Spectator Life

It’s indisputable. Food & Drink is The Spectator’s most important section. Ask yourself this: if you hadn’t eaten in days, would you have the slightest interest in perusing the deft political analysis, elevating cultural commentary and scintillating wit to be found the rest of the magazine? Without food, the only reading worth bothering with is Preparation for Death. As starvation sets in, only the two inevitables remain — Death and Taxes — and what need to worry about taxes? Tombstones have no mailboxes, shrouds no pockets. For over a millennium, November has been the month of the dead. The eleventh has been dedicated to fallen soldiers ever since World War One; but All Souls’ Day goes back much farther.

On Monday afternoon as I sat in class at NYU studying the antisemitic policies of the Third Reich, the “Flood NYC for Palestine” protests descended upon Washington Square Park. This October 7, a year after the worst Jewish massacre since the Holocaust, hundreds of people had interrupted their afternoons to join a march in support of what’s euphemistically referred to as Palestinian “resistance by any means necessary.” To say “terrorism” would be unsubtle, you see. NYU students staged a planned “walk out” to join the “flood” on Monday.

"You have a big mountain to climb!" is not the sort of text you eagerly await from your girlfriend’s father. But Billy, a true Southern gent, meant no ambiguity. As dawn cracked the alarms sounded in our Airbnb and six of us bundled into the back of the Dodge. A cool mist hung in the valley as “Baba O’Riley (Teenage Wasteland)” started up on the radio and got the blood running. At 6:15 a.m. we entered the shadow of Emigrant Peak, which at 10,921 feet, commands Montana’s Paradise Valley. Emigrant owes its name to Thomas Curry, a pioneer who struck gold in a creek on the east side of the mountain in 1863.

Nozawa Onsen and Hakuba, my favorite ski resorts near Tokyo, are booking up fast. A trip to Japan guarantees novelty, not least if you book a ski trip. Underpinned by excellent food, surreal views, reliable snow cover, fantastically cheap prices and delightful onsen culture, it’s no wonder the country is increasingly popular with gaijin (non-Japanese). Australian, American and European powder hounds now fill the towns every year, but there are endless authentic experiences waiting in each charmingly idiosyncratic resort. A quick Google betrays that my favorites are already filling up for winter ’24/25. So here’s a run-down of what to expect, and where I’d recommend you book, subayaku.

The political pyrotechnics in Washington this summer have been so blinding as to blot out everything else happening in the national capital. The inside job that forced President Joe Biden out of his re-election campaign and the meteoric rise of Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee, all in the shadow of Donald Trump’s return to the national stage, have fascinated Washington like nothing since the Watergate scandal, exactly fifty years ago.  Yet even as Washingtonians focus on blood sport of politics, it is too easy to forget that the city is filled with far more edifying activities than the gladiatorial clashes in the political arena.

Minouche Shafik has reigned as president of Columbia University. Culture wars, like the kind involving actual armies, have casualties. Shafik is the fourth Ivy League president to step down in the last nine months. She was proceeded by Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay at Harvard. Magill and Gay were casualties of their hapless testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on December 5 and, in Gay’s case, the subsequent revelations about her serial plagiarism. She was also proceeded by Martha Pollack, president of Cornell University, who hung up her mortar board in June, without an assist from the House committee but citing the “enormous, unexpected challenges” of having to deal with antisemitism and Islamophobia.

With my Customs Declaration Form in hand and Japanese customs handbook in my pocket, I touched down in Tokyo for the first time, from Mumbai. I was wearing flip flops in February, but feeling as ready as I ever would. “Don’t point your chopsticks.” “Never raise your voice.” “No talking on public transport.” “Try to arrive early.” “Take your garbage home with you.” “Meetings should not be canceled.” “Make sure you slurp your noodles.” “Jaywalking is punishable with up to three months in prison.” There was a lot to remember. I was determined not to follow the trodden path, to find spots nobody else had. Then I got off the train in central Tokyo.

After the bizarre, weather-beaten and at times purely controversial Olympics opening ceremony, the finale to a largely successful event was more assured, not least because of its most spectacular coup de théâtre. The now-sixty-two-year-old Tom Cruise, still the biggest movie star in the world, literally and symbolically, transferred the Olympics from Paris in 2024 to Los Angeles in 2028 by abseiling from the top of the Stade de France, collecting the Olympic flag and transferring it to the Hollywood sign above LA, with much airborne derring-do and implicit early promotion for the next Mission: Impossible film, to be released next summer. Cruise’s status as a living legend is now beyond discussion.

When I was sixteen, my dad took me along to a conference he attended in Calgary just days after the city hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics. By this time, the Eddie the Eagle and Jamaican bobsled T-shirts were all half-price, but everyone was still talking about the joke athletes that were the talk of the games. The International Olympic Committee wasn’t happy about it, though, and created what came to be known as the “Eddie the Eagle rule,” making it much harder for athletes to qualify for the Games. Since then, the number of ridiculously bad athletes competing in the Olympics has declined, but there are still dreadful performances to be found, and the Paris Games have been no exception.

This year’s Copa América soccer tournament in the US was a dress rehearsal for the 2026 World Cup, which will also be hosted by the US, along with Canada and Mexico. And to put it mildly, folks appear to hate the dress. With the US group opener against Bolivia barely attracting 48,000 fans to an 80,000-capacity stadium and players voicing frustration over the conditions of the fields, public opinion already seemed to not be on the host’s side. What transpired last night, however, likely caused more anti-US sentiment in the western hemisphere than any military intervention.