Full steam ahead? | The Spectator

A week at the World Backgammon Championship

Most people will know that there are no rivers in Monaco. The one I found there is the metaphorical waterway used by poker player and professional pollster Nate Silver to describe an ecosystem of people and ideas focused on probabilistic thinking and calculated risk-taking. The term is derived from poker, where the last community card to be revealed in a game of “Texas Hold ’Em” is known as the River. Poker players paddle about in the river, but so do stock-market traders, venture capitalists and anyone else consistently taking calculated risks. A politician deciding how to respond to Covid or a foreign invasion is “in the river.” In the broadest sense, we all live in it as we make risky decisions in an uncertain world, tipping our hats to Heraclitus from time to time.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The new political era

It seems likely that on Election Day the country entered fully upon the new political era that commenced with the fateful presidential election of 2016. Donald Trump spent the last four years in the howling political wilderness, savagely set upon by every species of Big Beast — legal, financial and political — but from which he emerged as a survivor — physically, mentally and morally intact to achieve what is acknowledged to be the greatest political comeback in American history. Donald J. Trump is, without a doubt, the most remarkable American politician to hold office since 1945. Whether or not he is a genuinely great man as well is a question that only the next four years can answer.

Bill Kauffman

On embracing the winter years

Batavia, New York I sit in hospice at the bedside of my beloved Aunt Jane — who never let us use the honorific, as “Aunt” made the perennially youthful Jane feel old — and the jukebox in my mind plays its saddest song: “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention. Jane, who is eighty-nine and till a few weeks ago looked twenty-five years younger, was my hip and happening aunt of the 1960s who lived in Buffalo and dated pro athletes and bopped along to WKBW’s Top 40. She taught my brother and me to write letters, which is why I still have an autographed photo of Minnesota Vikings kicker Fred Cox, and my brother has his signed picture of Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel.

Bill McMorris

Road-tripping with Wittgenstein

North Carolina The ancients used the sun and moon to measure time, but modern man has a more exact instrument at his disposal: the odometer. It has ticked up a thousand-plus miles, a sure sign the 2024 holiday season has just ended. The children are all struggling in the backseat — against one another, their own bladders and the nylon straps the Car Seat Cartel has foisted upon them — and are thus unable to see the dash’s mileage ticker, as well as the incriminating orange “service reminder” messages your wife is pretending to ignore. When you read aloud the “Welcome to North Carolina” sign, your most intelligent child says, “Are we still in the United States?

Life