Holy war | The Spectator

How the movies improve your mental health

If you subscribe to The Spectator, there’s a fair chance you are a committed reader. Of books, I mean. Books are your friends, they don’t frighten you. Even long books. But here’s a behavioral oddity that I’ve noticed in others, and in myself. We tend not to read many books twice, but we do often watch movies twice, even more than twice. Of course, length may have a lot to do with it; movies are rarely more than two hours long; books can often take days to finish. But is there something more to it, something deeper? Down here on the beaches in Florida we now recognize something the psychologists are calling “cinematherapy.

Josie Cox

Adieu, Dinosaur the pigeon

On one of the first warm Saturdays of this year, hundreds of New Yorkers flocked to the popular High Line, the railway-turned-public park that extends over 22 blocks of Manhattan, to bid farewell to a T-Rex-sized pigeon. The pigeon, cast out of aluminum and named “Dinosaur,” had been a resident of its elevated perch since 2024. As so many New Yorkers will tell you, though, part of what’s magical about living in this city is that the experience is often transient. In the words of Baz Luhrmann, you should “leave before it makes you hard.” There’s nothing worse than a hard pigeon and so it was that on that glorious day last month, I joined throngs of people eager to get one last look at the monstrous, departing bird.

Bill Kauffman

Reflections on the Moon

We Americans have been instructed to burst our buttons with pride over Artemis II’s drive-by of the Moon. But out here in cratering America, far from Mission Control, we remain buttoned-up. This is not due to our skinflint nature or lack of imagination; nah, it’s just that Big Science – “corporate socialism,” as the late parsimonious populist Democratic senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin termed the space program – is spiritless, mechanical and inhuman.

Aidan Hartley

The cattle rustlers have returned

Kenya When a mob of Somali cattle I bought in Kenya’s far north arrived on the farm in February, we quarantined them in a remote corner. To protect them against lions they slept in a boma with high drystone walls topped with treacherous thorns, guarded by a fierce police-licensed guard named Joseph. The Somalis are great stockmen, though these beautiful beasts, known as Awai, are more long-legged and rangy than our traditional ranch Borans. My truckload of cattle had survived a two-year drought on rocks and dust and they could walk hundreds of miles to water, yet they were randy and highly fertile. These are ancient cattle, of the sort that you see in petroglyphs and ochre painted on rock faces across Africa. I have fallen in love with them.

Melissa Kite

How far would I go for oil?

The oil delivery man had way too much swagger and, as he waved his nozzle about, I realized that he might be expecting a little something. Oh dear, I thought, as he pushed the nozzle into my oil tank, pressed the button on his truck and spent less than ten seconds giving me the amount of oil I could afford. Oh dear, what if the oil crisis is now at such fever pitch that desperate housewives in remote places are offering a little something on the side to get more oil? I had two French cyclists who ran the shower in the en-suite for so long I thought they had fallen asleep Ten seconds’ worth of oil did feel like the end of the world. Usually, I can afford to let the truck fill the entire tank and it comes to about a grand.

Life