Features

Friday

January 24, 2025

How game developers could kill the industry

In the golden age of video games, developers and players built relationships through a shared celebration of creativity. Many developers were gamers themselves, which helped foster mutual trust and respect with their audiences. Players assumed developers would prioritize their desires and craft experiences centered on their enjoyment. That mutuality is now gone as many creators have grown more concerned with pushing political ideology and show disdain for their consumers. Many game developers now treat their users not as collaborators in a shared passion but as adversaries, accusing them of bigotry and hate.

Jacob Heilbrunn

A pleasant respite from the tumult in Cambridge

Cambridge, England Inscribed on the lid of a two-manual harpsichord in Holy Trinity Church at Hildersham in Cambridgeshire is the Latin tag Musica Donum Dei — music is a gift of God. It was a sentiment I could hardly quarrel with as I listened in the little twelfth-century church to a variety of baroque sonatas for violin, recorder, cello and harpsichord. They were expertly performed by the Azur Ensemble, which is comprised of recent graduates of the Royal College of Music. A particular standout was the French harpsichordist Apolline Khou, who has performed widely in Europe and in a solo concert for King Charles III.

Leighton Woodhouse

A shining light in San Francisco

Alex Byrd was shooting meth in his wife’s bathroom while looking up a rehab center to check into. Before his most recent stint in prison, he’d been a major player in the drug trade, controlling distribution at every strip club on San Francisco’s Broadway Street and dealing all over the Bay Area from Oakland to San Jose. But while he was locked up, a leader in Nuestra Familia, his prison gang, offered Alex the chance to retire. When he got out, Alex promised his wife he’d never go back to prison again. But he was still an addict — and now it was a lot harder than it had been before, since he no longer had a constant supply of drugs. Now he had to work for his drug money, which is to say to engage in petty crimes like robbing Amazon stores. “It was a burden,” Alex says.

Peter J. Hasson

Rein in the rainmakers: gambling apps aren’t going anywhere

"I've been losing all my money sports betting, so I’m selling my car at CarMax so I can get some money and bet on tonight’s Cowboys-Bengals Monday Night Football game,” TikTokker ReeceMoneyBets told his 9,000 followers in early December, gesturing to a faux-gold Ford in the CarMax lot. “They just gave me $3,000, and I know I shouldn’t do this, but I’m betting it tonight on Monday Night Football.” He bet his car on a same-game parlay — all his bets needed to hit in order for him to win — that included the Bengals’ Ja’Marr Chase getting fifty receiving yards, Bengals QB Joe Burrow throwing two passing touchdowns and Cowboys QB Cooper Rush notching 200 passing yards. “Easiest bet ever...

Bridget Phetasy

Bryan Johnson and the meme-ing of life

In fifth grade my class read Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, the story of a ten- year-old girl who stumbles on a family of immortals, the Tucks, who impress upon her that eternal life is unnatural and actually a curse. The novel had a profound effect on me. I became obsessed with the book and with the relationship of life to death. One passage in particular has haunted me for decades. “You can’t have living without dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got,” the patriarch, Angus Tuck, says. “We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.” I’ve been thinking about this book a lot since I became aware of the tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson.

Daniel McCarthy

Shooing away the ghosts of Clinton and Blair

Donald Trump didn’t just win an election last year, he performed an exorcism. He cast out spirits that have directed Western politics for a generation, not least the ghosts of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Those particular left-liberal leaders haven’t been in power for many years, of course. But the style of politics they pioneered on both sides of the Atlantic didn’t end with their terms as president or prime minister. The world before Trump was still very much the world that Clinton and Blair had made. For decades Republicans and Conservatives found themselves having to accept the terms of what might be called the Clinton Blair settlement.

Thursday

December 26, 2024

Spectator Editorial

The heterodox cabinet

As Inauguration Day approaches, the second Trump administration is staffing up. The president-elect’s picks are more or less what everyone expected, outside of a few curveballs. To be honest, the lack of outrage from Trump critics is the big surprise: apparently Trump Derangement Syndrome is a passing fever; even many who’ve argued against him seem to see some logic in the administration of outsiders he’s been signaling he’ll pick for years. In Washington, where almost nothing changes from administration to administration, these cabinet picks might actually be able to effect some meaningful disruption. In almost every role that matters, Trump has opted for a nominee who has been an extreme critic of the very body he or she is set to oversee.

Scott Jennings

My top 2024 takeaways by Scott Jennings, CNN’s ‘Black Sheep’

New York "Black Sheep.” Not a nickname I expected, but my friends and family get a kick out of the Daily Mail’s moniker for me following a series of viral CNN moments. It’s more accurate than “Lonely Scott,” which Bill Maher applied after watching our network’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention. I am anything but lonely these days. In the wee hours following Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris, I impatiently wait my turn on CNN to explain what happened.

Roger Kimball

Trump was elected to change the status quo

It turns out that the campaign was the easy part. For Donald Trump, winning the election was just securing the beachhead. Now the real work begins. Cities must be retaken. The enemy’s fortifications stormed. Subject populations must be liberated. As I write, Trump is still trying to assemble his cabinet. You will probably know at least the major dramatis personae by the time you read this. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s embattled pick for attorney general, has bowed out of the confirmation process to avoid “becoming a distraction” for the Trump/Vance transition. How about RFK Jr.? Will he be confirmed as secretary of the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services? Will Tulsi Gabbard make it as director of national intelligence? Will Pete Hegseth become secretary of defense?

Ben Domenech

Trump’s new world order

Donald Trump’s ascension to his second presidency comes with a new cadre of followers and sidekicks, in the form of a cabinet built almost entirely from fresh faces. This is not a president interested in continuity, which he signaled early on, stating on social media that Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo — his erstwhile United Nations ambassador and secretary of state — would have no place in his second administration. The first name wasn’t a surprise, given the obvious tension he had with the woman who was his last challenger in the primary. The second was because Pompeo had been a dutiful supporter of Trump while in office, wrote a book defending their shared record on foreign policy and rejected the opportunity to run himself.

Neal Pollack

The Covid cabinet

On March 24, 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya co-published an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Is The Coronavirus As Deadly As They Say?” He argued that Covid lockdowns and quarantines had no grounding in scientific fact. That was a rare opinion in those isolated days. Anyone who spoke out against lockdowns, mask mandates, booster shots for toddlers, school closures, business shutdowns and any number of other injustices large and small that stemmed from Covid panic feels vindication today, as Bhattacharya, a sensible, mild-mannered scientist whom former National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins publicly smeared as a “fringe epidemiologist” is about, barring some sort of confirmation calamity, to take Collins’s job.

Amber Duke

The mental health election spiral

My first semester of college coincided with the 2012 presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. I was a conservative from a small rural town at an elite liberal university, and this was not great for my social life. My freshman floormates at Georgetown defaced my political signs, made nasty comments to me in the hallways and on election night my RA dropped by my room to rub it in my face when the race was called for Obama. The following morning, we all went back to class and started preparing for midterms. Four years later, universities across the country all but shut down when Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Suddenly the mental health of the losers was priority number one. Classes were canceled to allow students space to grieve.

Joel Kotkin

The battle of the oligarchs

Money and power have rarely been strangers; often nations are made to shudder when the ruling elites battle each other. Britain’s late empire was divided between liberal manufacturers and aristocratic interests, whose conflicts hastened the rise of the Labour Party and the end of empire. In the United States, opposition to powerful trusts defined progressive politics for decades, ultimately laying the basis for the New Deal and a greater scope for government. In the West today we are witnessing a similar divide among the uber-rich class — epitomized by Elon Musk’s embrace of Donald Trump — that is already reshaping politics. Until 2016 the US establishment, both Republican and Democratic, embraced similar views on national security, global trade and multilateral institutions.

Grace Curley

Talk radio is perfect prep for being press secretary

Sometime after running for Congress in New Hampshire and before being named President-elect Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt was nice enough to fill in for me on The Grace Curley Show during my maternity leave. I wouldn’t claim that those three months led Karoline — whose résumé includes work for Kayleigh McEnany, Elise Stefanik and Trump — to the White House. But I would argue that hosting a talk show is great preparation for the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. First off: she knows that if you lose your temper, you lose. Throughout summer 2023, Karoline heard from listeners about a host of issues, including the Republican primary candidates. A lot of listeners were thrilled at the prospect of former President Trump’s vying for a second term.

Ross Anderson

Tales from the crypto

I don’t gamble. But in October 2016, I made a bet. It was obvious Trump didn’t just have skeletons in his closet but a walk-in necropolis. As we stumbled toward November, the question wasn’t whether one of these skeletons would break free, but just how bad the October Surprise would be. It was supposed to be a polling-shifting, election-sealing, reputational nuclear bomb. And if you read the press, that’s what the “Pussy-Grabbing Tape” was. But to me, it was just another example of Trump being vulgar. And Trump had always been vulgar. And voters liked that he was vulgar, or didn’t care that he was vulgar, or liked that he was so unlike other politicians that he could be vulgar.

Dave Seminara

Splitsville: separatist movements are gaining steam in blue states

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only. “I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says.

Zaid Jilani

Whither the whistleblower: leakers and leak-hunters get a boost from tech

When Americans think about the word “whistleblower,” their minds may go to the 1970s, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began communicating with the informant who came to be known as Deep Throat, after the pornographic film of the same name (their source, a disgruntled FBI official called Mark Felt, outed himself decades later). But the history of whistleblowing in the United States predates Watergate by centuries. “Whistleblowing in this country is not new,” says Jackie Garrick, executive director at the whistleblower-support group Whistleblowers of America.

Bridget Phetasy

Journal of the preschool plague year

One of my favorite lines in the modern cinematic classic Incredibles 2 comes courtesy of fashion designer and maker of exclusive superhero costumes, Edna Mode, “Done properly, parenting is a heroic act. Done properly. I am fortunate it has never afflicted me.” I’ve been thinking about this line because for the past couple of days, we’ve watched entirely too much television as I struggled to juggle work, a sick child and a sick husband. I don’t feel like a hero. I’m pretty sure I’m not doing any of this parenting stuff properly. It feels like all hell has broken loose and my toddler is just our roommate now. A small, snotty, adorable, popsicle-addicted roommate. My house has been struck with what I’ve been referring to as “the preschool plague.

Daniel McCarthy

The Democrats need a new rulebook

Donald Trump’s triumphal return to the White House is the end of more than just the Joe Biden era. Since Bill Clinton’s presidency, Democrats had adhered to a formula they thought unbeatable: They would be socially progressive, economically centrist and staunchly internationalist. Republicans, they thought, had staked their future on demographics that were in decline — whites and the most conservative Christians. Democrats were the party of twenty-first-century America, an ethnically diverse and more secular, or at least religiously liberal, land. What went wrong? When Trump won in 2016, Democrats dismissed it as a fluke.

Fin de Pencier

A shaky truce in Beirut

There was an Israeli drone buzzing over Beirut at 8 a.m. on November 27, four hours after a ceasefire was signed and the shooting stopped. It soon disappeared and a feeling of elation set in. It was the best day we had in months. The Christmas spirit was palpable in Gemmayzeh, a Christian neighborhood in central Beirut. Christmas decorations were going up and the bars were packed that night. Lebanese in the diaspora who’d canceled their holiday trips to Beirut rebooked that day. But the Lebanese also know how to manage their expectations — they always hedge good news with dread. The agreement lays out an initial sixty-day truce, during which Hezbollah is required to withdraw its forces north of the Litani river, and the Lebanese Army is to take its place.