Food fight, Shot shy, Womb for hire

Operation Get Trump

Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. A case in point was the chyron that Fox News posted briefly on June 13. That was the day that Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami. The news story featured a split screen. On the left was Joe Biden speaking at an event in Washington for the secretary-general of NATO. On the right was Donald Trump addressing supporters in New Jersey. Underneath ran the unspeakable truth: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” That fresh-breeze-of-truth window was open for a total of twenty-seven seconds. Then it was slammed shut. But that was long enough. Our Guardians on the internet erupted in fury. Fox issued a public apology and canned the veteran producer responsible on the spot.

Spectator Editorial

How to make debate great again

By the time you read this, tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg may have beaten the living daylights out of each other. Earlier in the summer, Musk tweeted that he was “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO responded on Instagram Stories, “send me location.” “Vegas octagon,” suggested Musk, referring to the arena where UFC fights are held. Cue an avalanche of hype, some of it serious, much of it tongue-in-cheek, about the possibility of this plutocrat showdown. The Spectator takes no house view on whether the jiu-jitsu-loving Zuckerberg or the barrel-chested Musk should be viewed as the favorite. But we will admit finding this approach to dispute resolution refreshingly old-school — dueling for the new Silicon Valley aristocracy.

Teresa Mull

A new war on obesity is underway

Consume American media for more than five minutes, and sandwiched between advertisements for KFC $5 Fill-Ups and a dramatic Golden Corral short pondering the age-old question, “Chicken tenders or baby back ribs?,” you’re bound to behold at least a half-dozen ads for prescription drugs. They tend to last longer than the straight-to-the-glutton-button fast-food commercials, and they play over and over and over again (who doesn’t know the Oh, Oh, Oh, Ozempic! jingle by now?) — and airtime ain’t cheap. “When Oprah Winfrey’s bombshell interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle aired in March 2021, the British tuned in, and many were gobsmacked at the number of drug commercials they saw,” Vox reported earlier this year.

Birdie Hall

The case against surrogacy

Last July, Albert and Anthony Saniger filed a lawsuit against a high-end California fertility clinic after their dreams of having a second boy were destroyed when their surrogate gave birth to a baby daughter. After already choosing male names and Gmail accounts for their future son, the couple had explicitly made clear that no female embryos were to be transferred into the body of their surrogate, who had experienced two failed cycles of in vitro fertilization before a successful pregnancy in 2020. To add to the trauma of being forced to live with a healthy baby girl instead of a male, the Sanigers were now forced to spend “staggering” amounts of money raising the two boys they wanted and a girl, all bought via costly fertility clinic services.

Bridget Phetasy

Why antivax is back

The first time I ever heard the term “vaccine injury” was when I was in rehab aged nineteen. One of the women who was living at the halfway house — we’ll call her Jane — lost her son and blamed the vaccine he’d had that morning. Jane said he was fine, got the vaccine and then dropped dead on the playground later that day. This was almost twenty-five years ago, so the details are fuzzy. I don’t remember how old her son was; I don’t remember what vaccine — but I do remember that story. Everyone told Jane she was crazy, including all the doctors and her husband. She and her husband split up and she drank herself into oblivion and near death.

Patrick Ruffini

The GOP’s tribal warfare

Open any national publication, and you’ll read all about a cultish, fire-breathing MAGA majority in the Republican Party, slavish in its devotion to Donald Trump. Nothing will shake their conviction that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. This is the group that fumbled the ball on the one-yard line in the 2022 midterms, nominating unelectable kooks who could not perform the most basic of political tasks: winning undivided control of Congress amid 8 percent inflation that Americans largely blamed on the incumbent Democratic president. And now they’re poised to do it again. The front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024 is (at present) the twice-indicted Donald Trump.

Ben Domenech

Trump versus the party

When The Simpsons’s evil billionaire C. Montgomery Burns heads for a checkup, the doctor informs him he has virtually every disease known to man, including some just discovered for the first time. The odd thing is that all these diseases are in “perfect balance,” which the doctor illustrates by trying to shove a bunch of fuzzy novelty germs through a tiny door all at once. When they’re all jammed together, none can actually make it through — an example of “Three Stooges syndrome.” Despite the doctor’s warning that even a slight breeze could upset this balance, Burns happily concludes that he is “indestructible.” The Republican Party had a serious bout of Three Stooges syndrome in 2016.

genghis donald trump boomer republicanism establishment

Ben Domenech

Trump versus the party

When The Simpsons’s evil billionaire C. Montgomery Burns heads for a checkup, the doctor informs him he has virtually every disease known to man, including some just discovered for the first time. The odd thing is that all these diseases are in “perfect balance,” which the doctor illustrates by trying to shove a bunch of fuzzy novelty germs through a tiny door all at once. When they’re all jammed together, none can actually make it through — an example of “Three Stooges syndrome.” Despite the doctor’s warning that even a slight breeze could upset this balance, Burns happily concludes that he is “indestructible.” The Republican Party had a serious bout of Three Stooges syndrome in 2016.

Daniel McCarthy

The once and future president?

Donald Trump is having a better year than Joe Biden, notwithstanding an indictment or two. Both men hold commanding leads in the race for their parties’ presidential nominations. But the comparison works to Trump’s benefit: he isn’t quite an incumbent, while President Biden most definitely is. Not since George H.W. Bush in 1992 has an incumbent president faced a challenge within his own party as serious as the one Biden faces from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After weeks of unceasingly hostile press coverage, RFK Jr. still holds onto 15 percent of the Democratic primary vote. Meanwhile, polling averages show Biden barely beating Trump in a prospective rematch next year.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Meet the men who want to bring back the woolly mammoth

A few minutes into celebrated Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church’s appearance on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert motioned towards him conspiratorially. “How do you think your work will eventually destroy all mankind?” asked the comedian, peering meaningfully over his glasses and tapping the table. “It’s a couple of options. Do you think it’s going to be like a killer virus? Or more like a giant, mutant, killer-squid-man, who arises from the Pacific, between Easter Island and Chile, and feasts on our flesh?” Colbert’s probing was tongue-in-cheek, of course. But the joke worked because it touched on real concerns. Dr. Church, sixty-eight, has had a long and storied career, including helping to launch the Human Genome Project in 1984.

Chadwick Moore

Joe Exotic’s presidential plans from prison

“Do you have any advice for other presidential candidates who might end up in federal prison?” I ask Joseph “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage, of Tiger King fame, on a recent phone call. And I say “other” candidates because Joe Exotic is running for president. “You know what, Trump ought to stop bashing the Mexicans too bad on that border crisis stuff down there because when he gets in here, he’s going to be outnumbered. He’s going to find out they’re going to be his best friend,” Exotic says. “And he better stock up on Big Macs because they don’t serve that shit in here.” After claiming he’d spent two-and-a-half years in solitary confinement, Exotic was recently released back into general population.

joe exotic OE EXOTIC BY GONZALO LANZILOTTA. PLASTIBOY AND EL PLANTEO

Anne Seymour

My illegal abortion

I was twenty-one in 1960 and I can remember exactly what my godfather gave me for my coming-of-age present. It was an abortion. He didn’t know this, of course, but he gave me £200 and that is what I used it for. I have never told this story before and am only doing so now because of the return of abortion to the heart of political debate after last year’s Dobbs decision, which has led to the tightening of abortion laws in many states across America. I know firsthand about the danger and misery of illegal abortions, because I had one myself in the days, pre-1967, when abortion was illegal in Britain.

David Christopher Kaufman

What’s the media’s problem with black masculinity?

No experience in my many decades on this planet felt more degrading than being repeatedly referred to as “intimidating” by my former boss. As far as I know, the affluent, influential white women that I used to work with at Condé Nast lost their right to refer to their black male employees in such racially laden language long before the death of George Floyd. Especially when I was merely asking my (mostly white and female) underlings to simply do their jobs. I’m reminded of this charge every time I see a black man done up like a woman — which is seemingly all the time these days. Take Alex Newell and J. Harrison Ghee, who were awarded Best Actor statues at the Tony Awards in June, and both accepted them clad in colorful gowns and full makeup.

Amber Duke

The war on life’s simple pleasures

There are few things better in life than taking a hot shower at the end of a long day, crawling into a freshly made bed and passing out into the deepest sleep ever. There are also few things that ruin this uniquely cozy experience more quickly than stepping into a shower with dinky water pressure. Luckily, I’ve rarely dealt had to deal with that issue because I grew up with a plumber for a dad. We eschewed so-called “water-saving” shower heads in our home in favor of ones with such high water pressure that showers felt like a deep-tissue massage. When I moved out after college, my dad would drop by my various apartments to drill a hole in the non-removable flow restrictors put in shower heads by management.

Peter Wood

Shakespeare in black and white

Sarah Karim-Cooper first came to public attention at the cosmetics counter. Her book on makeup in Renaissance theater, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, was published in 2006. Its enduring popularity is not so much a testament to her scholarly insights on powdered hogs’ bones mixed with poppy oil — the old stage recipe for pale skin — or Shakespeare’s sardonic references to the kind of beauty “purchased by the weight” in The Merchant of Venice, as to Karim-Cooper’s celebrity: for more than a decade she’s been one of the leading racializers of Shakespeare’s work. Perhaps the key moment in her rise to fame was her 2018 curation of the Globe Theatre’s first “Shakespeare and Race Festival,” now held annually.

Daniel DePetris

What would Trump’s second-term foreign policy look like?

Former president Donald Trump is in a world of legal trouble. Not only is he the first president in history to be impeached twice, he holds the unenviable distinction of being the first president to be indicted. He doesn’t do things by half-measures — he’s been indicted twice. So far he faces a total of seventy-one criminal charges of various severity in two separate investigations, from falsifying business records and retention of national defense information to obstruction of justice. And as this magazine goes to press, we still haven’t heard from Fani Willis in Georgia, or from the second Jack Smith investigation. Yet despite his legal woes, Trump remains a top contender for the highest office in the land.

Kara Kennedy

Caroline Calloway sets the record straight

As I was on FaceTime with Caroline Calloway, the Washington Post published a review of her memoir, Scammer, alongside one of a book written by her archnemesis, ex-best friend and former love interest, Natalie Beach. From her squealing — and the way her phone was blowing up with calls from friends who’d read the piece — I could make an educated guess about its contents. “Beach is a talented essayist with a promising career ahead of her. Calloway is a lunatic who has already written a masterpiece,” Calloway read, with an emphasis on “lunatic” and a twinkle in her eye. “At one point they call Natalie quote unquote, good enough. And honestly, that is so brutal in its own fucking way,” she told me. The Post was right.

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