Spectator Life

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.

Americans are fat and getting fatter. “More than two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or have obesity,” reports Heathline.com. The CDC (I actually trust them on this one) says that between 1999 and 2020, “obesity prevalence increased from 30.5 percent to 41.9 percent,” and severe obesity “increased from 4.7 percent to 9.2 percent.” And so, in the wake of woke, Old Navy and other clothing companies are (trying to) cash-in on our widening waistlines by disguising their latest capitalistic campaign as “inclusive sizing.” I gave up shopping for Lent. I made my return recently by perusing a Lands’ End catalog with my mother.

Last July 17, my daughter, Solveig Gold, married (then) Princeton professor Joshua Katz. It was a glorious, indeed transcendent (as one friend put it) celebration of the glory of God and the power of love — attended by a large gathering of the canceled, the not-yet-canceled and a lucky few who are seemingly uncancellable. Last month, as the world now knows, he was fired. If you haven’t yet read Solveig’s piece in Bari Weiss’s Substack, put mine aside and read hers first. It is beautiful and inspiring. Mine, by contrast, is merely mad as hell. In July 2020, Joshua published a piece in Quillette taking vigorous exception to the now infamous July 4 “Princeton faculty letter.

Last month, Spectator World contributor Casey Chalk wrote an article for the Abbeville Institute about the suburbanization of Northern Virginia, and specifically about real estate developer John T. “Til” Hazel Jr., whose projects in the 1970s and '80s considerably defined Virginia’s portion of the DC suburbs. “Tysons Corner, Fair Lakes, Franklin Farm, Burke Centre, and Fairfax Station, if you’ve heard of them, all owe their current existence as prominent residential or commercial zones to Hazel,” writes Chalk. He goes on to argue, as many do of Northern Virginia, that for all its diversity and proximity to a major city, the region lacks a core or center, as well as the sense of neighborliness and community that once thrived in the area’s smaller-town agricultural days.

You might expect Zabar’s, the world-famous “appetizing” store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to have become a shadow of its former self. This seems to be the case for most of New York’s other independent specialty shops. Fairway, Balducci’s, H&H Bagels, Dean & Deluca: the food purveyors of my youth have gone kaput. They were bought, leveraged, expanded, overextended and oversold. They expired past their sell-by dates. But somehow Zabar’s survived. For the Upper West Sider, Zabar’s is our Yale College and our Harvard. Like many I make my way down to 80th Street and Broadway most weekends for continuing education. I head to the appetizing counter and take a number.