Society

Monday

Cosmo Landesman

My Tina Brown fantasy

I met my first wife at a party. I met my second wife at a party — and I’m convinced that I will meet my third wife at a party too. As I write, London is awash with parties, so my chances of finding my next wife are looking good. So far, I’ve met a sweet, bisexual marine biologist, a German curator — I’m not sure of what, but then everyone is a “curator” these days — a beautiful art critic who is famously bad in bed and one living legend. Her name is Tina. Tina Brown. Yes, that Tina Brown. Younger readers might be scratching their heads wondering: who’s that? (That’s like when young people say, “who are the Doors?”) She was the editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Talk magazine. (Gen-Z readers will be wondering: were they bands too?

tina
modernism
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

From modernism to totalitarianism

The modernist movement in the arts got underway around the start of the last century, encouraged by Ezra Pound’s exuberant exhortation to “Make it new!” Somewhat less attention was paid to making it good, as if what was new was inevitably good — better, indeed, than everything that had come before it. Barrels of printers’ ink were expended on the subject in the so-called “little magazines” of the period on both sides of the Atlantic, not all of it wasted; much of the relevant critical commentary was very intelligent and interesting indeed. Modernism as a concept and an aesthetic was less successful in music, painting, the plastic arts and architecture than in literature — though again, some of the work it inspired was very good.

Friday

Amber Duke

TikTok can’t escape its China problem

In 2020, then-president Donald Trump attempted to ban the wildly popular social media app TikTok. Its Gen Z influencers were horrified — how dare the bad orange man take away their right to vogue to teen beats in search of internet fame? Unfortunately, we would not be shielded from TikTok's insane viral trends (the latest involves users getting food poisoning after purchasing one creator's mysterious and apparently highly perishable "pink sauce"). Trump's order was stalled by legal proceedings and ultimately overturned by President Biden when he took office. Yet America still faces serious national security issues from TikTok due to its ownership by a Chinese company, ByteDance. ByteDance has long since scrapped any plans it had to sell TikTok to comply with Trump's order.

tiktok

Wednesday

Chadwick Moore

Admit it: monkeypox is kind of funny

When monkeypox crept onto the scene last month, with a handful of confirmed cases in the US, it seemed too absurd to be taken seriously by anyone who’d been paying attention over the last two years. Americans wised up to media malfeasance and career scammers in our health bureaucracies, rolled their eyes and thought, here we go again. The name itself, monkeypox, couldn’t be scarier — like something from a doomsday novel, or cooked up in an editorial meeting to provoke maximum panic. White liberals — the inexhaustible, ever-dutiful and poised-for-action enforcers of tyranny — had a different issue: the name’s racist.

Tuesday

Ericka Andersen

Are patients losing access to their autoimmune drugs post-Roe?

I was legitimately worried when I saw a friend post that her daughter may lose access to an important drug used to treat her autoimmune disease. In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court, my friend said drugs such as Methotrexate and Mifepristone were being banned in some states because of their dual purposes as medicative abortion drugs. As an ardent pro-lifer, I’ve been adamant to clarify how the overturning of Roe v. Wade affects women outside of the legality of abortion itself. When I first heard that ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage treatment could be criminalized in some way, I immediately consulted doctors and lawyers who could clarify the law’s intent.

autoimmune drugs pharmacy

Saturday

Teresa Mull

Is losing God making America miserable?

The number of Americans who believe in God has reached an all-time low, according to a Gallup survey that’s been tracking our nation’s “values and beliefs” since 1944. For a God fearin’ woman such as myself, it’s a disheartening statistic. But we are told never to abandon hope, and recent events — the Supreme Court rulings against abortion and in favor of prayer, a million swing voters switching their registrations to Republican, Keeping Up with the Kardashians finally airing its last season — betoken a more God-centered future. Gallup reports: The vast majority of US adults believe in God, but the 81 percent who do so is down six percentage points from 2017 and is the lowest in Gallup’s trend.

god

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

The death of the ladies’ man

There used to be a tiny elite of men in London who, whenever their names came up at a dinner party, people would say, “Oh him! He’s slept with everyone!” Women would laugh — and then confess: yes, they had too. In those days they spoke of these men with great affection and even admiration. They were seen as lovable lotharios; incorrigible and irresistible. Men like me, racked with envy, would sit silently with forced smiles on our faces wondering: how did they do it? These men weren’t necessarily great-looking, super-successful or rich. They didn’t have charisma or much charm either, and yet they dated one beautiful woman after another. (One of these men dated both the young Rachel Weisz and Gillian Anderson.) What did these guys have that we didn’t?

lothario
culture
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Conservatives and culture

"The liberal conception of society,” the political philosopher Kenneth L. Minogue wrote in The Liberal Mind, “is... determined by the moral and political policies of modern liberalism. It has only a tenuous connection with sociological description.” As well as, we must add, the political realities of the nation state in the twenty-first century. (Minogue’s book was first published in 1963.) Today, liberal policies are the emotional expression, translated into political terms, of liberals’ utopian aspirations toward the complete “inclusion” of every one of society’s “communities” on precisely equal terms. Liberals will not recognize that this goal can never be achieved, and that a multicultural nation is a plain contradiction in terms.

vasectomies
Guy Shepherd

The coming age of the vasectomy

The Supreme Court has overturned the tables that have governed our mating and dating for the past half century. We ought now to expect a real-time rewrite of the sexual social compact. Absent Roe v. Wade, organized women of the world are going to be asking more of men. Women are rightfully angry with men in general, SCOTUS men in particular — and, if you’ve been a free rider on your partner’s reproductive sacrifices, you. Men, it’s time for our best behavior. We ought to expect a sustained pushback across the culture and public institutions. This is not a good time for a man to find himself in front of a family court judge for being delinquent on child support. Things tough at home with the missus? Open your mind and heart to marriage counseling. Work it out.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Twitter gives Jordan Peterson the boot, Dave Rubin follows

Jordan Peterson went from being a psychologist advising troubled kids to an unlikely political figure as he fought against the Canadian government’s compelled speech law for pronouns. Cockburn watched with fascination as Peterson clashed repeatedly with the left-wing narrative, even going as far as to resign from his tenured position at the University of Toronto due to their rampant leftist ideology. On June 28, Twitter suspended him for this tweet (as recalled by his daughter): https://twitter.com/MikhailaFuller/status/1541946666567323649 Clearly referring to someone by their birth name is a sin for Twitter. Little did Cockburn know that Dave Rubin, the host of The Rubin Report, was to be next on the chopping block. Rubin sent this tweet before being suspended: https://twitter.

Thursday

Grayson Quay

The mainline Protestantism clown show

Just when I thought woke, mainline American Protestantism couldn’t descend any further into self-parody, the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America went and surprised me. Here’s a summary, courtesy of Dr. Jordan B. Cooper, a pastor in one of the conservative rump denominations that didn’t join the ELCA: Neurodivergent nonbinary trans pastor is made bishop. This individual then disciplines abusive latinxpastor. But this is unknowingly done on a Hispanic holiday and is thus racist. Woman archbishop rebukes bishop but isn't harsh enough so is then also racist. Wait, what?

Sunday

Cockburn

NYT finally tackles gender therapy

Cockburn started his Sunday by spitting Darjeeling all over the pages of the New York Times magazine. The cause of alarm? A lengthy, nuanced, meaty analysis of gender therapy had found its way into the paper of record. In Pride month, no less! Feature writer Emily Bazelon spent eight months reporting out the story, speaking to “more than sixty clinicians, researchers, activists and historians, as well as more than two dozen young people and about the same number of parents.” Her over-10,000-word article is framed around the forthcoming release of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s new Standards of Care guidelines, which are likely to prove controversial among both the pro- and anti-trans lobbies. It’s well worth a read.

nyt gender therapy

Wednesday

Cockburn

The traditionalist Mark Wahlberg

Usually, Cockburn is somewhere on the pessimistic side, talking about how so-and-so isn’t good, how who-knows-what is corrupting society. But today he's feeling nice for once. Mark Wahlberg, in a recent Instagram video, congratulated his son Michael for getting confirmed and praised other young people who want to serve God by way of the Catholic Church’s teachings. And it's got Cockburn feeling light. “Congratulations to my son Michael on making his confirmation,” Wahlberg said. “All the young people out there who are confirmed and taking their relationship with the Lord into their adulthood, what a commitment you guys have made.

Saturday

Jon Stokes

Smart contracts are the future of gun control

I pulled into the Walmart parking lot a little after midnight. Apart from the black Chevy Tahoe I was there to rendezvous with, it was almost empty. The driver, who I only knew as SouthernSigFan7 from the Texas gun forum we both frequent, was standing to the side of the SUV with a smartphone in one hand and a gun case in the other. The AR-15 I was about to buy from him was in that case. I could see he was getting his crypto wallet ready to receive the $2,000 in cryptocurrency I was about to send him to pay for the rifle. This sounds super shady — two total strangers meeting anonymously in a parking lot to exchange crypto for guns — but it’s actually far superior to the old instant background check system it replaced.

gun sales nft

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

Is swinging back?

In 1974 I was living in San Francisco when I got a phone call from a man who said, “I’m having a few people over to have sex with my wife, would you care to join us?” Back in the 1970s, people like this were called swingers. I politely declined. To my amazement I was recently invited by a couple in their sixties to go to one of London’s secret swinging parties with them. This one, they assured me, was for the “older swinger.” (I didn’t think there were any still alive!) To swing or not to swing? That is the question I never thought I’d ever face again. It was a kind offer, but frankly I’m too old for those sorts of sexual shenanigans.

swinging
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Fall of the godless

No religious season passes without it being insulted by the kind of person who lives in fear that somewhere some believer is not having his faith offended by someone to whom faith itself is offensive. This Eastertide was no exception. On Good Friday, which coincided with the first night of Passover, the New York Times printed an essay by a former yeshiva student proposing that in this year of violence and suffering it would be best to “pass over” God, adding, “Killing gods is an idea I can get behind.” This sort of village-atheist raspberry — which largely disappeared during the twentieth century along with American villages themselves — has enjoyed something of a revival early in the twenty-first century with the appearance of the so-called New Atheists.

atheists
martyrs
Daniel McCarthy

Martyrs win the culture wars

The culture war is suddenly going well for conservatives. Ron DeSantis stripped Disney of some of the woke corporation’s privileges in Florida. Elon Musk is taking over Twitter. Roe v. Wade appears doomed. And a backlash against Critical Race Theory in schools and transsexuals in women’s sports looks set to benefit Republicans mightily in November’s midterm elections. These are crucial battles. But they are not the war. The war is between race and sexuality on one side and traditional religion on the other. At any rate, those are the great causes with which the cultural left and right tend to identify. The progress of the war is seen in the retreat of Christianity and the advance of racial and sexual agendas on all fronts.

therapy
Jesse Singal

Who needs therapy?

If you pull up Twitter and search for “men will therapy,” you’ll find an endless scroll of jokes, many quite funny, about the things men will do before they go to therapy. There’s one for every current event: “men will buy twitter before going to therapy.” And after Samuel Alito’s draft Supreme Court decision was leaked: “Men will overturn roe v wade before going to therapy.” As with any ironic internet utterance, there are multiple layers here. The (genuinely useful!) website KnowYourMeme.com believes that Tweeter Zero for this meme is someone named @SpencerKlavan, who wrote “Men will literally defend an entire civilization from ruin in two world wars, start and provide for a family, produce masterworks of art and culture, and then just NOT go to therapy smdh.

testosterone
Melissa Chen

Why tech billionaires love testosterone

Testosterone is having a moment. At once a molecular vector for toxic masculinity and a health-optimizing supplement for middle-aged tycoons eager to project vigor, “T” is perhaps the most discussed hormone around. I blame Jeff Bezos, who has apparently aged in reverse since founding Amazon. After a tight-shirted appearance at the 2017 Sun Valley conference, his transformation from dweeby online-book-salesman to Vin Diesel-clone-with-alpha-swagger was unmistakable. Was he getting some hormonal help? Fast-forward a few years and he has acquired a hot Latina girlfriend and blasted himself into space in a giant metal penis. This left little room for doubt: surely he was marinated to a T, in T.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Why does Nancy Pelosi want communion anyway?

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s recent announcement that Nancy Pelosi has been barred from receiving communion brought fresh to Cockburn’s mind a memory he has of once having accidentally attended church with the Speaker of the House (and lived to tell about it). Sometimes alcohol can stir in one a devotional feeling, and so it was that Cockburn found himself at Mass one day at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown, seated a few rows behind Pelosi. When the time came, Cockburn refrained from receiving communion, but wondered as he watched Pelosi head toward the altar whether anyone should tackle her to the ground to prevent the sacrilege.