Death of the Silicon Valley dream

Will US colleges’ brand power survive falling standards?

Nike. Supreme. Ralph Lauren. Abercrombie and Fitch. Harvard and Yale. On the streets of Budapest, style-conscious teenagers have collapsed the distinction between the Ivy League and streetwear. Maybe Americans still balk at wearing the logo of schools they didn’t get into, but the market for collegiate apparel in Eastern Europe is not limited to alumni, students and ambitious high-schoolers. Even kids with no interest in (or chance of) going to Harvard are drawn by the power of its name. Meanwhile, American higher education is being convulsed by a social-justice revolution that upends the basis of these schools’ claims to exclusivity.

Ben Domenech

The New Right is going nowhere — and knows it

It is an irony of history that the bronze Statue of Freedom which stands tall atop the US Capitol dome was commissioned by the man who would seek to break the nation apart a few years later. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war when the statue was ordered, clashed with Yankee sculptor Thomas Crawford over his original design, which included a liberty cap, the symbol of an emancipated slave, above the statue’s crown. The statue is adorned with a sword, a shield and a wreath of victory. It’s symbolic in other ways as well: struck hundreds of times by lightning, it conducts and dissipates that violent energy into the earth. Freedom makes an excellent lightning rod. Today, critiques of the statue and what it represents arise from different sources.

John R. MacArthur

Why ‘woke’ doesn’t have the moral high ground

The much-overused word “woke” — basically meaning to be at all moments of the day and night conscious of racial and sexual discrimination — has been remarkably resistant to criticism, reason and even ridicule. Ever since the initial exposure and denunciation of Harvey Weinstein in 2017 — a long-drawn-out prosecution and sentencing only recently concluded — the “wokes” have paraded their righteousness in every corner of society with very little pushback. Occasionally, a super baddie such as Bill Cosby gets released from prison on constitutional grounds, but super-wokes in the United States never let such minor reversals slow them down, since the public momentum and the arguments are overwhelmingly in their favor.

Josie Cox

The A-lister next door

For most of my life I’ve been chronically awkward around anyone who’s even remotely famous. I once effusively greeted former British chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne because I knew I recognized him from somewhere. I just assumed he was a friend of a friend. At a conference in Berlin circa 2010, I spilled coffee on the back of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s suit. On another reporting assignment I tripped and lost a shoe while trailing the late Fiat Chrysler CEO, Sergio Marchionne. Stopping to retrieve it would have caused me to surrender my coveted spot in the press scrum, so I obtained my soundbite barefooted, triggering the notoriously grumpy Italian to crack a pitying smile.

Roger Kimball

Is it too late to save America?

Regular readers may recall how fond I am of a mot from the British diplomat, author and art collector Edgar Vincent, the first (and, as it happened, the last) Viscount d’Abernon: “An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” When I first encountered Lord D’Abernon’s saying, I was impressed by its slightly disabused cheerfulness. “Whew,” I thought. “As usual, some impending disaster was neatly avoided at the last moment by the wit and pluck of the doughty Brits.” The drama of the near-escape added to the sweetness of relief. Surely we Yankees — most of whom, until recently, were basically displaced Brits — could also be counted on to display the requisite derring-do at the critical moment. Could we though? “Almost too late.

William D. Cohan

Inside the unlikely return of WeWork’s Adam Neumann

Imagine for a moment you are Adam Neumann, the slick, smooth-talking Israeli-born entrepreneur who took the world by storm thirteen years ago with WeWork, his ultimately failed effort to rethink the way we office. After your start up took a tumble and your IPO failed, you nonetheless walk away with roughly $600 million in cash, plus another $400 million loan, and a new lease on life. You head underground, lick your wounds and claim to be trying to learn from what went wrong, including the relentless overhyping, the mismanagement and the enormous losses that your investors suffered. When you re-emerge, you decide to start again and persuade one of Silicon Valley’s most respected investors to back you. Whoa.

Teresa Mull

Inside Pennsylvania’s gas station wars

Travelers road-tripping across Pennsylvania this summer, take heed: a war is brewing in the center of the state. Buildings have been flattened. Families have been torn apart. The threat of an emerging third power regularly captures headlines and fuels the local rumor mills. I am referring to the competition among three gas stations-cum-convenience megastores — Sheetz, Rutter’s and Wawa. It is said to be the “most heated food rivalry in the country.” Food? A lot of what these places pass off as “food” is up there with the cosmic chicken sponge found at airports. Nonetheless, the rivalry is real. It’s palpable. It’s all-American. And as for the rural places benefiting from this capitalism, as the kids like to say, we’re here for it.

Matt Purple

Good riddance to the metaverse

So pack it all in then. Away with the wisecracking butterfly that sits on your shoulder during work meetings. Out with the Gamorrean Guards who play Texas Hold’em with you around a floating table. The metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg’s fever dream of a virtual-reality infused world, is dead. That’s assuming it was ever alive and kicking in the first place. To assess just how “real” the metaverse ever was, we need to go back to its inception in the fall of 2021. That was when Zuckerberg released a video of himself in suspiciously Steve Jobs-esque garb — black shirt and pants, sneakers — tooling around what he called a “home space” that brimmed with holographic bric-a-brac.

Daniel McCarthy

Why Ron DeSantis should wait for 2028

Maybe Niccolò Machiavelli was not the first political consultant, but he remains one of the best. Ron DeSantis might solicit his advice before deciding whether a 2024 campaign for the White House is wise. DeSantis could start with the penultimate chapter of The Prince, “What Fortune can do in human affairs, and how it can be resisted,” which is famous for its imagery. Machiavelli first likens fortune to a raging river, whose flood cannot be met head on but whose fury can be dissipated by dams and dykes built in advance. Later he says Fortune is a woman who yields to a young man who comes on strong, even roughly. The lesson for a forty-four-year-old DeSantis is obvious: seize the moment. She’s yours for the taking — if you’re bold.

Bill McMorris

Why Bernie Sanders has no heir

The Democratic establishment has never looked more vulnerable to progressive upheaval; Biden's supposed leadership bridge to a new generation leads nowhere. "Moderate" darling transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has seen his slim national prospects dwindle with every near-miss in the air and toxic train derailment on the ground. Vice President Kamala Harris has been about as visible as Biden was on the 2020 campaign trail — and a geriatric Capitol Hill leadership class appears on its last legs. The scene is set for the party’s progressives to strike. And yet there is little relief in sight for the party’s left wing as its own geriatric champion rides off into the sunset.

Bridget Phetasy

A lament for the Los Angeles we lost — and why I’m off

Like so many wannabe actors before me, I came to this gritty city with big dreams of “making it” in Tinseltown. I thought I wanted to be an actress until I got here and realized that driving around begging casting directors for approval wasn’t for me. Nonetheless, I stayed in Los Angeles — and over the last sixteen years, this big, messy, giant suburban sprawl has become a part of me. My husband and I have agonized over the decision of whether to stay or go. Making a cost-benefit analysis — like whether to stay near family in perfect weather or go where we can provide a better quality of life for our daughter in a place with unbearable heat — has felt like trying to solve an impossible math equation.

Alexander Larman

Charles III is fighting for the monarchy’s life

On September 10, 1946, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin remarked, “kings are pretty cheap these days.” His comment was directed at the displaced monarchs who floated, dispossessed, around Europe, but it might also have been a dig at the ailing king George VI, who had found his métier in wartime but struggled to regain it afterwards. Less than six years after Bevin’s comment, the king died and Elizabeth II assumed the throne, leading to an unprecedented period of monarchical duration, stability and popularity. Yet after her own death last September, at the age of ninety-six, and the subsequent accession of her son, Bevin’s statement has assumed new and unlooked-for relevance.

Benjamin Hall

I was injured covering Ukraine — but I’ll work my way back

A little over a year ago, I was gravely injured in a missile blast while covering the Ukraine-Russia war for Fox News. The severity of my injuries has made recovery a very long and arduous process. Every day I have a number of things I have to do. So in the morning, I’ve got about an hour and a half or so of facing all the problems that have popped up overnight. I do a lot of exercises, a lot of stretches. I do a lot of balance work. Everything from using rubber bands to try and get my thumb to move a little bit more to taking care of my burns because if I don’t, they break open and bleed a lot. I do that every single day. The list is honestly endless, and the beginning of every day is tough. I tell myself that the worst part of the day is finished in the morning, which is great.

Spectator Editorial

Make tech great again

Mark Zuckerberg has dubbed 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency.” The slogan is a corporate euphemism for layoffs, of course — and not an especially subtle one. Zuckerberg’s company has parted ways with tens of thousands of employees this year. Other tech firms are following suit. Crunchbase estimates that US tech firms fired more than 118,000 employees in the first quarter of 2023. These are lean times in Silicon Valley — and, as Joel Kotkin explains in this month’s cover story, there is more to this tale than Big Tech belt-tightening after a pandemic-era hiring spree. The Valley, Kotkin explains, is in trouble. A place that America, and the world, once looked to for an ambitious and optimistic vision of the future, has grown sclerotic.

Features