Features

Tuesday

December 2, 2025

Howard’s beginning: the luck of Lutnick

With Elon Musk no longer sleeping in a cot in Washington, only one member of the White House inner circle comes close to matching Donald Trump’s net worth: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Commerce is usually a mid-tier cabinet post; even fervent political observers would be hard-pressed to name previous officeholders. But Lutnick has been one of Trump’s most impactful advisors in this second term. His ideas about tariffs have greatly affected the world’s economy, and have influenced Trump’s mercurial tariff pronouncements. Plus, he’s worth about $3 billion himself. Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, himself a billionaire, is only worth about half as much. Lutnick made his name as CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a major New York financial services company.

Buckley Carlson

Goodbye to the Smoky Yolk diner

“Actually, yes, please, I would like the pastrami corned-beef hash on the side – extra brown, extra peppers. Perfect complement to my Prime Benny. May want to hold the cheesy grits, though, but I’d love a side of maple and a large strawberry shake. Man needs his fruit!” “Whip cream?” “Oh, I think, absolutely.” It wasn’t a novel conversation. I used to entertain similar, equally weighty questions at least three times a week here. But I do recall thinking, then, and many times previously: if one is scarfing a monster shake at 7:30 on a Tuesday morning, is whipped cream really your most likely coronary catalyst? (Always skip the cherry; nothing found in nature – even adjacent to nature – can achieve such brilliant degrees of radiation red.

Matt Ridley

The end of the climate cult

Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent COP summit in Belém, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. By failing to pledge a cut in fossil fuels, COP achieved less than nothing, the venue caught fire, the air-conditioning malfunctioned – and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper.

Ben Domenech

The National Football League goes international

On a beautifully gray Madrid afternoon, a group of prominent executives and representatives of America’s most popular sports league gathered to discuss how to divide up the world. There were repeated references to shared values, community engagement, cultural appreciation and “cross-border connection through competition.” The many well-dressed attendees nodded along, doubtlessly hearing each of these totemic invocations for what they really mean – money, in unimaginable sums, and the National Football League’s bold plan to take over the planet. This season the NFL has played seven international games. Madrid, São Paulo, Dublin and Berlin each hosted one fixture. London got three.

Christopher Caldwell

Eclipse of the boomers

Shortly after Christmas, the oldest baby boomer will turn 80. The 75 million people born between 1946 and 1964 who have dominated the American political imagination since the Eisenhower administration are starting to fade from the scene. Anyone who has felt oppressed by the baby boom – and this includes virtually every non-senior citizen in the country – will complain that it’s about frickin’ time. If the boomers are only now losing their influence, they long ago lost their marbles. What was the archetypal boomer moment of recent years? Probably Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. But maybe it was the indignant boycott of Spotify by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell over the Covid “misinformation” to which Joe Rogan allegedly gave vent in 2022.

Daniel McCarthy

The theater of Washington

Suddenly it’s Ibsen season in Washington, DC. It’s true that only Shakespeare’s plays are performed worldwide more often than Henrik Ibsen’s. But to have two of the great 19th-century Norwegian playwright’s works running at once in the nation’s capital is unusual. And the works in question – An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck – deliver contradictory messages. Together they say something not only about the state of the arts in Washington, but also about the state of the liberal mind. Politics is very much a presence on the capital’s stages. The city’s two main Shakespeare organizations, the Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Folger Theatre, last year presented seasons heavily influenced by the presidential election.

Joel Kotkin

Slouching towards Gavin

More through historical accident than anything else, Gavin Newsom has emerged as the de facto leader of the Democratic resistance. His dubious attempt to redistrict California along partisan lines won at the ballot box last month. It was a gamble – an open and explicit attempt at gerrymandering – which voters have rewarded. He is conspicuously modeling his image on Bill Clinton’s and Slick Willie is returning the compliment by letting insiders know that he is hugely impressed by Newsom’s talents. Newsom is also audaciously recasting himself as a working-class hero. He has said he spent his childhood “hustling” and that he “raised himself.” That rather downplays his rise as a protégé of the Getty family, which employed his father as its lawyer.

Lionel Shriver

The ‘affordability’ delusion

During last week’s excruciating Oval Office make-nice between an insultingly buddy-buddy American President and a fraudulently obsequious New York City mayor-elect, the contest was over which pol was the more patronizing. At one point Trump graciously granted his petitioner permission to call him a "fascist" while clearly implying the guy’s OTT campaign rhetoric had been embarrassing. Donald Trump sat regally on his throne, patting Zohran Mamdani’s arm while commending "Attaboy!" as if petting a golden retriever that had fetched a ball. For his part, Mamdani stood mutely by the Resolute desk with cartoonish humility, hands over crotch. This cowed performance of beta-male submission was meant to disguise who’d got a leg over whom.

Nicholas Wade

The science of marriage

“Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” With this stern admonition, the Church has long been a fervent defender of marriage. But as religion has faded as a social force, so too has marriage. Does it much matter if people choose to shack up together instead of tying the knot? What is lost if some men want to be incels or some women decide a husband is a bothersome surplus to their needs? The problem is that all lifestyles alternative to marriage serve to undermine it. And like other major social institutions, marriage is not some arbitrary cultural construct like a federal holiday. Rather, it rests on genetically shaped behaviors that evolution has written into the human genome because of their survival value.

Roger Kimball

Federal judges crave the spotlight

In the great injunction sweepstakes that have followed Donald Trump’s second administration like a shadow, we have seen district court judges with a hankering for executive power attempt to play president in more than a hundred cases from immigration and tariffs to funding various executive branch agencies, so-called trans-rights, DEI and climate change. Some of these injunctions and temporary restraining orders are still pending. Many, perhaps most, have been resolved by the Supreme Court in ways that favor the Trump administration, not always categorically but usually by affirming the broad scope of executive power envisioned by Article II of the Constitution.

Ben Clerkin

Can Zelensky surrender?

Kyiv The urge to run from danger is only human. It was palpable when air raid sirens sounded as I left the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, which is close to the front line and under relentless attack nightly from Russian drones. Five MiG-31 aircraft were in the air, Telegram channels with access to reliable intelligence reported. The warplanes can be armed with either the Iskander ballistic missile – which travels at up to 5,400mph – or the Kinzhal hypersonic missile, top speed 7,700mph. So fast there wasn’t enough time to find a shelter. We sat in traffic with bated breath, waiting. A deep boom resonated through the mini-bus and two colleagues of mine began praying. Was it an intercept or an impact – or a Patriot defense battery firing? We still don’t know.

Andreas Roth

The steady erosion of academic rigor in German schools

German teachers are a privileged species. Most of us enjoy the status of a Beamter, a tenured civil servant. We can be dismissed only after a serious criminal conviction, we are exempt from social-insurance contributions and even our mortgage rates are lower. Such comfort discourages dissent. Yet, after more than 25 years as a pampered Beamter, I find myself overwhelmed, not by the teaching load or the students, but by the accelerating erosion of academic standards. Having taught English, history and Latin at four different Gymnasien, I have learned that challenging students is now frowned upon by both bureaucrats and politicians. Nearly all my colleagues agree that standards have plummeted.

Josie Cox

Meet the e-girls selling European decline to America

Earlier this year, a striking 28-year-old woman, dressed head to toe in a vivid shade of crimson, stepped up to the podium at a conference in Hungary. “Ladies and gentlemen: hello Budapest. I’m so thrilled to be here again,” she began, adjusting the twin microphones and gently swiping a strand of long blonde hair from her forehead. “As some of you might remember, last year I gave here a speech as well, about the ‘great replacement,’” she continued, confidently glancing around the assembled audience. “I wanted the whole world to know that the ‘great replacement theory’ was, in fact, not a theory, but reality. White people are becoming a minority in their own homelands at an exceptionally fast rate.

Gavin Mortimer

Are America’s women heading for the exit?

Life is apparently so disagreeable in Donald Trump’s America that 40 percent of women aged between 15 and 44 want to leave. That is four times higher than the 10 percent who wanted to quit the US in 2014. According to Gallup, which conducted the poll, nearly half the nation’s younger women have “lost faith in America’s institutions.” This disenchantment accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which enshrined the constitutional right to abortion. Younger American men are bearing up better. Only 19 percent share women’s distaste for the Donald, a 21 percent differential which is the largest recorded by Gallup since it began asking the question in 2007.

Katherine Dee

Olivia Nuzzi and the return of ‘celebrity journalism’

There are two competing ideas going around about “the old days” of journalism. In one, journalism was a sober public service, safeguarded by editors and ethics, untainted by the capital-A, capital-E Attention Economy. In the other, it was a racist, sexist boys’ club we managed to leave behind – even if only briefly, for long enough to support Teen Vogue’s politics vertical. (May they rest in peace.) The current pile-on concerning celebrity reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose ex Ryan Lizza has revealed her affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., leans hard on the first fantasy. Once there were newsrooms; now there are “personal brands.” Once we had Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow; now there is a woman in a Lana Del Rey cosplay Mustang with 1990s porn-star brows.

Orson Fry

A transatlantic party route

Breaker Media, which has established itself as one of New York City’s foremost bean-spillers, hosted its first shindig at the West Village’s Super Burrito. Exuberant Aussie founder Lachlan Cartwright, an unashamedly old-school hack with a business card wedged in the brim of his fedora, mounted the bar and gave an impassioned speech: “I might as well have called this Broken Media because it’s almost broken me! But I’m having the time of my life.” So too were the guests as they guzzled martinis and snagged cigarettes from bowls on the tables. During one cig break, I had my fortune read by one of the party’s hired psychics. She said all the right things – “born under a lucky star, many children etc.

Michael Young

Is our education system radicalizing young men?

My 11-year-old son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents’ orientation night held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious why young men rage against the larger social system and why they might find a character like Nick Fuentes attractive. The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and decorations that all invoked the various totems of diversity. Black Lives Matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging and basically every sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present.

Charles Cornish-Dale

Why are we so obsessed with Hitler’s penis?

We care about Adolf Hitler’s penis, as a society. Quite a lot, it seems. A British documentary claims, finally, to have solved the mystery of the Nazi leader’s schwanz – was it big or was it small? – and to have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the famous chant of “Hitler’s only got one ball,” a favorite among British soldiers, wasn’t just an idle insult. The key evidence is genetic: a blood-stained piece of fabric from the Hitler bunker. The documentary filmmakers tested it against a sample from one of Hitler’s closest living relatives to make sure the blood was his. And it was. That meant his genome could be sequenced and then analyzed for genetic clues about his personality, health and, of course, his manhood.

Max Horder

Our brave new world

In 1961, just two years before he died in Los Angeles, the polymath, philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley gave humanity a warning. Much of his prophecy about society in Brave New World had come to pass, he said, which made him even more certain that the standout problem of the future would be our inability to resist becoming enslaved to our own technology. Now, more than 60 years after his death – and with an entire generation of children frying their brains with smartphones and nobody able or willing to do anything to stop them – it is hard to deny that he was onto something. The man was destined to be a prophet for our gadget-addled age.

Allum Bokhari

The dismantling of Lambda School

In 2017, Zoom finally achieved what Skype never could: hosting video calls that didn’t freeze. It was a golden moment to take education online. Enter Lambda School, a Silicon Valley startup founded by Austen Allred with the aim of disrupting higher education. Allred’s idea was simple: people wanted to learn to code but often couldn’t pay $20,000 upfront. His solution? You’d pay nothing until you landed a job earning more than $50,000 a year. At that point, a share of your income would go back to Lambda. But never more than $30,000, and never with interest. The technical term for this is an income share agreement, or ISA, an equity-like stake in a few years of a person’s future income. If you got a good job, the school was repaid. If you didn’t, the school took the loss.