Spectator Life

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.

Joe Biden’s midterms victory lap didn’t last long. On Thursday, a federal judge in Texas struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. US District Judge Mark Pittman ruled that it was “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated.” It feels like just yesterday White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was at the podium proudly reading reviews from the student debt reallocation website. So many happy customers had nothing but great things to say about their experience. Jean-Pierre quoted one student’s review as follows: “I just filled out the student loan forgiveness form in about one minute on my phone in my pajamas. It is possible that the government actually made a form that’s easy and straightforward.

Horizontal, deep into a book and ever deeper into a mojito, is how I’ve spent most of my week. A private beach under the Caribbean sun should have been relaxing. And it would have been, if it wasn’t for the vibe squad. What is a "vibe squad," you ask? Well, picture it: you’re nearing the end of a Patti Smith novel, and naturally you’re crying. It’s mid-afternoon, you’re contemplating a nap after the next drink. When all of a sudden you and Patti Smith are covered in booze, startled by a young girl in a bright top screaming, "are you ready to part-aaaaaay?" I was not, in fact, ready to part-aaaaaay, and the girl quickly moved along to the next unwitting tourist too polite to tell her to sling her hook.

As one of eight children, I feel deep kinship with others who come from big families. Bunk beds, hand-me-down clothes, abject chaos at dinnertime — these are the staples of big-family life. Tieghan Gerard, the author of the food blog and cookbook series Half Baked Harvest, is one such kindred spirit. She comes from a family of ten, and began cooking as a tween to help with frenzied mealtimes. She soon started creating her own recipes for a food blog, which became three bestselling cookbooks and a four-million-follower Instagram. Her big-family backstory blends with her wholesome, rustic aesthetic: feeding a crowd, after all, involves creativity, resourcefulness and well-loved tools. I hoped I’d recognize some high-volume cooking tricks in Half Baked Harvest: Super Simple.

I am a Party City Bavarian: wearing Doc Martens, pulled-up cotton socks, a polyester smock and pair of buttock-hugging lederhosen. Drowning men have more breathing room. My range of motion is limited to a ceremonial waddle. Thankfully, I do not have far to travel — and there is plenty of beer. Allow me to explain: this weekend I took the trip ninety or so miles north of Atlanta to Helen, a small city not far from the North Carolina state line. In the late 1960s, city officials passed a zoning regulation to turn Helen into a replica of a Bavarian alpine town (hey, it was a weird decade). The result is a unique slice of Americana: an Oktoberfest in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, as Appalachian as it is alpine.

It is a common thing we have all experienced to be true: events that forever fix themselves in our memory of a certain place. Call it the “I’ll never forget where I was on December 7, 1941 or September 11, 2001” syndrome. On the Sunday Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, my father was on a train passing through western Pennsylvania after a job interview in New York City; he preserved a copy of the Pittsburgh paper to prove it. On the morning of September 11, I was breakfasting at home, awaiting my driver for Dulles International Airport; due to fly that day, I did not.

Perusing the listings of a recent auction, I noticed an intriguing, relatively flat piece of copper-plated cast iron featuring intricate foliate and geometric designs. It was a baluster designed by the firm of Adler & Sullivan in 1893 for the old Chicago Stock Exchange. The 1972 demolition of that building, thanks to the “urban renewal” undertaken by many progressive American cities during the mid-twentieth century, led to this bit of architectural salvage coming up at auction many years later. It also led to the death of an idealistic photographer and activist named Richard Nickel. When Nickel (born in 1928) was killed on April 13, 1972, his body was not recovered for weeks.

Today is my 10,369th day of "girlhood". I don't have a bow in my hair, nor am I wearing a Barbie pink dress. But I am still a woman. Because I was born one. Because I am. I will always pray that people suffering from gender dysphoria are able to find peace with who they are. However, I do not have any sympathy for those who play-act as women using hackneyed stereotypes, pretend to speak for us — and then have the stones to tell us we are the problem when we don't comply with their delusion. Such is the case with Dylan Mulvaney. Despite not actually being a woman and even only "identifying" as such for less than a year, Mulvaney has somehow become the woman du jour. Mulvaney is a TikTok influencer with over 8 million followers and a viral series he calls, "Days of Girlhood".

I got out of the taxi in front of my hotel in lower town Ottawa and was immediately accosted by a homeless junkie looking for a donation to the cause. It was a Sunday evening, well after sunset, and not quite the greeting I had hoped for upon arrival in Canada’s leafy capital. The smell of pot was in the air, a lot of it — there was a cannabis store across the street, and another around the corner. After checking in and dropping off my bags, I went in search of a late dinner. A two-block journey to a trendy tap house with a wide selection of craft beers witnessed another half-dozen, very animated homeless people. One, eyes closed, was dancing in the middle of the sidewalk, his arms flailing in the air, oblivious to everyone and everything around him (mind the lamppost!).

The restaurant world was devastated this week after learning a fact our cousins across the Pond have been telling us for some time: that James Corden is a huge douchebag. The Late Late Show host found himself on the blacklist of swanky New York haunt Balthazar, after owner Keith McNally described the Brit as his “most abusive customer.” Now, one enterprising company that provides signage to restaurants is offering its clients a “free digital sign” to Iet Corden know he’s banned from their establishments too. Australia-based Mandoe Media breathlessly rushed the signs out in a press release. A bit too quickly for Cockburn’s liking, as the company appears to have skipped the spell-checking stage. One reads, “DONT BE LIKE JAMES: TREAT STAFF WITH RESPECT!

Georgetown University's School of Medicine is teaching its students to administer puberty blockers and hormone therapy to minors, an investigation by The Spectator reveals. Medical students were told in a 2021 pre-clinical course that the "only way to help" many transgender people is to "'fix' their bodies" through medical intervention. The course also falsely claimed that puberty blockers are "fully reversible." Georgetown University did not return a request for comment. First year medical students at Georgetown are required to take a course on Human Sexuality, which is part of a foundational block on the reproductive system. In an iteration of this course last year, students were greeted with a guest lecture on "Transgender Health Care" by Dr. David S. Reitman.

I recently got engaged. After the celebratory Champagne and indulgent restaurant meals my fiancé and I enjoyed in our month of post-betrothal bliss, reality set in: soon I must fit into a wedding dress. Of course, dresses come in all shapes and sizes, just like brides. But have you seen the price of a wedding photographer lately? I’d like to look my best. These days, the main weight-loss food trend seems to be the ketogenic diet. Like the Paleo and Atkins diets, eating keto means cutting carbs. Unlike these other diets, keto isn’t high in protein; it’s high in fat. The idea is that depriving yourself of carbs and protein will cause your body to burn fat for energy — starting with the bacon and eggs you ate for breakfast and ending with your thighs.

Just before the start of the fall semester, New York University fired the distinguished professor in organic chemistry Maitland Jones Jr. NYU’s dean for Science Gregory Gabadadze informed Jones in a terse letter that his work “did not rise to the standards we require from our teaching faculty.” Jones is a legend in his field who literally wrote his subject’s 1,300-page textbook Organic Chemistry. He had been teaching at NYU on a renewable one-year contract since his retirement, in 2007, from a forty-three-year career at Princeton University. During his time at NYU, Jones won teaching awards. In 2017, he was named one of NYU’s “coolest” professors, a distinction he shared with only seven of his nearly 10,000 colleagues. Jones’s offense? His class was too hard.

The dominant wolf gets the liver, at least according to the podcaster Joe Rogan. In one episode, a bodybuilder called “CarnivoreMD” (real name Paul Saladino) tells him: “If you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male... or alpha female.” Offal has taken a markedly macho turn in recent years. No longer consigned to memories of the postwar school cafeteria, organs have become the preferred food of a certain type of gym bro. The word “offal” implies wastage — from the Middle Dutch for offcuts — but it can also be a delicacy. Foie gras is only the most obvious example. For the most part, though, the West has become squeamish about what was once called “variety meat.” But a new wave of offal-lovers is reviving an interest in organs.

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin is not backing down in the face of left-wing criticism of his new policy on parental rights in schools. During a Sunday interview on CNN's State of the Union, Youngkin rejected the push from teachers' unions and Democratic activists to supplant families as the most important arbiter of a child's upbringing. "[P]arents have a fundamental right to be engaged in their children’s lives,” Youngkin said. “And, oh, by the way, children have a right to have parents engaged in their life. And we needed to fix a wrong…children don’t belong to the state. They belong to families.

Cheating scandals in sports are, sadly, not uncommon. Tom Brady was suspended for several games after the NFL claimed he was "generally aware" of a plot to deflate footballs to make them easier to throw. The Houston Astros fired their manager for using video footage to steal opponents' signs. Barry Bonds missed out on a spot in the baseball Hall of Fame over his use of performance enhancing drugs. Cyclist Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven consecutive Tour de France titles and an Olympic medal for doping. Still, it's fairly unusual for cheating to make national headlines unless it occurs outside of one of the four major professional sporting leagues. That's why it caught my attention when there were three major cheating scandals involving niche sports in just one month.

Cockburn misses the old Kanye, straight from the ’Go Kanye. The rapper, producer, designer and… (what’s the opposite of a mental health advocate?) plumbed new depths this week with his appearance at Paris Fashion Week. West showed up to the launch of his new sneaker line alongside friend and fellow former liberal Candace Owens. Both wore shirts adorned with the slogan “White Lives Matter.” https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1577000138131656704 “White Lives Matter,” of course, was a common retort to the “Black Lives Matter” maxim that emerged in 2013 after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

Ever since the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling that allowed sports gambling to explode across the nation, the United States has seen a steady increase in the ready availability of gambling opportunities and apps that are now some of the main advertisers and sponsors for sports coverage of all stripes — from ESPN, Fox, NBC and CBS to the likes of Barstool and podcasts a plenty. Some traditionalists and conservatives are put off by this — gambling, they've long argued, is bad for communities and imposes a tax on working-class Americans. That's certainly true when it comes to the presence of casinos and the regressive taxation of lotteries. But sports gambling, unlike other forms of gambling, has significant social benefits that should not be ignored.

Rejoice, flight attendants! British airline Virgin Atlantic announced last week that they are switching to a gender-neutral uniform policy. Previously, female flight crew members donned the airline's iconic bright red skirt suit, while male crew wore burgundy three-piece suits. Now they may choose which uniform best matches their gender identity and pop on an accompanying pin informing customers of their chosen pronouns. The YouTube video announcing the new policy features several "non-binary" crew members who express pleasure at the change. Curiously, Virgin Atlantic opted to disable comments on the video and hide the number of dislikes.