In safe hands | The Spectator

Should Olympians be paid?

The Olympics are the pinnacle of athletic achievement, a global stage where the very best compete for ultimate glory. With the XXXIII Olympiad now underway in Paris, we’re reminded of their magnitude as 206 countries participate across thirty-two different sports. Until recently, winning an Olympic gold medal was a reward in itself, but with World Athletics’ (the body that governs track and field) decision to introduce prize money this year, there is now extra incentive to win. Leaving behind 128 years of Olympic tradition, forty-eight gold medalists will receive an award of $50,000 this year. Not every athlete is eligible.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The era of ideological, overreaching and omnipresent government

It was a law of classical political philosophy that democratic polities devolve inevitably into tyrannical ones. This law is being validated in the twenty-first century, as liberal democracy creates societies antithetical to both liberalism and democracy by shaping citizens of a character for which neither was designed nor developed. In a parallel development over the past decade or so in Europe and the United States, liberals and democrats view their response to the problem as “reaction,” pure and simple, against the sort of thing they have been fighting since 1789. Only it is not reaction; it is apparently something new in history.

Bill Kauffman

How one bad scene can ruin an otherwise great movie

Can one egregiously bad scene ruin an otherwise great movie? When I go on an early 1970s jag — revisiting the golden age of American cinema — I can never bring myself to rewatch Five Easy Pieces (1970), in which Jack Nicholson plays an upper-middle-class piano prodigy turned downwardly mobile oil field worker. It’s a fine character study poisoned, for me, by the famous scene in which a petulant Nicholson berates a diner waitress who stubbornly refuses his request to add tomatoes to his omelet.

Cosmo Landesman

My Martin Amis FOMO

There’s a form of social anxiety that a lot of people suffer from — FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. “Fear” suggests something imaginary, that isn’t really happening. Not so. I don’t fear missing out, because I know I am. Friends are always asking me: are you appearing at the Hay Literary festival? No! Am I speaking at the Idler festival? No! Am I reading extracts from my book at the Cambridge Literary festival? No! “What?!” they exclaim in mock disbelief — and then ask why I’m not appearing at some small, obscure, local village literary fête, somewhere in the rectum of rural England. I’ve gotten used to the seasonal snub from the lit-festival establishment. And there are literary events all over London that I haven’t been invited to as well. OK, I’ll live.

Bill McMorris

Waste not want not

Alexandria, Virginia I sit on bathtub’s edge, back spasming, left leg numb, inner cheek bitten raw — pain that must be endured if I am to triumph over fatherly futility. #5 is only twenty months old but understands that in a household of eight people the toilet is the optimal, if not the only, place for contemplation. I am reflecting, too, on an event that occurred three years earlier, one that will be with me on my deathbed. I was in a rush for reasons I cannot recall as #4 sat lost in thought or perhaps the fiftieth reading of Yertle the Turtle. I grew frustrated. “Go pee! Go poo!” She looked up at me and said with the calm gravity befitting a statesman: “Go Mets.” Only then did she poop.

Life