Features

Friday

Patrick Allitt

What George Washington learned from Brooklyn Heights

The biggest battle of the American Revolutionary War was fought in Brooklyn, just after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, in the summer of 1776. The Americans were outnumbered two to one, lost badly and were lucky to be able to extricate themselves from what could have been a war-ending disaster. George Washington, in command, learned that his troops must be better armed, better led and better disciplined to take on the Redcoats and that, whenever possible, he should avoid European-style pitched battles. Acting on these lessons for the next seven years, he found a way to survive and, eventually, to prevail.

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Daniel McCarthy

What Britain taught us

Being in Britain around the Fourth of July is always an odd experience for an American. It was especially awkward to be at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London a week before the 250th anniversary of US independence. ARC is a British organization whose massive annual conference – about 4,000 people this year – is styled as a kind of counter-Davos, an international gathering of center-right types including a heavy representation of Americans. Given the timing, various speeches by gracious British hosts praising their American guests’ homeland – and by Americans themselves praising the principles of their revolution against the British two and a half centuries ago – were to be expected. But that didn’t diminish the cognitive dissonance.

Roger Kimball

Why socialism will fail

The philosopher David Hume warned us not to mistake “constant conjunction” for causation. It’s good advice, though it is not the sort of universal disturbance in the force that some philosophers, eager to jettison old certitudes, believe it to be. Hume himself eventually rejected that “pretended skepticism” as a juvenile affectation. Like the rest of us, he recognized that reasoning from induction, from observed realities, introduces us to that great guide in the cognitive adventure of life – probability. Don’t let the appearance of a black swan down under disturb you: good mental hygiene and faith in the soundness of inductive reasoning go together. I indulge in this preliminary expectoration (apologies to Søren Kierkegaard) because I arrived in London on June 22.

The Spectator

Who’s the most underrated American?

Bill Kauffman Luther Martin: a voluble and drunken Maryland attorney who walked out of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 after warning his fellow delegates that their handiwork provided the framework for a centralized and militaristic empire that would efface regional distinctions and erode the liberties for which American patriots had fought and bled a decade earlier. An unheeded prophet who breathed the Spirit of ’76. Lionel Shriver Edith Wharton. Hardly unrecognized, but under-taught and too little familiar to the international literary readership (e.g., in Britain). A spectacular stylist, she wrote novels that still sound modern and perfectly accessible 100 years later – and she was a real feminist before the days the word meant humorless pill.

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Christopher Caldwell

America is still an English country

Americans have been enjoined, as we approach our country’s 250th anniversary, to be a bit more grateful. Good advice. It is not just the freedom of speech and the purple mountains’ majesties we should be taking stock of. It is also our knack, in recent decades, for miseducating ourselves, failing to read the signs of the times, making wrong choices – and then profiting from the fallout. In the global financial crisis that ran for a decade after 2008, blunders in American financial engineering, from complex derivatives to mortgage-backed securities, bankrupted debtor countries and cost several others their sovereignty, most notoriously Greece.

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Christopher Buskirk

Ambition is in America’s DNA

Rome Last month, I found myself sitting on a panel discussing the European Union’s digital asset strategy. The conversation revolved around the digital euro, tokenization, stablecoins, financial regulation and the future of capital markets. Outside the conference hall stood one of the great cities of human civilization. Rome encourages long thoughts. Every stone seems to remind visitors that history is not a straight line. Great nations rise, stagnate and sometimes disappear altogether. Walking through Rome after the conference, I started thinking less about digital currencies and more about something else entirely. America turns 250 this year. For any nation, two and a half centuries is a respectable run. For a republic, it is extraordinary.

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Matt McDonald

Who can save America’s 250th birthday?

"They’re taking that down,” says Keith Krach when I ask if the White House’s UFC stage will still be up on July 4, as Donald Trump had suggested. “I think they’re disassembling it right now.” Krach is chief executive of Freedom 250 and responsible for planning events to mark America’s 250th birthday. Well, partially responsible. The story of America’s birthday party is a complicated one, involving multiple “bipartisan” planning organizations with similar names, canceled acts and branding disputes. Ten years ago, Congress set up the United States Semiquincentennial Commission to plan for the 250th. George W. Bush, Barack Obama and their spouses have honorary leadership positions. Joe Biden appointed Rosie Rios, a former US treasurer, to chair the commission.

Douglas Murray

Andy Burnham’s worryingly vague vision for Britain

Once again the question occurs: “Why do they want it?” Keir Starmer held a very important role in the legal profession before entering parliament, but for some reason he desperately wanted to be even more political. As soon as he became an MP it was plain that he was so keen to get the top job that he was even willing to go through the Jeremy Corbyn period – immiserating his reputation and presumably himself by spending years having to pretend that Corbyn was a suitable candidate for prime minister. Serving in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet was not something that any decent person would do – leading some of us to conclude either that Starmer was not a decent person or that he had such a surfeit of ambition it didn’t matter because it was a means to an end.

Spectator Editorial

America at 250 remains an exceptional country

Who could ever have imagined what was being unleashed on the world when Thomas Gage ordered 700 Redcoats to march out from Boston and seize supplies in the town of Concord? Who could have dreamed, 250 years ago, what would be built by the descendants of those 56 men who put their names to the Declaration of Independence while gathered in the Pennsylvania State House? The United States of America turns 250 having enjoyed a near-uninterrupted run of success unmatched in world history. By her 100th birthday, the US was already master of an entire continent. By her 200th, she had won two world wars, invented the airplane, the atomic bomb and the transistor; created the motion picture and rock ’n’ roll; become the first automobile nation and put a man on the Moon.

Thursday

Gus Carter

The Spectator’s role in the birth of America

The Spectator was there at the founding of America. George Washington had six copies of the original, 18th-century Spectator at his Mount Vernon estate and read them often. He shared with Joseph Addison, The Spectator’s co-publisher, an interest in how to educate ideal citizens: men and women with wit and grit. Young Washington read The Spectator in the hope of bettering himself, too. Both of his older half-brothers had been educated in England and he wished also for the manners and polish of an English gentleman. For the pioneering, self-improving men who would go on to create an independent America, the 18th-century Spectator was both an education and a guide. “I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The New York Times’s twisted reporting of Henry Nowak’s murder

Last month’s headline in the New York Times was obfuscating: “In the UK, a Violent Cycle: Hateful Attacks, Right-Wing Agitation and Riots.” Because hatred is now irrevocably associated with the “right-wing,” innocent American newspaper readers will have presumed that these agitating, rioting reactionaries were also the authors of the “hateful attacks.” The New York Times and the PBS News Hour delivered such twisted, incomplete and minimized versions of recent incendiary events in the UK that I was obliged to tell the stories of Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie to more than one ordinarily up-to-date American friend, because the salient details had been omitted from left-leaning reports.

Saturday

Freya India

How iPhones became birth control

A new study has found that smartphones are a likely cause of falling American birth rates. Economists Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper tracked the rollout of the iPhone across the country and found that the more people used smartphones, the further birth rates fell. This was especially true for the youngest cohort of women. Between 2007 and 2011, use of the iPhone was correlated with between 33 to 52 percent of America’s fertility decline. There’s been a lot of discussion about smartphones and falling fertility rates lately. Most arguments go something like this: smartphones and social media are linked to rising rates of anxiety and depression, less sex and less in-person socializing.

iphones birth control

Friday

Tim Shipman

‘I identify with Daenerys Targaryen before she went mad’: an interview with Kemi Badenoch

There was a moment backstage, before I interviewed Kemi Badenoch for a Spectator event, when I felt like John Sergeant with Margaret Thatcher bearing down on him as he pronounced her leadership in difficulty. I suggested to Badenoch that she was a rare example of a politician I had changed my mind about. “You mean you were very negative before?” she said, fixing me with the full alpha female glare. I muttered something placatory, but the truth is that a year ago I thought she was rubbish – and that was the mainstream view in her own party. She was arrogant, flat-footed, absenting herself from a stage that was being dominated by Nigel Farage, resistant to advice, convinced she was great at PMQs when even Keir Starmer was wiping the floor with her.

kemi badenoch
Olenka Hamilton

Decluttering is the ultimate act of love

“You are going to die before me and leave me to deal with this, and I will curse your soul for all eternity,” I once said half-jokingly to my husband over a glass of wine. We were having one of our regular conversations about what he was going to do about his late uncle’s possessions, which had arrived at our house in lorry-loads about a year after we had married. “Why don’t you do half an hour of sorting every weekend? I will help you,” I would suggest in reference to the multiple barns, basements and attics at our farm, which were now piled high with three generations’ worth of male hoarding. But with an increasing number of children in the house and no sense of urgency, progress was slow.

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James Heale

Can Reform see off the threat from Restore?

Nigel Farage has always prided himself on being able to see off any threat from his right flank. But now a new force has emerged in the form of his ex-colleague Rupert Lowe. When the two Reform MPs fell out 15 months ago, friends shared memes of Farage’s past fallen rivals ascending to heaven. “Come and join us, Rupert!” they exhorted. Instead, Lowe fought back, setting up his own party, Restore Britain. In the Makerfield by-election on June 18, one poll puts Restore on 7 percent – enough to stop Reform and hand the seat to Labour’s Andy Burnham. Restore’s strategy is simple: use Farage’s playbook against him. Like Farage, Lowe has put his faith in social media, building up a noisy following that can then be turned into a campaigning force.

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Patrick Smith

Why I take frog poison

You picture the rainforest, naturally. A clearing at first light, a shaman with thousand-yard eyes, the canopy screeching overhead. What you do not picture is a fourth-floor flat on an east London estate, a woman wafting sage around your head and the slow realization that you have just handed over £150 to be – quite literally – poisoned. This is kambo. And at the lowest ebb of my late thirties, becalmed in a miasma of self-loathing and suffering from PTSD following a moped accident in Thailand, I had decided it was precisely what I needed. Made from the dried skin secretions of a giant monkey frog, it is also, as of last month, suspected of having killed its first Briton.

Peter Frankopan

The real ‘Thucydides Trap’ Beijing and Washington must avoid

These are good times to be a scholar of the classical world. Last summer, Donald Trump issued an order that all federal architecture needed to be “beautiful,” noting that the Founding Fathers “wanted America’s public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue.” George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had therefore “consciously modeled the most important buildings in Washington, DC, on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome.” It was time to go back to these principles, said Trump. From now on “classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings” in the District of Columbia.

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Mary Wakefield

Save us from the Gospel according to Grok

The Rt. Revd. Martyn Snow, the handsome and up-to-date Bishop of Leicester, has decided that it’s OK, even admirable, for clergy to use AI to write their sermons. Bishop Snow was on the radio the other day, proud to share with listeners that in his diocese, they’ve even had an AI expert come to give pointers to the priests. No more painful head-scratching on a Saturday afternoon for the lucky clerics of Leicester. ChatGPT will sort it. Just plug in a Bible verse and a few well-crafted prompts, and you’re off to the cricket, or to Pride, whichever way you swing. It’s one of those many times I wish Michael Wharton was still alive and writing.

Allum Bokhari

The rise of anti-tech terrorism

Sometime after midnight on a Monday in April, a man in Indianapolis emptied 13 rounds into the front door of city-county councilman Ron Gibson. His eight-year-old son was asleep in the house. Tucked under the doormat was a handwritten note. It read: “No Data Centers.” One hesitates to draw grand conclusions from a single individual with a grievance and a firearm. But the note is the thing. The shooter did not want money, or revenge for some private wrong. He wanted, apparently, to register a policy preference about server infrastructure. And he is not, it turns out, alone. US law-enforcement officials have lately begun reaching for a new phrase to describe what is bubbling up: “anti-tech extremism.

Kabir Singh Bawa

Why is Peter Thiel in Argentina?

Many people enjoy ascribing meaning to the behavior and actions of elite politicians, celebrities – and especially billionaires. They read volumes into their every move, like studying tea leaves or predicting whole futures from the position and movement of the stars. So Peter Thiel’s decision to relocate to Argentina has elicited exactly the reaction one would expect. Thiel is the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir. Whenever he does anything unusual, the speculation begins within hours, growing more and more outlandish with every attempt to explain his actions. Is he finally fleeing the US? Is he seeking refuge from a wealth tax? Is he insuring himself against doomsday in anticipation of civilizational collapse?