Spectator Life

I grew up in a northeastern state, and when I moved to Washington, there were plenty of culture shocks I had to get used to. The Metro seemed like a revelation, a magical train that whisked you under the White House and the National Mall (this was back when DC public transportation actually worked). Less appealing were the crime notices slapped about my neighborhood: I saw one once — I'm not making this up — that reported a real-life nunchuck attack. But the biggest shock of all was, and still is, the heat. Where I grew up, a 100-degree day was an event. That's all the more so because my parents didn't have so much as a window air conditioner until I was around ten years old. In the frozen reaches of Up North, this was a perfectly normal way to live.

Cockburn saw Papa John last week at CPAC — and he had some strong words about his old stomping grounds. John Schnatter, founder of Papa John’s Pizza, was ousted from his company in 2018 after saying the N-word on a conference call. Cockburn thinks he had it coming. Schnatter, who ate 800 pizzas from the chain over the last eighteen months, claims the company is now “down with Little Caesar’s,” among the gravest insults you can level in the pizza business. The Pizza Papa made it clear that he knows why the company is losing its way: "We built the whole company on conservative values. Conservative ideology has two of the most critical attributes: truth and God." Without truth and God, he said, the pizza had gotten worse.

I remember still the foreboding language and tone when I was learning to drive in New Jersey over a decade ago. First, you needed to earn your permit. Never forget that driving is a privilege, not a right (which only works if driving is an option, not effectively a requirement, though drivers ed isn’t in charge of land use). After your permit, you start with your probationary license. And in a twist that somehow passes civil liberties muster, you’re not even allowed to appeal a ticket issued to you during your probationary period. You feel a bit under suspicion until you finally get that license. Yet for all that, it’s still, basically, a lot of bureaucracy and paper-pushing.

Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons is the latest in a spate of streaming service exposés that seek to deconstruct the image-obsessed culture of the 2000s and 2010s. Netflix’s documentary about Abercrombie & Fitch taught us that the retailer was racist, fatphobic and potentially brimming with predatory closeted homosexuals. Hulu’s three-part documentary series about Victoria’s Secret teaches us that the company was sexist, fatphobic and potentially linked to pedophilic sex trafficking. Both take issue with the billionaire Les Wexner, who these days is more famous for his association with Jeffrey Epstein than his role in defining mall culture. (His retail conglomerate was also behind The Limited, Lane Bryant, Bath & Body Works and several other retail staples.

Hollywood star Chris Pratt is having an incredible few months. Pratt's new show The Terminal List is the top streamed television series on Amazon Prime, the latest Jurassic World movie just surpassed $900 million at the box office and filming recently wrapped on the third and final installment of Guardians of the Galaxy. His wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, just welcomed the couple's second baby, and next year, Pratt will provide the voice for popular animated characters Mario and Garfield in their respective movies. Pratt's rise is especially remarkable because less than two years ago the online mob officially deigned him "The Worst Chris" after a series of media attacks about his alleged political and religious views.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I took a day trip to Maryland, where we visited the National Capital Trolley Museum. It’s an unassuming building with an ornamented facade — a little like a Main Street building in a rural small town — and the gift shop, exhibits and ticket prices are all modest. There’s an interactive electricity exhibit for kids (and adults like me), where you can power a tiny trolley in a diorama of an old streetcar-suburb scene. One of the windows in a house even lights up. It’s simple and fun, a small, lean museum run by a dedicated group of people. An older man who worked there explained the old DC trolley map to me, recalling all the different lines he used to ride as a kid. That’s something you can’t get from a book.

I have always admired the tag corruptio optima pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. Take the Ivy League. These super-rich, super-prestigious institutions are so wealthy and so beguiling because, once upon a time, they represented and — more to the point — successfully transmitted to their students the prime civilizational values of our culture. We’re told, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the light we see from distant stars is very old and, in some cases, is light from stars that were long ago extinguished. It is same with the Ivy League and their near competitors. Today, they are utterly bankrupt — not financially, of course. No, in a good old greedy capitalist sense, they are filthy, stinking rich.

Manchester, England Making plans for a European city break this summer? Seeking somewhere with centuries of history and culture, fine wine and, above all, sweltering temperatures? There’ll always be Rome, Barcelona, Athens — but chances are you haven’t considered Manchester, the northern English industrial powerhouse that inspired Karl Marx to write The Communist Manifesto and gave the world the Smiths, Joy Division and Oasis (you know, the ones who wrote “Wonderwall”).

Today’s youth get a bad rap for being boring: they don’t join clubs, volunteer, pursue hobbies, or invent anything. Their sartorial style is a sad mishmash of tired trends, their movies unimaginative remakes (there are nine Spider-Man movies now), and their music is largely stoned hip-hop artists talk-singing to the same hypnotic beat. There are many forces at work in the dulling of the current generation, but one of the simplest reasons youngins may not feel inclined to go anywhere or do anything is because getting there is such an exercise in meh. When was the last time you sat in the driver’s seat of a new car, gripped the steering wheel and felt one iota of excitement?

Everyone comes to Bogotá looking for something. It’s always been that way. A thousand years ago, indigenous traders traveled to the markets in the Bogotá savanna to barter with the Muisca and exchange gold, emeralds, salt and cotton. The Spaniards arrived five centuries later in search of the treasures of conquest and the mythical city of gold that now lends its name to the international airport: El Dorado. The great revolutionary Simón Bolívar came in search of the capital of his South America republic Gran Colombia and to liberate the continent from Spanish rule. I didn’t know what I was looking for when I first arrived in Bogotá.

For the first time in my adult life, I left Washington, DC for the Fourth of July holiday. Apparently this is a very popular move: locals usually prefer to escape the concrete jungle in favor of sunny shores, winding rivers, or, well, anywhere but here. Not me. Party hopping around the nation's capital before settling in at a secret spot away from all of the tourists to watch fireworks on the National Mall makes this one of my favorite days of the year. However, driven by both a desire to visit family and check out what everyone was raving about in our July magazine, this year I hopped on a southbound plane to the Sunshine State. The weekend took me from Tampa to Sarasota to Naples, experiencing all of the weird and wonderful that Florida has to offer.

Two weeks before Covid began to hit Europe, I stood in the Basilica Cistern beneath Istanbul, steadily getting dripped on. Built during the reign of the Emperor Justinian I in 532, just before another deadly pandemic — the plague of Justinian — the cistern lies beneath Istanbul’s tourist hotspot, and despite it being damp, dark and having stands of 007 merchandise at its entrance and exit, it is one of the most enchanting places in a city that has captivated its visitors for over a thousand years. "If the Earth were a single state," Napoleon once pronounced, "Istanbul would be its capital," and upon visiting you begin to understand why.

There were runners on first and second. The batter hit a ball through the gap between the shortstop and third base, and off the runners went. Except the shortstop immediately got in the way of the runner coming from second, and started smacking him with a glove. The confused runner covered his head with his hands as he maneuvered around the shortstop, and barely made it to third base in time to beat the throw from left field. Such are the joys of little league baseball, of which I recently completed my third season of coaching. I approached the shortstop after that play, and explained to her that she was not allowed to tag the runner with her glove unless she actually had the ball. “Oh, I know,” she retorted. “I was trying to stop him from getting to third base.

A so-called TikTok "star" went viral this week after complaining to her more than 2 million followers that a ranch prohibited her from riding their horses because she was over the weight limit. Remi Bader, who describes herself as a "curve model" — a new term for plus-size models that sounds "nicer," says former model Anna Shillinglaw — claimed in a TikTok video that Deep Hollow Ranch in Montauk, New York, made her leave because she weighed more than 240 pounds. "I don't really need any opinions on this one," Bader said in response to commenters who noted that horses cannot carry humans above a certain weight without severe strain or injury. "It's the fact of how it wasn't advertised and how poorly it was handled. This was my experience not yours. ...

The Washington Redskins — sorry, Football Team — sorry, Commanders — aren't letting a name change be the end of their ridiculous virtue signaling. Last week, the organization fined defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio $100,000 for expressing a completely benign political opinion about the January 6 Capitol riot. Del Rio first caught the attention of the woke scolds when he responded to a tweet about the January 6 committee hearings by the Brookings Institute's Norm Eisen. Eisen hasn't been shy about calling January 6 an "insurrection," and insists that former president Donald Trump is going to be charged with crimes for his alleged role in the Capitol riot. Del Rio asked why Eisen wasn't talking about "the summer of riots, looting, burning and the destruction of personal property.