Big bet | The Spectator

The RNC should tell us who gets to make the debates

My favorite campaign moment since I announced I was running for president was at the Machine Shed, a restaurant in Urbandale, Iowa. Of course, we all love a packed house and an energetic crowd, but I thought the questions asked were really authentic and suggested to me that there was a level of trust that I have started to build in the community. One person said they liked what I was saying, but wanted to know how I could represent Americans as a Hindu when we’re founded on Judeo-Christian principles. I love that. To be in a full room with a couple hundred people and someone stands up and looks me in the face and asks me that? That’s pretty inspiring. I told them that our basic values are the same, including the emphasis on family.

Bill McMorris

Why the national divorce worked: a future history

The following is an excerpt from Yale University law professor Elizabeth Friedkin’s remarks to the 2026 International Federation of United Conscious Uncoupling Professionals. When then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene first proposed the dissolution of the United States of America in 2023, many feared she was threatening a second Civil War, including most of us in this room. Over the past two years, however, we have witnessed a benign break-up that is now a beacon to dissatisfied land conglomerates the world over. I was skeptical when I was chosen to serve as arbitrator, but I will be the first to admit that I underestimated the shrewdness of Ms. Taylor Greene.

Bethany Mandel

A new book and a newborn

One of the most famous lines from the classic 2002 romcom Sweet Home Alabama has leading lady Reese Witherspoon incredulously asking a redneck hometown friend, “You brought a baby... to a bar?” I encounter that incredulity frequently, every time I cart my kids to work events, including those at bars. But a book tour? This was a new one. A book tour with a baby is hard, but babies (and kids) are worth all the hardships. As Scrubs’s wise Dr. Kelso once explained, “Nothing that’s worth having in life comes easy.” That’s a mantra in our home as we wade through the hard times, and it’s a lesson we impart to our kids as we endeavor to raise them into happy warriors and resilient and caring adults.

Spectator Editorial

Save America’s cities

Lori Lightfoot became the latest face of municipal failure in America in February when Chicago voters delivered a resounding thumbs down to her record in office. A first-term incumbent, Lightfoot managed to secure just 15 percent of the vote in her reelection bid, finishing a distant third and failing to make the runoff. “I am a black woman in America,” she complained when searching for an explanation the day after her defeat. But her vertiginous fall — she won with three-quarters of the vote in the runoff four years ago — has nothing to do with her race or gender, and everything to do with her record in office. Chicagoans were frustrated with her management for many reasons, but the question of crime dominated the race.

Daniel McCarthy

How to win the war that everyone is losing

Russia is losing the war in Ukraine. So is Ukraine. And so are we. Imagine the good guys win tomorrow. What exactly will we have won? Ukraine was the poorest country in Europe even before the war. Afterward it will remain as dependent on American dollars as it is now — and on American arms. Russia will not have disappeared, after all. The last war-torn and impoverished country that required open-ended American support was Afghanistan. Yet all the weapons and funds we lavished on Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani failed to keep the Taliban at bay after we left. The money also didn’t help with Afghanistan’s corruption problem. Will it help with Ukraine’s? In 2021, Transparency International ranked Ukraine second only to Russia as the most corrupt country in Europe.

Ben Domenech

Nancy Mace, the Waffle House populist

If you want to be a prominent member of Congress in this day and age, the surest path is to become a hype machine for the ideological extremes of your party. Yet Nancy Mace gives no signs of responding to these tabloid incentives in conversation with her constituents. It’s an odd thing to say about a politician in 2023, but you might even find yourself taking her seriously. In a Washington where the House of Representatives is dominated by GOP would-be pundits, including bomb-throwers such as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, the second-term Republican from South Carolina’s 1st district sounds like a politician from a different era.

John Pietro

The Paraguay predicament over Taiwan

On April 30, Paraguayans will go to the polls to select a new president. Though elections in the landlocked South American nation do not typically make headlines around the world, this vote carries outsized geopolitical importance: it could mean Taiwan loses yet another country to China. Opposition candidate Efraín Alegre of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party, or PLRA, has said that, should he win, he will retract Paraguay’s recognition of Taiwan as a country. At present, Paraguay is the largest of just fourteen countries to have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and the only one in South America. Paraguay first recognized Taipei in 1957 while under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner.

Ashley Rindsberg

Why are we still funding gain-of-function research?

If someone had asked you in winter 2019 your views on gain-of-function research, you would likely have given them a blank look. But since the Covid pandemic, and with the Wall Street Journal revealing in February that the US Department of Energy now thinks Covid-19 is likely to have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, gain-of-function research — often conducted to make viruses more infectious and more deadly — is a matter of enormous significance and should be at the forefront of a national conversation about the very real risks it poses. For more than a century virologists have worked to identify and understand viruses, whether or not they’re pathogens, for reasons ranging from pure science to applications in everything from agriculture to vaccines.

Matt Purple

Yawn: your childhood just died again

We’re spending all this money to fight Vladimir Putin but what about Mindy Kaling? From Democrats to Republicans, from Atlantic to Pacific, the nation has rarely been as united as it is in hatred of Kaling’s new animated HBO show Velma. The gory and profane rehash of the Scooby-Doo franchise has a whopping 7 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. YouTube commentators leapfrog over each other to denounce the show: Velma is cringe; Velma is garbage; Velma is racist! Far be it for me to agree with the mob: I’d love nothing more than to say I like this show and watch a million Twitter coronaries blossom. But alas, having seen it, I can attest that Velma’s very existence has singlehandedly wiped out centuries of human progress.

Oliver Wiseman

The other DeSantis

The woman with a starring role in perhaps the most talked about campaign ads of both the 2018 and 2022 election cycles wasn’t on the ballot. In both, a politician whose stock has risen as much as anyone’s in the last half decade was happy to let his wife do the talking. Five years ago, Casey DeSantis narrated a thirty-second clip in which she testified to her husband Ron’s admiration for Donald Trump. You’ve probably seen it. “Everyone knows my husband is endorsed by President Trump, but he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids,” says Casey. The ad cuts to footage of the Republican gubernatorial candidate building a toy wall with one child, reading The Art of the Deal to another, and so on. “People say he’s all Trump,” says Casey.

Bridget Phetasy

Confessions of the mommy groupchat

As I approach my daughter’s first birthday this month, I’m reflecting on what it’s been like to become a mom so late in the game — and the thousands of lessons I’ve learned. A lot of people have carried me through pregnancy and the first year: my husband, for one, has been a rock. His mother and stepfather. My aunt and uncle. They’ve all shown up for us in ways we didn’t even know we would need, with home-cooked meals when I was in the newborn bubble, with baby care so we could work or sleep or unwind. However, nothing has carried me quite like the groupchat a friend started in my first trimester. This friend had her second child on the way and realized three of us were pregnant all within months of one another, so she started the chat.

Neal Pollack

The unstoppable march of the gambling giants

There’s an old adage in the gambling business: “You never hear anyone say ‘I used to be a bookie but then I went broke.’” So if you’re betting on the DraftKings sportsbook app going under soon, even though the company lost $242 million in the fourth fiscal quarter of last year, you’re as big a sucker as the people who think they’re going to get rich by hitting a ten-team parlay. The company brought in $855 million in revenue in the same time period, up 81 percent from the previous quarter, and increased its user base to 2.6 million, up 31 percent. It only lost money because it spent a fortune on advertising and promotions, which, given the other numbers, have clearly been successful.

Rosie Gray

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the anti-confidence man

Dealing with the writer, statistician, Twitter warrior and self-described flâneur Nassim Nicholas Taleb is no simple matter. First there was the initial approach, months ago. I ventured to email him and ask for an interview despite his long-held and often-expressed low opinion of journalists. (Heuristic: those who make the biggest deal out of disliking the media care about it the most.) To my surprise, Taleb agreed to it almost immediately even though he “doesn’t do interviews.” Some logistical back and forth ensued. Then a twist: he would only agree to be interviewed if he wasn’t photographed. Why? Because in photos he is “made to look sickly and weak.

Kevin Cook

Did Ernest Hemingway have CTE?

It was July 2, 1961. Ernest Hemingway was three weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday. He had been living comfortably in a cabin in Ketchum, Idaho, with his fourth wife, Mary. He liked it there. He liked the hunting and fishing and the clean air. Still he had a plan. That morning he padded to the basement in his pajamas and bathrobe. He unlocked the gun closet. He selected a favorite shotgun, a double-barreled twelve-gauge. He put a shell in each barrel. He put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth. Why pull the trigger now, after so many years of defying death? Eight months earlier he had checked into the Mayo Clinic as “George Saviers,” the name of his elderly doctor in Ketchum.

Roger Kimball

A history lesson for Joe Biden

Some moderately clever people, reflecting on the confusing morass of current events, knowingly quote George Santayana’s most famous observation: that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Since the past is largely an almanac of unfortunate (not to say horrific) events, the idea that we are “condemned to repeat it” concentrates the mind in approximately the way Dr. Johnson said the prospect of hanging in a fortnight tends to do. But of course the past never really repeats itself. When it comes to history, Heraclitus rules: you cannot step into the same river twice, mon brave. Moreover, as that sage of Ionia said, “the true nature of things loves to conceal itself.

Teresa Mull

A woman for all seasons

One of the things I love most about living in Pennsylvania is experiencing all four seasons. They are pronounced, and regardless of how long you’ve lived there, the changes in weather are always remarkable. People comment on the weather constantly, as if the four things it might be doing outside — being warm, cold, wet or dry — are novel any old day. Whether these remarks are upbeat or grumbly seems to depend on one’s age and if snow is more likely to result in a day off school or a bout of rheumatism. For me, though, a change in the seasons — any season — is a sentimental event. It’s as if nature is poignantly reminding me that time is passing. A late February warm spell this year inspired me to do some spring cleaning.

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