects to be reimbursed by the federal government, as it was during Trump’s first term as president, but it won’t be paid before the next financial year.

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