MAGA cracks | The Spectator

The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types: Dr. Strangelove (The theorist) The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors.

Josie Cox

How Trader Joe’s became a way of life

A young woman recently approached me as I stood outside Trader Joe’s on the corner of 93rd Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m visiting from the UK and I’m just wondering if there’s anything worth seeing around here.” This is not an unusual occurrence. It’s always tourist season in New York. People come for the cherry blossoms in Central Park, for the magic of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and for the vague hope of running into Timothée Chalamet at a downtown brunch place. They even come in the sweltering heat of summer when I, personally, would rather be anywhere else – ideally somewhere without the pungent smell of hot garbage and misplaced ambition.

Bill Kauffman

The anti-Masonic roots of the Republican party

I suppose the big anniversary event of the coming new year is the semi-quincentennial of the American Revolution. I’m all for celebrating revolution and secession but spare a good thought for the bicentennial we’ll be celebrating hereabouts in 2026: that of the Morgan Affair, featuring betrayal, a possible murder, an enduring mystery and a political eruption whose ejecta would one day help form the Republican party. I’m writing this while sitting on the polished granite bench in the Batavia Cemetery dedicated to my late friend and swimming teacher Catherine Roth, grande dame, who waged a righteously “wrothful” battle against the urban renewers who razed and ruined so much of downtown Batavia, New York, in the 1960s and 1970s. (Greatest Generation my ass!

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

An adage dating at least from my adolescence: “You either use it or lose it.” This bit of folk wisdom, which refers principally – or so I understand – to the male procreative organ, has always been considered so obvious as to hardly need stating. Thus the recent discovery that the same principle goes for another human organ – the brain – should not surprise anyone.

Life