Society

Wednesday

Joseph D'Hippolito 

Pope Leo is following in Francis’s footsteps

Since Pope Leo XIV’s election in May, Catholics have wondered whether he would continue Pope Francis’s radical agenda or ignite a more conservative reaction. After five months, the verdict appears clear. Leo will not only promote the principal policies in Francis’s agenda, but work to solidify them. This includes suppressing traditionalist theology and liturgy while bolstering activism on the environment, migration and same-sex relationships. Traditionalists initially viewed Leo with hope. They noted his ability to recite the Latin Mass, his choice of papal livery favored by Pope Benedict XVI and his meeting with Cardinal Raymond Burke, who supports maintaining the Latin Mass. But the new pope refuses to discipline bishops who move against traditionalists.

leo
michael heath
Mary Wakefield

Michael Heath on 75 years at The Spectator

When I joined The Spectator in 2000, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-story Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media alpha males. She would soon be married to the publisher Stephen Quinn and having an affair with former British home secretary David Blunkett, but was always looking to widen her portfolio. One floor down was former British prime minister Boris Johnson, then editor of the magazine, mostly immersed in meetings of his own with associate editor Petronella Wyatt. We’d sometimes find him on the landing, staring mistily into the middle distance.

Tuesday

Neal Pollack

Marjorie Taylor Greene auditions for The View

Last week, in anticipation of her appearance on The View this morning (or afternoon, depending on your local listings), Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted out an image of her perfect “100 A Liberty Score,” given out by Conservative Review and Blaze Media. “Nothing has changed about me, I’m 1,000,000% America ONLY,” she wrote. “Sorry I’m not sorry. I don’t obey Republican men’s demands that I, as a woman, don’t remain seen but not heard.” Well, there’s no chance of us not hearing Rep. Greene.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Monday

Alexander Larman

Why Taylor Sheridan quit Paramount

There are many showrunners in contemporary Hollywood who are, essentially, all-powerful – Vince Gilligan and Aaron Sorkin have been able to do what they like for a considerable time now, for instance, and I doubt anyone’s giving the White Lotus’s Mike White too many notes, unless they’re blank checks – but there are two men who are primus inter pares when it comes to their relationship with their studios. Ryan Murphy more or less is Mr. Netflix, as can be seen by the streaming service merrily bankrolling everything he writes and/or creates – even something as unpleasant and morally corrupt as the recent Ed Gein show – and Taylor Sheridan and Paramount have been hand in glove for years now. Until, that is, they’re not.

Taylor Sheridan
Trump
Gage Klipper

Trump refuses to take 60 Minutes bait

“Have some of these raids gone too far?” Norah O’Donnell asked Donald Trump of ICE immigration arrests as he sat down with 60 Minutes for the first time in five years.Trump refused to take the bait. Instead of ranting or insulting O’Donnell, as she may have hoped, he was calm – and even counterintuitive. “We have to start off with a policy, and the policy has to be, you came into the country illegally, you’re going to go out,” he said. “We’re going to work with you,” he continued, “and you’re going to come back into our country legally.”Pressed on whether he plans to use the military to crack down on anti-ICE protests, Trump declined. “I could,” he said, “but I haven’t chosen to use it. I hope you give me credit for that.

Sunday

Damian Thompson

How the occult captured the modern mind

The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a "law of science" in 1968: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would soon be flying over rock festivals packed with hippies obsessed with "magick." Naturally Clarke’s readers understood the difference between aerodynamics and sky gods. But African tribesmen gawping at an early airplane, or Pacific Islanders watching an atomic explosion, could only conclude that they were witnessing a supernatural event: for them, a scientific explanation was literally inconceivable.

Charles
Joseph D'Hippolito 

King Charles and Pope Leo share the same religion

The historic meeting October 23 between Pope Leo XIV and King Charles III – the first between a pope and an English monarch since before the Reformation – goes beyond the obvious religious significance. It suggests future cooperation in promoting an entirely different religion, one favored by most of the world's elites. That religion preaches environmental sustainability through draconian measures that demand humanity's submission at the expense of common sense and science. Not for nothing did Leo and Charles meet less than three weeks before the start of COP30, the United Nations' annual conference on climate change. Throughout his public life, Charles positioned himself as Defender of the Environment.

Friday

Rachel K. Paulose

Pray for the persecuted Christian church

Sunday November 2, 2025 marks the annual Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. Global violence against Christians has doubled in the last thirty years, and one in seven believers now suffers persecution. Today, “Christians constitute by far the most widely persecuted religion,” in the world.In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 16 million Christians have fled for their lives to escape violence or been forcibly displaced. Congressman Riley Moore has described Nigeria as “the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian.” So far this year in Nigeria at least 7,000 Christians have been put to death. More than 19,000 Christian churches have been burned to the ground or attacked in the last fifteen years.

Christians

Wednesday

Cockburn

De Blasio ‘imposter’ hoodwinks British paper

Of all the people to go as for Halloween, why would you choose Bill de Blasio, an undistinguished Mayor of New York and flame-out 2020 presidential candidate?  That’s a plausible explanation for the recent howler from the Times of London – Great Britain’s newspaper of record – whose veteran US correspondent Bevan Hurley quoted a man identifying himself as de Blasio on his misgivings about Zohran Mamdani. “While the ambition is admirable, the cost estimates – reportedly exceeding $7 billion annually – rest on optimistic assumptions... about eliminating waste and raising revenue through new taxes,” this total imposter told Mr. Hurley, with strange eloquence. “In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.

Bill de Blasio

Sunday

Ed Condon

The perils of Catholic social media evangelism

Jesus, it could be reasonably observed, recruited a motley cast to serve as the first heralds of the gospel. An endlessly squabbling band of fishermen, with a few tax collectors and zealots thrown in, the biblical narratives have them endlessly jockeying among themselves for prominence and status before they, to a man, flee when the going gets tough and their Messiah gets arrested. In the two thousand years since, the Catholic Church has done its best to balance the inevitable imperfections of its messengers with the perfect truths they are supposed to announce. It’s not always an easy task – and as with so many other things, the internet has made it much more complicated.

Catholic
Jack Carr
Ben Clerkin

Is Jack Carr behind the Department of War?

As a Navy SEAL for 20 years, who reached the rank of Lieutenant Commander and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Jack Carr knows about warfare on an expert and visceral level. And as the New York Times bestselling author of The Terminal List series and writer of the Amazon hit show based on the books, starring Chris Pratt, he knows the power of words. He also has a tendency to succeed at whatever he turns his mind to (see the above). But, still, when he decided the Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of War, it seemed like a very tall order and he was a lone voice. Undeterred, he wrote in op-eds about how the department had lost its way and needed to refocus on warfighting by changing its name back to that it was given in 1789.

Friday

Cockburn

An evening in Austin with Graham Linehan and Meghan Murphy

It’s a telling commentary on our times that an Irish man and a Canadian woman have to go to Texas in order to honestly express themselves in public. But that’s how it played out on Thursday night at a suburban Austin “salon” that Cockburn attended. Cockburn, who also frequently travels to Texas to talk out his heterodox opinions, appreciated the hospitality of hostess Trish Morrison and her husband, who’s a catering paella chef, so the food is always good over there.   The Irishman was Graham Linehan, creator of the sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd, among others, and more recently an embattled participant in the transgender wars.

Linehan graham linehan

Thursday

Neal Pollack

Did the mafia make NBA stars offers they couldn’t refuse?

The FBI has arrested Chauncey Billups, NBA champion, Hall of Famer, and coach of the Portland Trail Blazers for his association in a rigged poker game operated by some of New York City’s most notorious crime family. “Why would Chauncey do it?” the world of sports is asking. He’s already worth tens of millions of dollars. That’s a question for Billups, his attorneys, his God, and, presumably, Blazers ownership to answer. But as someone who regularly plays a lot of low and micro-stakes poker, I have a pretty good idea. The games I play in are monitored by security cameras, with armed guards at the exits in case people get out of line. When I play in World Series of Poker or World Poker Tour events, there are a strict set of rules by which the vast majority of players abide.

Chauncey Billups

Tuesday

Luke Lyman

How Alex Jones won

One of my favorite Walt Whitman stanzas goes like this: I’m a pioneer! I’m an explorer! I’m a human, and I’m comin’! I’m animated! I’m alive! My heart’s big! It’s got hot blood goin’ through it fast! I like to fight! I like to eat! I like to have children! I’m here! I got a life force! This is a human! This is what we look like! This is what we act like! This is what everyone was like before us! This is what I am! Just kidding. That’s Alex Jones, the voice of our time. Nobody in media has won more in the past 20 years than Jones. He’s lost a lot along the way, of course, including the largest defamation suit in American history and access to every mainstream media platform. But those were only temporary slowdowns.

Jones
education
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The tyranny of the mass-intellectual

In the classical world the question of whether virtue can be taught, or is rather acquired by interior inclination and moral development, was the subject of intense debate by the best Grecian and Roman philosophers. None ever succeeded, however, in agreeing an answer. Progressive education along narrow lines is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority Since the second half of the 20th century, academics and intellectuals have seemed to believe that they have answered the question definitively and to their own satisfaction. Virtue, they have decided, can indeed be taught, and liberal democratic education is doing it, in public and private schools and universities alike throughout the western world.

Tuesday

Daniel McCarthy

Is the religious right shifting?

In 2021, for the first time in 1,400-odd years, Britain ceased to have a Christian majority. The United Kingdom, the political entity of which the island of Great Britain has been a part since 1801, has had its share of not-quite-Christian prime ministers over the years, with a handful of agnostics and quiet atheists. But in 2022, for the first time, the UK had a prime minister who practiced a non-Christian religion – and Hinduism had the distinction of claiming the first post-Christian head of state, Rishi Sunak. The West’s ethnic and religious foundations have already shifted in our great cities It may be some time before an American president is Hindu. Already, however, there are several prominent Hindus in the Trump orbit and near the top of the Republican party.

religious
Katherine Dee

What folklore can teach us about our online lives

Irish folklore spoke of many worlds. There was the world of fields and hearths and then there were the hidden places where the non-material lived: the Sídhe mounds, the sea-realm of Manannán mac Lir, the land of youth called Tír na nÓg and, finally, the land of the dead. These worlds coexisted with ours. A woman might leave butter on the windowsill, lest the fairies sour the churn. A new mother would avoid complimenting her baby – at least, not too loudly – for fear he would be kidnapped by the Good Neighbors and replaced with a changeling. My first real boyfriend’s father blamed every family misfortune on their decision to cut down a hawthorn tree.

folklore
chatbots
Lara Brown

Why people are falling in love with chatbots

Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss “philosophy, regrets, old wounds.” Before he knew it, Jason was in love. Many women have turned to chatbots after experiencing repeated disappointment with real men Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI, with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships.

crypto
Michael Simmons

Can stablecoins make America the crypto capital of the world?

“I will make sure the US is the crypto capital of the world,” Donald Trump vowed earlier this year. In July, he signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (Genius) Act. The Act creates federal guardrails for dollar-pegged stablecoins and regulates who can issue and redeem them. Concerns from law enforcement are also addressed, by making sure anti-money laundering and consumer regulation applies. But what are stablecoins? They are digital tokens built to stay at a stable price, usually one dollar. They sit on the blockchain – the computer protocol that makes crypto work – but what’s underpinning their value are real-world assets, usually cash or government bonds.

talk
Cosmo Landesman

Polite society is a thing of the past

In 1908, the iconoclast writer Lytton Strachey – the bad boy of the Bloomsbury set – pointed a long finger at a stain on artist Vanessa Bell’s dress and asked, “Semen?” Later, Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf wrote: “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down… It was, I think, a great advance in civilization.” Americans tend to think that the English are sexually repressed and too refined and cultured for such talk I was recently in a bar in Bloomsbury – one that actually serves a “Virginia Woolf hamburger” – when talk among the young women at my table turned to men they knew who were, how should I put this, well-endowed. Of course, I’ve heard such talk before, but not in a long time and not in such anatomical detail.