Society

One heartening if dimly consoling result of the disastrous fires that swept through Notre-Dame cathedral has been the willingness of politicians and philanthropists to pledge their financial and institutional support towards its reconstruction. Yes, some of them might have an eye on acquiring good PR. Yes, believers might question the nature of their attachment. Still, it good to know that people will not watch the decline of beauty and tradition with absolute indifference. The reconstruction, though, will be fiercely contested. Already, modernists are sidling into the conversation with progressive platitudes and philistinic schemes. You might think the widespread shock and sadness that the fire caused represented love and admiration for Notre-Dame as it was.

Google co-founder Larry Page popularized the term ‘moonshots.’ But venture capitalists, apparently, are looking to the stars. An app called Co-Star, which provides slick digital versions of horoscopes and astrological birth charts, has raised $5 million in funding. An investor who put money into an ‘Uber for astrological readings’ company expresses excitement about the $2.1 billion market for ‘mystical services.’ Erin Griffith, the author of a recent New York Times feature on the subject, took a lighthearted angle toward the subject while nevertheless acknowledging that there really is business potential. Millennial women, she writes, have ‘traded [astrology’s] psychedelic new-wave stigma for modern Instagrammy witch vibes.

Notre-Dame is the symbolic heart of Paris and France, and a symbol of European Christianity second only to the Vatican in Rome. The apocalyptic destruction of a monument of such beauty and significance would be a sign of the times at any time. In our time, however, no one seems sure of what the sign means. I doubt I was alone in my first response. When I saw footage of the falling, burning spire, I assumed that this was an act of terrorism rather than, as seems most likely, an accident caused by renovation work. This is a sign of the times, even though it would be incautious to admit it in polite society.

In August 2018, The Atlantic said that he was an ‘inevitable’ presidential candidate. Last April, Bill Maher declared him a ‘folk hero': ‘we’re in love with you,’ he said. But yesterday, the final nail was jackhammered into the political coffin of Michael Avenatti, known the world over, thanks to Tucker Carlson, as the ‘creepy porn lawyer.’ Avenatti was arrested and charged with embezzlement and extortion in March. That was just a warm-up act, however.

Religious faith may be declining in America but it is still a cultural force to be reckoned with, looming large in any general election cycle. Courting religious voters remains a factor in the calculus of any prospective presidential candidate, especially as neither party seems a natural home for many of them. Americans are actually losing their religion rather faster than their faith. A recent poll showed that ‘nones’ – those without a religious affiliation –  are now the country’s largest group for the first time: Americans are increasingly defining their own faith, and not asking a church to do it for them. In this landscape, what a ‘Christian’ believes as a core value is suddenly malleable and open to influences from all sides.

If you want to know why American foreign policy has repeatedly failed to achieve its goals since the end of the Cold War, consider the wisdom of Thomas L. Friedman. His column at the New York Times is a weathervane of expense-account groupthink as it charges in the wrong direction.When American jobs were outsourced in the Nineties, Friedman cheered for globalization. When the George W. Bush administration pushed for invading Iraq, Friedman promoted the mad and dangerous idea that post-Saddam Iraq would become a liberal democracy. And you just knew that Obama’s Middle East policies were going to be a disaster when the Times boasted that the bumbling ringmaster had ‘sounded out’ Friedman as his chief clown.

The reaction of New Zealand’s vast non-Muslim majority to the terrorist attack at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch is both inspiring and alarming. Inspiring because, faced with a group of mostly recent arrivals who constitute a mere 1 percent of New Zealand’s population, the other 99 percent have chosen not to ignore their loss and distress, but to commiserate and console at a time when liberal democracies are beset by factional resentments. What is alarming is the form the reaction has taken. When New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern observed Friday prayers in the park outside the mosque, she and many other non-Muslim women wore a hijab.

Over the course of tonight and tomorrow, Jews around the world will eat a lot of hamentaschen, dress up in costumes, listen to the megillah, and give charity and gifts of food and drink to their friends. Some of us will also get quite drunk; partly because it’s fun, and partly because the Talmud says that on Purim, a person should be so drunk that they cannot distinguish between Haman (villain of the Purim story) and Mordecai (one of the heroes of the Purim story). As far as Jewish holidays go, Purim is a fun one which means that many of its crucial lessons often go unappreciated. Americans tend to know that on Passover, we celebrate the Exodus from Egypt, and that on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we atone and hope to be inscribed in the book of life.

‘Pay-to-play is not OK; we want a public hearing today.’ That was the chant heard at HQ2-Apalooza, a recent event held by Amazon in Arlington, Va., the Washington, DC suburb that will host the Seattle-based internet giant’s second headquarters. The scene might have conjured some unpleasant and recent memories for Amazon. The firm’s search for a place to build its ‘HQ2’, a year-long, highly publicized sweepstakes that received entries from over 200 localities across North America, concluded with the decision to split the headquarters between New York and Arlington, only to see public opposition force Amazon to scuttle its New York plans. Now, the backlash has spread to Virginia.

What’s worse to lose – your keys or your wallet? That’s the question more than 100,000 angry investors who used the QuadrigaCX exchange to purchase cryptocurrency now contemplate. The apparent sudden death in December of Canadian Gerald Cotten, the exchange’s 30-year-old founder, has without warning left them in a $250 million-shaped hole. Mr Cotten, who had Crohn’s disease, is said to have died while on honeymoon in India after his bowel became perforated during what is reported to have looked at first like a bad case of Delhi belly. With him, we are led to believe, went the only crypto key to the place in which QuadrigaCX investor money is stored – repositories known as offline ‘wallets’.

Why does everyone have it in for Victor Davis Hanson? Professor, Hoover Institution fellow and farmer, Hanson is a consummate scholar of military history and ancient Greece. His literary accomplishments include paeans to American agrarianism and epoch-spanning histories of war, lauded by left and right. Yet the bipartisan goodwill has lately evaporated. The reason for the contempt is easily apprehensible: Hanson’s new book is titled, simply, The Case for Trump.The repercussions have been swift. Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker accused Hanson of ‘hostility to undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants.

Does Facebook have a grudge against the right? It’s an accusation that’s been leveled against Mark Zuckerberg before — notably in a Congressional hearing last year — and is rearing its head again, with the suspension of two British right-wing broadcasters, Tommy Robinson and Raheem Kassam. Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League, has been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram for ‘repeatedly breaching’ their Community Standards by ‘posting material that uses dehumanizing language and calls for violence targeted at Muslims’, according to a Facebook blog post. ‘What they’re saying about me is complete lies,’ Robinson told Cockburn this morning. ‘What they’re saying about “hate” is all lies.

When Trump declared the border situation a national emergency, you couldn’t move for breathless headlines questioning the constitutionality of his order. But has the mainstream media always held this deep commitment to reporting on the limits of power of the nation’s chief executive? Trump is hardly the first president to make use of an executive order in order to circumvent Congress. Back in February, 2011, President Obama began contemplating strikes against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Article I, Section 8, of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war.

News from the #NeverTrump bubble, as Weekly Standard spinoff site The Bulwark have decided to keep tally of every conservative who expresses discomfort or opposition to Trump’s declaration of a national emergency for wall money. It’s an ambitious branching out into listicles for the site, whose preferred format up until that point had been ‘please, someone, anyone, primary Trump’. Their piece, entitled ‘Conservative Critics of Trump’s Non-Emergency Declaration, Listed’, categorizes opponents of the executive cash grab by their area of work.

Mr Theodore McCarrick will spend his last days within the limestone walls of St Fidelis Friary in Victoria, Kansas. He’ll be able to see the stunning St Fidelis Church, ‘the Basilica of the Plains’, from his window. His quarters in the monastery will be simple, clean, and pleasant. He’ll have all the time in the world to pray, read, write, think, or just putter, as old men like to do. His meals, laundry, heating, and other necessities will be taken care of for him. There will always be a tender Franciscan nearby if he needs to talk, or cry, or play checkers. He’ll die surrounded by holy men praying for the repose of his soul.

Media types are getting all sniffy because some goober dealt a BBC cameraman one ‘very hard shove’ at Donald Trump’s El Paso rally on Monday. The BBC released a statement saying the cameraman, Ron Skeans, is ‘fine’ – which most people no doubt assumed he was, because Skeans is a grown man. The ‘incredibly violent attack’ (as Britain’s state broadcaster is choosing to bill it) took place shortly after Trump pointed to the press pen and said: ‘Wow, look at all the press, can you believe that?’ and ‘They’ve gone down a long way since they started hitting us a little bit, right?’ Inflammatory stuff!

I woke up, thanked Allah for not letting the yahud across the street hypnotize me in my sleep, then crawled to the window and peeked over the sill. The black Volvo was gone. He must have got up early this morning, to stuff more money into the mouths of the other members of the Minnesota delegation. I got up, standing strong. My husband gets the kids’ breakfast. He’s like a brother to me. Really. It’s in our faith tradition. His support gives me time to do more for my people. There’s so much to do when I get to my office, I barely have time to wipe my feet on the Israeli-flag doormat that members of my progressive and diverse community gave me when I won my House seat by defeating the yahud Phyllis Kahn and Mohamud Noor, who I now believe to be a yahud.