Features

Tuesday

December 2, 2025

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.

Merlin Marr-Johnson

The world needs more copper, but there’s a catch

Copper has a nickname in the commodities market. It’s known as “Doctor Copper” because it’s so deeply integrated into the physical fabric of our lives and all the technology we depend on that its price reflects the health of the economy. “Gold is money, everything else is credit,” said J.P. Morgan more than a century ago. But copper is more than money. It’s modern human life. It is used in every corner of our technology, from houses to windfarms to warehouses. Which is why I think, while everyone’s still obsessing about gold, it’s worth taking a look at copper. Since the global financial crisis in 2008, stock markets may have reached new highs but the physical world of construction, infrastructure and manufacturing has never quite regained its old growth rate.

Mary Wakefield

Talk to your dead grandmother thanks to AI

Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing ad I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it because you need to be forewarned, just in case this Christmas a child or a grandchild happens to mention that it might be an idea to record a video for posterity, and opens the 2wai app. 2wai is the company responsible for the ad, and the service it offers is the creation of AI versions of family members so that relatives can talk to them after they’re dead. Catch ’em while they’re still alive, says 2wai; film a three-minute interview and Bob’s your AI uncle. “Loved ones we’ve lost can be part of our future.” That’s its catchphrase. The 2wai ad is about “Baby Charlie,” and it goes like this.

Tuesday

November 18, 2025

Spectator Editorial

Can Trump control inflation?

Notionally, Americans have never been better off. The ructions in tech stocks over the past few weeks cannot detract from the fact that the US economy has been outgunning other developed economies all century. The overall graph of real disposable income for Americans continues to trend upward, almost as if the sharp dip during the pandemic had not happened. That is certainly not true everywhere: in many countries, Covid has been followed by stagnation in GDP and wages. Yet, for all the wealth generated, many Americans simply do not feel that they are living in a thriving country. On the things that really matter, such as basic living costs, citizens at the lower end of the income scale feel their wages are increasingly inadequate. They are not imagining it.

Neal Pollack

Trump’s Oddjob: the rise of Steven Cheung

Though reporters covering the Trump administration are very familiar with Steven Cheung, the Donald’s combative White House communications director, he’s not a recognizable face to the general public. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt plays good cop, deflecting questions; Cheung is bad cop, trolling the media on X. But Cheung had a moment in the spotlight early this month during a press conference in which Trump announced reduced prices for GLP-1 “fat drugs.” “Where’s Steve?” Trump said. “He’s taking it.” The press is very familiar with Cheung’s weight issues. When one media outlet compared him to the rather overweight Bond villain Oddjob, Cheung leaned into the racially tinged stereotype and posed for a photo while wearing a bowler hat.

Curtis Sliwa

Andrew Cuomo was the spoiler, not me

In the final weeks of the New York City mayoral campaign, there was heavy involvement from billionaires and masters of the universe. Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined the chorus of the Democratic Establishment. And the message was clear: a vote for me was a vote for Mamdani. There was a 72-hour barrage from super PACs running this message on conservative radio and news shows in an attempt to convince Republicans and conservatives to abandon their beliefs and principles and effectively join the Democratic party. No longer was the focus on what each candidate stood for. The point was to rewrite history and distance fact from reality. We had Andrew Cuomo – a failed governor who left office in disgrace – being presented to the public as NYC’s only savior.

Ben Domenech

Is MAGA cracking up?

In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced. His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was. Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats.

Freddy Gray

The bonfire of the New Right’s vanities

The American right has a problem: it can’t stop talking about itself. Commentators, academics and journalists of what used to be called a “conservative” persuasion all tend to think that their ideas are tremendously interesting. And, in the way a difficult child becomes argumentative when he or she isn’t getting attention, they fight. They fear irrelevance and so they fall out with each other and take sides in order to prove to themselves that they have something worth saying. Things become messy and nasty and everybody gets carried away – usually in the hope of grabbing their own slice of an all-too easily distracted online audience. (Why else am I writing this?

Daniel McCarthy

What would Buckley do?

When Sam Tanenhaus’s monumental biography Buckley was published in June, I began a review by noting that William F. Buckley Jr.’s memory is as ill-served by some of his admirers as it is by his critics. The two have in fact largely converged on a single characterization of National Review’s founder: Buckley as the patron saint of purges, who excommunicated anti-Semites and conspiracists (as one side emphasizes) or antiwar dissenters and populists (as the other sees it) from the conservative movement.

Bridget Phetasy

It’s the cost of living, stupid

Earlier this month, the Republicans lost their first set of elections after Donald Trump’s victory last year, proving once again that without Trump, the GOP is cooked. Because yes – it really is all about him. Are you a narcissist if the world actually does revolve around you? Or are you just right? The problem for the GOP is that they need Trump to win, but Trump loves watching them lose without him. OK, maybe he is a narcissist. What’s clear is that the 2024 election was not the final boss. It didn’t destroy wokeism. You have to picture the spider in The Lord of the Rings, Shelob, crawling back into her cave after being stabbed by Samwise. Is she injured? Yes. Dead? No. She will probably be back to kill you.

Matt Ridley

Among the lords of tech

“What’s missing?” the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at Los Angeles, laid out in the haze below us. “Cranes!” he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital “bits” instead of physical “atoms” because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing.