Spectator Life

Willard Nickerson was about as Cape Cod as you could get. Chatham locals even gave him the nickname ‘The Codfather’. Willard was a 12th-generation member of the Nickerson family, his ancestors having arrived on the Mayflower. He was also a Chatham lobsterman/fisherman and on July 4, 1976, Willard led the annual parade down Chatham’s Main Street in my father’s 1952 Woody car. My father was rightly proud to chauffeur one of the town’s most revered residents. Willard was not just a local treasure because of his profession, he also played the trombone during Chatham’s summer band concerts. If you happened to be a year-round resident, Willard would come and find leaks in your roof during a blustery nor’easter.

'You can get away from everything,’ said Harold Wilson of the Isles of Scilly, ‘not only in distance but also in time’. During the parliamentary recess, Wilson would frequently catch the sleeper from Paddington to Penzance before making the notoriously choppy crossing to Britain’s most westerly archipelago. There he would unwind in his cottage on St Mary’s. This family of five islands 28 miles off the nose of Land’s End has always enjoyed a somewhat secretive coterie of admirers — Jude Law and Michael Morpurgo to name but two. Deserted beaches with a Caribbean palette are surely part of the draw, as are hedgerows festooned with wild garlic, pink bells and exotic aeoniums.

Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game was never supposed to be political. It was designed as a casual gathering of the league’s best players to showcase their best skills. That all changed of course when the MLB decided to move the game out of Atlanta over Democrat calls to boycott the state over Georgia’s new voting law. The decision was rash, illiterate to the text of the law and based mostly on tweets and half-truths from popular celebrity Democrats like Stacey Abrams, along with Georgia senators, who later backtracked. When the MLB changed its mind, it transformed itself into a political league and its All-Star Game into a political lightning rod. Therefore the league has no excuse for dodging the political issues of the day.

London All is fair in love and war, and nothing is fair in sport. England rode their luck to their first final in a European Championship in London on Sunday night. They scored a stylish goal in the second minute, too — but then their luck ran out. Italy, always the favorites, regained control of the game. They equalized with only 23 minutes of normal time to run, forced a penalty shootout, and won. You make your own luck. England had the host nation’s home advantage. They had an off-pitch assist from their fans, too. For weeks the words 'Football’s coming home’ have echoed around this green and pleasant, small and crowded land. England’s game rose as the tournament progressed, until an entire nation waited on tenterhooks for Sunday night. For what?

Here’s how to tell when Republican politicians or journalists or activists are making headway: left-liberal media networks start accusing them of being — wait for it — conspiracy theorists. In recent days, for instance, NBC’s Ben Collins and Joy Reid claimed that the grassroots parent uprising over critical race theory in schools was being driven by QAnon. Or remember last February when Sen. Tom Cotton raised questions about the origins of the coronavirus? The New York Times headline read, ‘Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins’. In May, when Sen.

Congratulations to Nikole Hannah-Jones for parlaying the intellectual imposture of the 1619 Project into a job for life. Hannah-Jones has been hired by Howard University as a professor in Race & Journalism. Both of these fields are rife with dubious standards and historic embarrassments, so she should fit right in. There are those on the pipe-smoking right who object to allowing a mountebank like Hannah-Jones onto the verdant lawns and into the stinky precincts of the institutions of what used to be the higher learning. They protest about academic standards, as if they still exist.

My first summer back in my hometown was a dreary affair — COVID closures, canceled parties and paranoid friends diminished the pleasures of small-town living. But all across the country, the end of the pandemic has brought back one of the joys of living in a non-metropolitan city like mine: minor league baseball. Sure, it’s great to be able to watch the MLB again on split-screens at the bar — and if you’re really lucky, to pay $12 for a hot dog at a major league stadium — but the joys of the minors are all their own. Where else can you watch your very own neighborhood kids dress up in Styrofoam foodstuff costumes to compete in increasingly complex and obscure contests between each inning? With a merry-go-round, fireworks, the smell of popcorn in the air and the sound of P!

I knew that critical race theory was spreading rapidly through America’s institutions, including not just schools and corporations, but also the military. But I was still taken aback when the burger at my favorite tavern arrived branded (literally) as a CRT special. It was, fortunately, mere coincidence. The Clear River Tavern in Pittsfield, Vermont was not after all making a political statement. But almost everyone else is.

'Who are you going to believe, me, or your lying eyes?' Poway Unified School District in San Diego, California all but told concerned parents who say the school is injecting critical race theory into two new elective courses on offer to students. The two courses, 'Ethnic Literature' and 'Ethnic Studies', were made available to high school students 'in response to our racial equity plan and community conversations held with students, staff and families’, according to the school district's Facebook page. Ethnic Literature, a course guide says, seeks to promote 'empathy' by examining how 'systems of power in the United States' have affected various minority groups.

The most exciting arrival in years on the DC dining scene is coinciding with the end of the pandemic. Not since the launch of the DC Michelin guide has the buzz been as strong. Nestled adjacent to the Old Ebbitt Grill, it’s sure to be a welcome addition to the Power Lunch scene among the Jos A. Bank-clad downtown crowd. Yes, the Cheesecake Factory has opened their new location just a few blocks from the White House. Truth be told, DC being a city full of cynical people who think they live in a West Wing episode and that the height of dining is Cafe Milano, it’s not actually clear to me that DC deserves a Cheesecake Factory. But it brings a level of class, sophistication and culture to the nation’s capital that we haven’t had since Billy Carter.

Tourists take the cable car to the Top of the Rock to pester the monkeys that live at the summit, but the best thing about this clifftop arena is the view. Standing on the cliff edge, gazing down at the big ships traversing the busy strait below, you realize what makes Gibraltar so important. Spain lies behind you, Morocco lies ahead. To your left is the Mediterranean and, on your right, the wild Atlantic. This is the bridgehead between Africa and Europe, the gateway between the Old World and the New. No wonder Britain has always been so determined to hold onto it. Whoever controls the Rock controls this narrow strait and all the traffic that passes through it, about a quarter of the world’s shipping.

'To every thing there is a season,' we read in Ecclesiastes, and summer is the season for seersucker. No fabric is better suited for long summer days. Its lightness reflects the sun. Its pucker ventilates the skin. Rather than avoid the heat, seersucker dresses up for the hot occasion. Summers in New York are infernally hot. Seersucker makes it livable, if not always desirable. Since fashion dictates that seersucker only emerge between Memorial Day and Labor Day — timing that varies as you head south — its absence also makes its return that much more rewarding. As the weather warms, out it comes, radiating the light of summers past.

Before anyone says anything else about Amy Chua, it’s worth noting that we still have no idea exactly why people are talking about her. This is a peculiar state of affairs for a person whose offenses and subsequent downfall have been the recent subject of reporting in multiple major media outlets. There's an allegation: that Chua, a Yale Law School professor, violated both protocol and decency during the 2020 school year by hosting dinner parties at her home for students and elite members of the legal profession. There's a punishment: the alleged infraction cost her a position as the head of one of the Yale Law School's intimate classes for first-year students known as a ‘small group’.

Tensions ran high at the Loudoun County School Board meeting on Tuesday evening, following a Virginia judge’s decision to reinstate an elementary school teacher suspended for refusing to call transgender students by their preferred pronouns. Earlier, Circuit Judge James E. Plowman Jr ordered the school district to ‘immediately reinstate’ Tanner Cross as a physical education instructor at Leesburg Elementary School. Cross was suspended for speaking out at a board meeting in late May against a proposed policy that required teachers to use transgender students' preferred pronouns and names. On June 1, Cross filed a lawsuit against the district's superintendent Scott A.

Well, it looks like the tennis world has found its Meghan Markle. Naomi Osaka, who may in theory be Japanese, but is to all intents and purposes Californian when it comes to worldview, will no longer be taking part in the French Open because she can’t handle the post match interviews, especially when she loses. She wants to go away and look after her mental health. It’s rough luck on other Japanese tennis players (and maybe the Japan Olympic team), on her sponsors (is she too shy to do endorsements too, the ones she’s getting tens of millions of dollars for?) and on the tournament organizers. But nowadays when you say you’ve got mental health issues, there’s no arguing with that. Except, of course, there is.