Let them cook | The Spectator

The joy of politics

Laramie, Wyoming The Joy of Sex, by the appropriately named Alex Comfort, was a bestselling illustrated sex manual published in 1972 and released in a new edition in 2008. In 2024, anyone with sufficient imagination to describe and illustrate The Joy of Politics would beat out Elon Musk in the race to become the world’s first trillionaire. Politics — like sex — has always been with us, but the conception of politics as “joy” began, you may argue, with the adoption of the “Ode to Joy” that concludes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the European Union as its official anthem in 1985.

Bill Kauffman

‘Democracy’ in New York State

Batavia, New York Election Day in New York just ain’t the same anymore, thanks to nepo numbskulls George W. Bush and Andrew Cuomo. Though I always vote for longshots and losers, radicals and reactionaries, I have such happy memories of early November Tuesdays. Mr. Milward, dressed as Uncle Sam, would tour the polling places of my hometown, benign and reassuring in a way that his model — the autocratic “I Want You!” martinet — was not. When I was a tyke, I trailed my mother as she cast a 1964 ballot for LBJ. The gray-haired election inspectors panicked — “There’s a child in the voting booth!” — but my violation of polling-place etiquette paled in comparison to Landslide Lyndon’s stolen US Senate election of 1948.

Cosmo Landesman

How to know when to let friends go

London When an old friend says to you, “we must meet up for lunch sometime,” you can be sure of one thing: you will never meet for lunch. Why? Because your friendship is over. The clue is in the word “sometime.” It’s a rain check that never gets cashed. It’s what friends say to each other when they feel obliged to see a friend they don’t really want to see — but they don’t want to dump either. We all have friends like these: I call them the Undead friends, when the friendship is neither fully alive nor totally dead. You don’t delete them from your contact list — just your social life. This will lead to the odd spasm of guilt but don’t worry; we all do it. And it gets done to us too. There are people you think of as your great friends.

Bill McMorris

Cacophony at the dinner table

Alexandria, Virginia Close your eyes. Picture an elementary school orchestra on a school bus. All instruments are plastic recorders. Now picture the school bus hurtling into a warehouse filled with barn owls. Open your eyes. Welcome to my dinner table. The priest assured us he wanted to experience family life at its fullest. No need for a special meal, he said (we will pretend that we eat duck every week). No need to clean (fat chance). Only a bachelor could think that freshly swept floors and expert cooking could detract from an authentic family meal in a house full of women. Aside from grace I do not think I have completed a sentence at the dinner table since 2017. There are too many riddles and recess incidents to discuss.

Ryan Spaeder

The new worst team in baseball

To this day, the exact origin of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is unknown. It may be easy to blame poor old Mrs. O’Leary, though the conspiracy-minded out there speculate that the blaze might have been a deliberately planned event orchestrated by powerful interests to reshape the city for profit and control. Whether or not these theories hold water, the fire offered a convenient opportunity to rebuild the city with stricter building codes and modern brick and steel structures that allowed the city’s elite to seize prime real estate, drive up property values and transform Chicago into a modern hub of wealth and innovation. It has taken all of 153 years, but the fire has crossed the South Branch of the Chicago River and reached West 35th Street.

Life