Spectator Life

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.

For those of us with a poor grasp of time, who can still recall when a night at the bar could be sharply revisited by a Proustian wave of stale smoke arising from yesterday’s clothes, it can almost feel as if vaping crept up on us out of nowhere. One moment, it seemed, all the authorities had firmly agreed that pushing for vaping was creepy, and were pledging to legislate and tax cigarettes into oblivion; the next, great hordes of schoolchildren were apparently free to suck constantly on little vials of liquid nicotine with sugar-rush names such as Cherry Fizzle and Blue Razz Lemonade. What happened?

Every time Bill Maher goes viral for being a "non-woke" liberal, the conservative pundit class is eager to remind readers that Maher is not one of them. It’s a pedantic and pointless exercise, because Maher has never claimed to be.  Case in point, earlier this month, National Review published another piece in a long trilogy of tired conservative columns bitching about Maher acting as some sort of “leftist agent” because he “has always made his bed with the mainstream.” “As entertainment,” wrote culture critic Armond White, “Real Time has a limited audience of HBO subscribers, yet its clips serve as a crutch for conservative TV programs — those outlets too feckless to generate their own talking points but that are always following the lead of left-wing media.

I recently found myself scrolling World Cement Weekly in search of news of a massive rewilding project in northern Mexico, created and funded by the cement giant Cemex. The growing success of the rewilding movement is strangely little known — though there are now places that are wilder, more vibrant, more teeming with life than they have been for centuries, few outside the movement know anything about them. Two decades ago, a nature-loving chief executive of Cemex decided that the company would acquire 346,000 acres of degraded land on Mexico’s border with America, an area larger than Los Angeles, renamed the El Carmen Nature Reserve.