Maga en vogue | The Spectator

Which GOAT really is the greatest?

Shohei Ohtani had a baseball season for the ages. The Dodgers’ sensational designated hitter hit fifty-four home runs and stole fifty-nine bases to become the founding member of baseball’s 50/50 club. Even before his Dodgers won the World Series and Ohtani won the National League’s MVP award, sportswriters were calling him the best player in baseball history. His heroics bring a key question into play: is Ohtani’s 2024 season one of the greatest performances in sports history? It’s up there for sure, but there are other contenders. Jesse Owens won four gold medals under Adolf Hitler’s nose at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Why human history is fated to end in apocalypse

Laramie, Wyoming In 1988 Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of history had been reached in the form of liberal democratic capitalism, the ne plus ultra of human civilization. Three decades later it seems more likely that the direction of history will be theological, as the world comes reluctantly to recognize that science, democracy, capitalism and technology are insufficient to the achievement of human happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment.

Bill Kauffman

The controversy of Daylight Savings Time

Batavia, New York I bear no ill will against golfers — I triple-bogey easy holes and miss gimme putts with the worst of them — but President Trump’s demand that we eliminate Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a double eagle out of the blue, especially as Trump had earlier advocated a move to year-round DST. Although Benjamin Franklin is often credited as its progenitor, the real father of Daylight Saving Time, according to Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward, was the golfing British architect William Willett, who deplored “the waste of daylight.” The British Royal Astronomer dismissed Willett’s idea with the counterproposal that “between the months of October and March the thermometer should be put up ten degrees.

Cosmo Landesman

Toby Young: love him or loathe him?

London Everyone has at least one friend that none of their other friends can stand, someone you love but everyone else loathes. Mine is called Toby Young. For around thirty years people have asked me: are you still friends with that awful Toby Young? And with a bit of hesitation I say, well... yes. And they shake their heads or roll their eyes in disbelief and disapproval. They don’t like his politics — he’s a right-wing conservative and founder of the Free Speech Union, which defends victims of woke ideology. And they don’t like Toby the person because of a series of sophomoric and “sexist” tweets that came to public light in 2018. It was national news and it cost Toby his career in public life.

Life