Spectator Life

I advise you to have a bottle of Dramamine on hand before reading Claudine Gay’s nauseating missive announcing her resignation as president of Harvard University. “It has been distressing,” she (or perhaps it was someone else) wrote, “to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.” “Confronting hate”? “Upholding scholarly rigor”? “Racial animus”? Puh-leeze!  Gay had a chance to “confront hate” when the pampered panty-waist radicals at Harvard demonstrated in favor of Hamas. She didn’t.

One of the most important political developments of 2023 was the growing pushback against “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Those DEI programs and the ideology that underpin them are under siege politically and legally, and they are losing. They had grown rapidly, thanks to a mixture of support, indifference and timidity. But that began to ebb last year and will continue to recede in 2024. The wounded patient was wheeled into the intensive care unit when the Supreme Court undermined a crucial foundation for DEI and related affirmative action programs. The decision came in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a similar case against the University of North Carolina.

You are probably almost as sick of hearing about Claudine Gay — as of this writing, still the president of Harvard University — as I am of writing about her. As I pointed out a year ago in this space, Harvard’s appointment of Gay, a black woman, was simply the next chapter in the university’s long-running pursuit of its racial spoils system. Gay’s entire academic career has been a testimony to the power of that enterprise. What a prize Harvard had in Claudine Gay: a black female who was an avid proponent of the whole “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” racket. Could there be any doubt that she was being groomed for the top slot?

The Toad's Morale, Sam Tallent's stand-up comedy special, gives you the answer to the question: what if a genius-level writer decided to devote himself thoroughly to writing jokes on the subjects of sex, death and bodily fluids? Distributed on comedian Shane Gillis's YouTube channel — another giant phenomenon and also in the top tier of best podcast guests who could also play offensive tackles — Tallent's special showcases his capability for timing and rhythm. His jokes have a tempo that seems natural and relaxed in the moment, but is clearly intentional, effortless on the surface but disguising the skill of the construction under a thick layer of blue.  https://youtu.be/0eIUA1jfEk0?

Harvard president Claudine Gay’s troubling history of appropriating other people’s idea and words and passing them off as her own has a well-worn name: plagiarism. Every college and university in the United States prohibits plagiarism. Most present students with explicit rules against it and lay out the possibility of drastic punishments, such as failing a course and, depending on the severity of the offense, expulsion from the college. Typically, instructors in freshman English include lessons on the proper ways to quote, paraphrase and cite sources.  Why? What is so wrong with plagiarism? We don’t punish actors for reciting their lines and failing to add, “Mr. William Shakespeare wrote that.

The city of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, really comes into its own twice a year. Firstly is August, when its streets are thronged with revelers and amateur PR types (“four stars in the Scotsman!”) promoting their wares at the world-famous performing arts festival. And then the second comes at the end of the year, during the New Year’s Eve period of Hogmanay, which sees anyone claiming long-distant Scots ancestry taking part in the revels for a day or two, just as it seems anyone in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day suddenly remembers their long-lost Uncle Padraig or Great-Aunt Shelagh. In any case, Hogmanay in Edinburgh is a marvelous experience, freezing cold aside, and best experienced from the surroundings of somewhere comfortable.

You just can’t beat London at Christmas. Unless you’re lining up to get into the Tube station (never mind onto a train) at Oxford Circus, in the pissing rain. Then you’re better off in one of those glass igloos in Finland.  When I’m in town for the holidays, I find myself returning to a few old faithfuls, with a few old faithfuls. The Zetter Marylebone Keep this gem up your sleeve for when the crowds become a little too much. A warren of sumptuous suites and a lavish, candlelit parlor awaits at dinky Zetter Marylebone hotel, just a couple of streets back from shopping mecca Selfridges. Divide and conquer last-minute shopping with Mom, then meet here at lunchtime for a swift recovery.

As a left-wing sympathizer to the Palestinian cause, I cringed when I heard reports that college students around the country, including at Columbia University, my alma mater, had expressed support for Hamas’s murder of Israeli civilians on October 7. My first thought was that “woke” students had lost their minds — confusing the perfectly legitimate defense of Palestinian rights with the usual laundry list of “resistance” clichés that pay little attention to history, morality or the subtleties of the English language.

Who could resist the opportunity to visit a women’s island? Four years ago, I read an article in the New York Times travel section about an Estonian island called Kihnu, which the Times dubbed an “Isle of Women.” Its subhead asked “What would life be like without men?” and I wanted to find out, making a mental note to visit this peculiar island — “run by women” — someday, and my opportunity came last summer as part of a trip with my wife, Jen, and our teenage sons to Finland and the Baltic countries. But Kihnu, we discovered, isn’t a women’s island, or anything close to it. Before our trip, I reread the Times piece plus similar ones before combing YouTube for Kihnu videos.

Boston Harbor Hotel, 6:42 a.m. I tossed on a robe, had a fight with an unfamiliar coffee machine, then threw back my bedroom curtains to soak up the best part of chronic jet lag. Fuschia skies intensified before a beautifully fat, gold sun peeped above the horizon. Some hours later, a three-tier stand stacked with PB&J sandwiches, smoked salmon, vanilla bean scones and fig jam obscured the same uninterrupted view, from the Rowes Wharf Sea Grille downstairs. Proffered a frankly overwhelming selection of colorful loose leaf teas, the irony wasn’t lost on me, a Brit, as I raised a pinky. “Green Sparkling… Tropical Oolong… Organic Big Ben English Breakfast… Chai Imperial? How about L’Herboriste?

“There is too much Nutella in the cornetto.” Not the words you hope to hear while trudging up the craggy slope of the most active volcano in Europe, in the wrong footwear. Clouds of black dust kicked up into my nostrils. A white butterfly posed starkly against dried black lava.  “Come, ragas, I want to show you something. These are lava bombs. I am standing on thiiiiiiick liquid. The lava! It went splat-ta! Like pizza dough!” Our guide Vincenzio gesticulated at his bedraggled group, inwardly asking themselves why they’d volunteered to tackle Mount Etna in a heatwave. “A big mama. She-” A robotic siren interrupted Vincenzio mid-flow, screeching from a startled septuagenarian’s Nokia. A teenager patted down his jean pocket, confused.

Matthew Williams, the tattooed American fashion designer and creative director at Givenchy, will soon be evicted from the famous house. Givenchy announced on December 1 that Williams would leave his job at the end of the year. Nobody is particularly surprised. His three-year tenure has been controversial and highly disliked by many, and also hasn’t produced any viral products. It was obvious Williams’s publicists knew his time was up too. Late last year, he was profiled by Jessica Testa in the New York Times; an article built around the fact that designer contracts typically only last three years, and that his time at Givenchy wasn't producing hits. Diesel, Vetements, Loewe and Balenciaga have all spun controversy into sales. The best Givenchy achieved was disappointment, if that.

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question.  You might think it was a pretty simple question.

“Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath,” opens Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad. The goddess Homer summoned isn’t named, but it is usually assumed he meant Calliope, the muse of epic poetry —and much later, circus music. But Homer might have meant Lyssa, the Greek goddess of mad rage and frenzy. She was well known to the ancients. The Romans called her Furor or Rabies — which gets the idea across fairly well. The Norse had two versions: Odr, who represented fury and frenzy, and Fenrir, a giant wolf who represents uncontrollable savagery.    By whatever name she may have been called, Lyssa appears to have been active in human affairs for a very long time.

“Stealth wealth” became A Thing in 2023. TikTok was awash with “get the look!” fashion videos; magazines full of think pieces on crisp white shirts and camel cashmere. The idea is to ooze money — or at least look like you do — in classic, understated cuts and colors. What the Streeps and Paltrows have been doing for decades is now the standard for the aspirational and chronically online.  The trend came to mind as I tumbled into Rome’s five-star Anantara Palazzo Naiadi during the Cerberus heatwave. Slick with sweat, a suitcase half my size and missing one wheel, toenails unpainted and there to interview chef Heros de Agostinis, I wished I’d paid more attention. There are fancy hotels, then there are stratospherically fancy hotels like this one.

The Cybertruck is here. Finally. Maybe. Sort of. Thursday was the “Cybertruck Delivery Event,” where they finally rolled off the production line and were handed over to waiting customers. Musk served as chaperone, host and speaker, and the event was a hype-fest for fanboys. As the presentation started, it was hard to tell whether some in the crowd were shouting “Elon” or “hallelujah” (I think the latter). He presented a polished marketing video, markedly sparse on specs, but promised that the Cybertruck was one of those rare products that change how we see the world; that it is “more truck than truck,” while also being “a better sports car than a sports car” and the best product Tesla had ever made. It’s not.

My phone screamed on the bedside table at 4:30 a.m. I’d been playing poker at a home game in Culver City until late in the night, so I didn’t answer, and I also didn’t answer the other six times it rang in the next two hours. When I finally woke up, I had a text from the “BBC OS” asking if I could talk. “What is the BBC OS?” I wondered. Then I realized it was the actual BBC’s Overnight Service. Still, why were they calling me at dawn? And then when I went online, I realized they wanted to know my thoughts about the fact that Snoop Dogg had announced, on his Instagram, that he, “after much consideration and conversation with my family ... decided to give up smoke.” He accompanied this announcement with a photo of himself, hands in prayer, looking quite plaintive.