Spectator Life

Time to send your kitchen knives out for sharpening. The hot weather is coming, and you know what that means: Greek salad, or horiatiki as the Greeks call it. Is there any pleasure in life quite like dicing tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers with a knife that balances properly in the palm, whose blade possesses just the right steely flex and strength, and — above all — that is properly sharpened? With the right edged tool, it is hard to stop cutting things up for Greek salad. With the right ingredients, it is hard to stop eating it. This is why Greek salad is the perfect dish to make for a dinner party. As your friends buzz about the kitchen, drinks in hand, you can chop away on autopilot, chatting merrily as your cutting board fills with heaped tomato chunks.

Princeton University’s Board of Trustees voted to fire tenured classics professor Joshua Katz on Monday — and the reason why has Cockburn adjusting his monocle to look a bit closer at the circumstances. Katz first came under scrutiny in 2018 for a consensual sexual relationship he had with a student at least a decade prior. At the time, he was suspended from his job for a year without pay. Then, new allegations arose that Katz had not been fully honest nor had fully cooperated with the previous investigation. Much to the chagrin of any frat guy looking to him for advice on how to score, Princeton gave him the boot.

Monsters, of course, come in a variety of shapes and forms, but they have some deep commonalities. Among these are a voracious appetite, an affinity for darkness, and a talent for evasion. They are hard to kill and very dangerous, especially to the innocent and the naive. Often they inspire a perverse kind of worship. I have been thinking about monsters as I contemplate the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates that have swept through the nation’s schools, colleges, and businesses, and nearly every other institution of note. The National Archives has a “Diversity and Inclusion Program.” So does Major League Baseball. So does the American Public Gardens Association. One is hard put to find a significant public body that is not committed to DEI.

The woes of the world are a’plenty. People are anxious, stressed-out, and burned-out. It seems that no matter what side of the political aisle you gravitate toward, there’s a new battle to be fought at the dawn of each day. Even innocent settings — school board meetings, comedy shows, the Magic Kingdom itself — are not immune from partisan vitriol. Luckily for us, though, this is Derby Day, which means it’s the perfect time to do something about the very real but underreported disorder that’s been plaguing our society for a while now: we’ve forgotten how to have fun. It’s a contagious disease that affects brain function and mood, and if left untreated, could result in everyone becoming a smug, humorless elitist (a prognosis worse than Covid).

My wife and I live in Northern Virginia, in Fairfax County. Whenever we go out to eat, we almost always go somewhere in the suburbs. Fairfax, along with neighboring Montgomery County in Maryland, is home to a wealth of restaurants serving cuisines from all over the world. Just last January, Bon Appétit wrote that “to travel DC’s Beltway is to sample the flavors of the world,” and the New York Times declared that “America’s next great restaurants are in the suburbs.” You could argue that the suburban food scene in the DC metro area surpasses that of the city itself. Nonetheless, DC is widely seen as a “foodie city,” and its restaurants generally get more coverage and hype than their suburban counterparts.

Over the last month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his like-minded legislature have escalated a feud with the Walt Disney Company. Last week, the state stripped Disney of its unique land privileges and tax advantages. What began over a contested Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law has grown into a cautionary tale in corporate woke. The law prohibits sexual orientation and gender identity lessons in kindergarten through third grade and — this feature has been far less publicized — forbids school personnel from concealing “healthcare services” for older kids from their parents. Dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by media partisans, the law has become a parents' rights lightning rod.

James Eskridge cuts a defiant figure as he rides around Tangier Island on his motorbike. The weathered, garrulous water man known to all as “Ooker” is the mayor, spokesman and public face of one of America’s most endangered communities. Buffeted by rising sea levels and relentless erosion, Tangier is not so slowly sinking into the shallow waters of the Chesapeake Bay, threatening its ancient community of crab-hunting, God-fearing, Cornish-sounding fishermen with extinction. The Chesapeake, site of the first British settlements in America, has some of the highest relative sea rise on the planet. If Tangier disappears beneath its waves, America will lose a living link to its pre-revolutionary past.

A new poll found that Americans overwhelmingly support the language of the Parental Rights in Education bill signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis this week. Celebrities at the Oscars on Sunday night shrieked about the alleged attack on LGBT rights and Disney executives were caught on tape promising to create more queer content for children in response to the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill. A poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies indicates that these woke institutions are wholly out of step with the concerns of normal Americans. When registered voters were shown the actual language of the bill, which prohibits age or developmentally inappropriate sexual education in pre-K through third grade, they supported it by more than a two-to-one margin.

The alphabet people screamed in bloodcurdling unison Monday as Florida governor Ron DeSantis coolly signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill. Dubbed, in lockstep, by activists and the mainstream media the "Don’t Say Gay" bill, the words "gay," "homosexual" or anything similar don’t appear anywhere in the six-page law. Quite clearly, the law states that "a school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." A few things to note here: "primary grade levels" are defined in Florida as age three to grade three.

The left is now arguing that the people most upset about biological men like Lia Thomas and Laurel Hubbard competing in women's sports are the ones who otherwise don't care about or watch women's sports. It's nonsense, just like the argument that men can't have an opinion on abortion, but allow me to present my credentials nonetheless. I was a three-sport varsity athlete in high school, and was most accomplished as a goalie for the field hockey team. I broke my school's record for saves in a season and was named Defensive Player of the Year in my region. Alas, I wasn't quite good enough to be recruited to a Division I team, so I opted to play on the club team at Georgetown.

Roland G. Fryer is a tenured professor of economics at Harvard — an anointed member of the elite by most definitions. He is also black, widely published and the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work on the black “achievement gap” in grade school. Fryer was a student of Nobel laureate Gary Becker and a close associate of other economists who focus on rigorous analysis of empirical data. That's led him to observations that were a bit unsettling to higher education orthodoxies. For example, Fryer found that the academic achievement gap accelerates between kindergarten and eighth grade. He also found that controlling for a few variables, the initial disparity disappeared.

Reka Gyorgy showed commendable courage this weekend for finally speaking out against the National College Athletic Association's rules regarding trans competitors. The Virginia Tech swimmer and Olympian was bumped out of a finals spot in the 500 free due to transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas's participation. In a letter posted to her Instagram account, Gyorgy wrote, "It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the NCAA's decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete... [Thursday] is the result of the NCAA and their lack of interest in protecting their athletes." Gyorgy is one of the first NCAA female swimmers to speak publicly about the negative impact Thomas's participation in the sport has on women.

Every time I visit Pennsylvania Amish Country, it feels a little less like Amish Country. My parents were aghast when, in the mid-2000s, they visited for the first time since the 1980s (and for the first time with me) and found a massive outlet center along the main commercial drag. When my wife and I visited in 2017 — my first time since that childhood family trip — I was dismayed to see that the field in front of the Amish Farm and House had become a Target and its attendant parking lot. (I was only a little less dismayed when the landmark Congress Inn, with its out-of-place capitol-dome sign, met the wrecking ball.

Surveying the effect of British education on families, G.K. Chesterton wryly observed in his 1910 book What’s Wrong with the World: “The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.” Little more than a decade later, the compulsory public education movement was to pick up steam across the United States, often presented as a necessity for the protection and wellbeing of American children. History, Mark Twain might say, is rhyming.