Spectator Life

Peter Salovey must be fretting. The longtime president of Yale University has done everything in his power to pander to the forces of woke identity politics. He changed the name of Calhoun College at Yale because students didn’t like that it was named after John C. Calhoun, a supporter of slavery in the early nineteenth century. Salovey covered over or ripped out artwork across the university that a specially appointed committee deemed insensitive or offensive. He shoveled tens of millions of dollars into “diversity” initiatives in an effort to appease student crybullies. But Salovey has one insuperable handicap. He is white. In the great racial sweepstakes of the day, that is (if I may so put it) an insuperable black mark. Harvard understands this.

The pandemic of the past two years had many casualties — everything from lost lives to faith in bureaucratic and medical expertise. All-you-can-eat buffet restaurants were among the hardest-hit subsectors of the service economy. Buffets were already in steep decline nationwide by 2019, owing to evolving American preferences for fast casual dining and farm-to-table menus with Golden Corral as arguably the sole remaining buffet chain in America. By 2022, even that venerable franchise  — a Raleigh, North Carolina-based symbol of American excess and dependent on high gross revenues to offset narrow per-order profit margins — had seen its footprint shrink 25 percent, down to a mere 360 restaurants after losing eighty due to pandemic-related closures.

Chesapeake, Virginia  If you're looking for a Christmas display to rival Clark Griswold's 25,000 twinkling incandescent lights, the Chesapeake City Hall is a good place to start. The building lights up each year for its "Deck the Hall" event, a drive-through light display featuring candy cane-wrapped trees, glittering snowflakes and City Hall itself glowing red and green. The decorations were so bright I had a difficult time reading the signs that would point me to the Chesapeake Public Schools building. Luckily, it only took a few more turns before I saw two parking lots full of cars and a line of people sprawling down the block. The crowd wasn't there to take in the beautiful Christmas lights.

The After School Satan Club being hosted at a Virginia elementary school faced a temporary setback Tuesday when its unnamed sponsor decided to no longer host the event. However, according to the Satanic Temple, which hosts the ASSC around the country, a new sponsor has resubmitted the group’s application. Chesapeake Public Schools Superintendent Jared A. Cotton sent an email to parents on Tuesday indicating that the initial application had been withdrawn. “Today, the Chesapeake citizen requesting to use the facility on behalf of the ASSC has officially withdrawn their request,” Cotton wrote. “As such, the application no longer meets the requirements of School Board Policy. At this point, the approval for building use has been canceled.

I’m hungry, so I know it has begun. December. The month when the kitchen transforms into a battleground, no soldier safe from its vigilant sniper’s gaze. Seemingly innocuous snacking is off-limits: one must assume that everything edible — everything — has been squirreled away for festive drop-ins, cocktail parties and The Big Day. “Wait! Don’t open that. It’s the Christmas wine.” “Hey. Don’t even think about it. That’s a gift for Auntie Jo.” “Put those back! They’re the Christmas Eve cashews.” We must struggle with bizarre concepts like “having a banana” or “waiting until dinner.” Or, do as I do. Continue in vain, scribbling an IOU list that grows as long as my belly grows round. I’ll buy it back tomorrow. Of course I will.

Americans are truly excellent at four things: ingenuity, marketing, making chicken wings and inventing their own sports. The first three, of course, are also all foundational pillars of American sporting glory; it would be nothing without the wings. And so, as the US gears up to face the Netherlands on Saturday, its first ever appearance in the knockout round of the World Cup this century, I am duty bound to issue a plea: for the love of all that you hold sacred, please America, don’t get into soccer. This would be a huge mistake. While covering the World Cup in Doha, I’ve watched the US men’s national team, or USMNT as they are unforgivably referred to, play in a couple of games. And I have to say I'm pretty concerned.

For most of my life, I was a night owl. Up-and-at-‘em types would tease me for my sleeping-in habits. I’d go on the defensive by saying, yeah, you get up at the crack of dawn, but you’re also in bed by dusk like a nerd, whereas I burn the midnight oil like some mad genius tinkering away with the romantic moon and my fellow nocturnal beasts. I preferred, until relatively recently, to work late rather than get up early to complete tasks. In college, I avoided 8 a.m. classes like Joe Biden avoids news conferences. But deep down, I always longed to be one of those people who was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first thing in the morning, accomplishing half their to-do list before I had hit the snooze button for the third time. For years, I thought it just wasn’t in the cards.

The 1-0 Team USA victory over Iran in a World Cup match that was crucial to both teams seemed to take place in a different universe from the grand geopolitical narratives that swirled around it. This was nothing like the infamous 1956 Melbourne Bloodbath between the Hungarian and Soviet water polo teams, facing off weeks after the USSR's bloody suppression of Hungary's revolution. The stakes in Doha were very high: for Iran, only a win or a draw would see them advance; for America, win or go home. Yet there did not appear to be any tension or enmity between the players on the field. No screaming matches, head butts, or dirty fouls. There were few controversial calls by the referee.

Joshua Weissman’s number-one bestselling An Unapologetic Cookbook is misnamed. You won’t catch the potty-mouthed, long- haired chef saying sorry for making a mild ethnic slur against Italians or a penis joke, but in a philosophical sense, apologetics is exactly what he’s doing: he champions the joys of home cooking to an uninitiated audience. Weissman’s unlikely following is made up of the type of guys who consume a lot of quasi-educational content on YouTube and Wikipedia. They won’t buy the latest Barefoot Contessa volume, but they are curious about how things are made, whether it’s bridges or Big Macs.

The World Cup has just begun and it’s already shaping up to be the wokest iteration of the world’s grandest sporting event in history. Twelve years ago, corrupt FIFA officials awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a Gulf state of less than three million people and about the size of Connecticut. In the intervening years, most of the criticism of this decision focused on the bribery scandal that engulfed FIFA and claims from human rights groups that some 6,000 migrant laborers died on the job during the frenzied construction of eight stadiums and other buildings for the tournament. Attacks on the host country have broadened in recent days, focusing predominantly on Qatar’s laws criminalizing homosexuality.

Much ink has been spilled over the clothes in Netflix’s fifth season of The Crown, which debuted last week. The award-winning show about Britain’s royal family has reached the scandalous “Diana Affair,” in which every outfit of Ms. Spencer's is seen as a rapier against the formal codes of the Firm. Her looks are meticulously replicated by costume designer Amy Roberts (or as much as possible given the slimmer, taller frame of Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Diana). Despite their spousal difficulties, a talent Diana and Charles shared was dressing. His attention to playfully using fundamentals (color, cut, textile quality) lends to a personal style that is both timeless and surprisingly contemporary.

There are some characters who infuse literature and life with disproportionate zest. The nature of their vocations is less relevant than the fervency they bring to the job, which is what makes them stand up off the page and sail through time. Lucius Beebe, who kept a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley, favored bowler hats and evening dress and wrote a column for the old New York Herald Tribune in the 1930s and then for Gourmet until his death in 1966, sits high up on my list of zestful characters who go the distance: militantly old-fashioned, never out-of-date. The association with the estimable, sadly deceased Gourmet justifies talking about Beebe under the food heading as much as any other, even though he did not always write about food as such.

Two days before the start of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, authorities have decided to ban the sale of alcohol within the eight stadiums hosting matches. Only non-alcoholic options will be available. Cockburn is appalled at the audacity of such a move — soccer without booze!? How will anyone cope? Beer will apparently be available at the Fan Festival among other areas, but that's little consolation. Not to mention the fact that Budweiser had a sponsorship deal with FIFA for the World Cup. Who knew that the Gulf nation could be so ruthless? (Lots of people.) Qatar is already struggling to attract fans, with inadequate lodging options and incredibly high fees.

Winter is just around the corner — and you know what that means: the Soccer World Cup? Yes, as sleigh bells ring and children listen, a motley crew of twenty- and thirtysomething millionaires will be kicking balls around in hastily constructed stadiums in the desert. The tournament is in Qatar for the first time — not known as a great footballing nation (their men’s team has never qualified on merit), but the head of their FA was deputy head of FIFA during Sepp Blatter’s appallingly corrupt tenure, so that’s got to be a good enough reason to host it there. In the middle of the regular season. In new arenas that thousands of migrant workers died building.

As with a couple of prominent unmarried senators, Americans have long suspected that soccer might be gay. Now, it’s official. On Monday, the US men’s national team unveiled a redesign to the team’s logo that replaces red stripes in the crest with the rainbow colors of the gay pride flag. https://twitter.com/USMNT/status/1592266453952172041 Soccer’s decision to come out of the closet ahead of the World Cup, and to live as its authentic self, was met with shrugs of “well, obviously” and “I always thought soccer might be gay since that time I caught soccer trying on my make-up and lipsyncing to Donna Summer.

Turin at the end of August is pleasingly melancholic. The city has emptied after the feast of Ferragosto on August 15 and won’t fill up again till September. Solid bourgeois streets, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings now housing banks, are deserted save for the occasional confused tourist. What brings others to Turin in August I cannot say. For me, it was a wedding in Milan at the end of the week and the prospect of a little vacation ahead of it. Turin was a whim. I was meant to meet a college friend in Genoa on Monday, but my Sunday-night redeye from New York was canceled. Saturday was the only option, and so I was left at a loose end. Options abounded: I could stay overnight in Milan and head to Genoa with my friend the next day.