Features

Friday

August 18, 2023

Summer vacation fatigue

Alexandria, Virginia I entered summer with the following list of tasks: convert the shed into an office; discard several tons of debris from the storage room; assemble that Amish treehouse that’s been sitting in the yard; chop down the ash tree. A gust of wind took down the crabapple tree right before the Memorial Day barbecue. On the guest list: my younger brother, who moonlights as an unlicensed contractor; my wife’s cousin who built his own home; and Terry Schilling, who constructed a luxury treehouse. A normal man would have leaned on such a guest list to get the work done for him. A writer self-conscious about his manliness would make a show of chopping the tree up with the dull blade of a cheap chainsaw.

Ben Domenech

Inside the progressive war on the Supreme Court

In the basement of a Washington, DC restaurant, 200 ticket-purchasing fans have gathered to witness the live recording of a multifaceted conversation about the villainy and corruption of the Supreme Court, and one justice in particular. It only seems appropriate to order the shrimp and grits: it costs $19.99 and comes with a white-wine tomato sauce. This may seem rather hifalutin, but it also comes in a glass mason jar that references tired hipster kitsch — perfectly suitable for a live podcast hosted by Slate.

Daniel McCarthy

The rise of the popcons

The Republican Party has to come to grips with populism. Donald Trump’s commanding lead in the race for the 2024 presidential nomination makes that clear, as does the fact that the next-most popular candidate, Ron DeSantis, also has a populist streak. In fact, the GOP’s base has subscribed to one flavor of populism or another since at least as far back as the start of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-hunting had a pronounced class dimension — elite officials in “striped pants” were a frequent target. By the end of the 1960s, Richard Nixon was appealing to the “silent majority” against a radical campus counterculture. The Moral Majority and other religious right groups of the 1980s and 1990s exhibited a form of Christian populism.

Sam Patten

Confessions of a Russiagate survivor

As the latest special counsel files new charges against former president Donald Trump, it’s beginning to look like legal crusades in America are more important than political ones. Locking up one’s political opponents is the sort of thing they used to do in Ukraine, after all, or the totalitarian state of which Arthur Koestler wrote in Darkness at Noon. Just a few years after claims of Russian collusion with the winning candidate of America’s 2016 presidential election were debunked, it is ironic that a Russian’s critique of our political culture nearly half a century ago captures our current predicament so clearly.

Roger Kimball

Has America lapsed into a gerontocracy?

Although I write at high summer, by the time you read this another school year will be upon us. I wonder: do students still read T.S. Eliot? They should. A lot of what he wrote continues to reverberate with significance. Consider, to take just one example, these lines from his poem “Gerontion.” History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distractedAnd what she gives, gives with such supple confusionsThat the giving famishes the craving.Gives too lateWhat’s not believed in, or if still believed,In memory only, reconsidered passion.Gives too soonInto weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed withTill the refusal propagates a fear.

Kevin Dahlgren

Homelessness in black and white

I stood across the street from Seattle’s City Hall, next to a long line of tents. There were more than fifteen of them, no more than a few feet apart. In between the tents, furniture and trash was piled high. The encampment took up the entire sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to walk in the street and triggering nonstop honking from passing cars. In a parking lot on the corner, people from a local mutual aid group stood at a booth, handing out food and water. They had signs making clear their views: “Stop the Sweeps,” “You sweep we strike,” “Fuck Capitalism,” “Equity now!” and “Smash Fascism.” This particular aid group were self-identified anarchists.

Bridget Phetasy

Real America is the middle seat in coach

There is a lot of talk about “Real America” these days: what it means, who populates it and what those people represent. Is it the “coastal elites” who inhabit the cities? Is it the people in the “flyover states”? The commentators doing the talking and writing about these mythical Real Americans and their concerns are usually very wealthy. At the very least, they’re flying business or first class. Many of them fly private. To me, Real America is the middle seat in coach. I’ve always loved chatting with people when I travel. (Yes, I’m one of “those people” but don’t worry, I can take a hint.) My ex-husband recently passed away and I was headed home for a thirty-six-hour trip to attend his funeral.

Zoe Strimpel

Fear and complacency in Taiwan

On a recent trip to Taiwan as a guest of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I knew that war with an increasingly belligerent China is a daily possibility. Chinese ships are in constant circulation in the Taiwan Strait. Chinese aircraft unceasingly fly near the island, getting close to Taiwanese air space. Beijing’s increasingly threatening language about forced “unification” seems to bring a catastrophic attack closer. Genuine fear fluttered in the wake of Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August last year when China launched three days of drills that paid no regard to what they called the “imaginary” median line, which divides Chinese from Taiwanese territory.

Ben Judah

Europe is not a museum

The temperature, at last, is starting to drop — and for Europeans that only means one thing: peak season is over. The crowds in the piazzas and on the beaches are starting to thin. And in the tavernas that were TikTokked you can finally think about getting a table. It’s time. Like the clockwork of migrating swallows — the Americans are going home. And knowing you can finally count on a breeze and far fewer strong-dollar spenders than a few weeks earlier, a stingier tipping class of European grande bourgeoisie in West London or the 8ème arrondissement — that has long since given up on July and August for the Mediterranean — is now contemplating a holiday. It’s still, however, at least conversationally, Europe season in the United States for a few more weeks.

David Christopher Kaufman

Is the era of the corporate DEI officer coming to an end?

Barely three years after the death of George Floyd, it appears the era of the corporate DEI officer is rapidly coming to an end. Or at least experiencing a major contraction. Across American business, the number of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion roles grew by 55 percent following the protests of summer 2020, reported the Society of Human Resource Management. At the start of 2022, the entire DEI “industry” was worth an estimated $9.4 billion. In 2023, it’s a very different story. According to the workplace trends consultancy Revelio Labs, DEI jobs shrank by one-third last year. The key problem with the DEI industrial complex is not the idea that American workplaces should be more representative of America — but the means often used to achieve those ends.

Teresa Mull

College-town blues

College towns are “decimating the GOP,” reported Politico in July, the reason being, in part, that “more college students and more faculty tend to be a recipe for more Democratic votes.” The college-town blues are a phenomenon with which I’m quite familiar. I live in Philipsburg, an old lumber and coal-mining town about twenty-five miles from State College, home to Pennsylvania State University. Though we’re in the same county, “the mountain” separates us physically, and as for politics... well, at last month’s Rush Township supervisors meeting, an old-timer floated the idea of seceding from Centre County (his main concern being that Centre County requires emissions testing on vehicles, and neighboring red counties don’t).

Nomi Kaltmann

Will Orthodox Judaism accept female rabbis?

Bracha Jaffe, an American-Israeli, spent decades working in tech, focusing on software development and raising her family in Israel. But following a midlife career shift and a move to New York, she now also works as an assistant rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, a large Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx. Every day, she plays a key role guiding congregants during life cycle events, such as births and deaths. She teaches classes and visits the sick. “I think it’s still true that when someone says ‘Rabbi,’ what comes to mind is an older male, perhaps with a white beard,” she says. With her blonde bob, ever-present smile and warm demeanor, Jaffe is a far cry from this stereotype.

Amber Duke

Has the patriot economy’s moment finally arrived?

It’s Saturday. You just rolled out of your MyPillow Giza Dream sheets, spent a little extra time trimming your beard with your Jeremy’s Razor, and brewed yourself a fresh cup of MAGA Dark Roast COVFEFE. You call your best friend on your Patriot Mobile cellphone to shoot the breeze. Hell, it’s five o’clock somewhere. Go ahead and crack open an Ultra Right beer and waste away the afternoon. Welcome to life in the patriot economy — the parallel economy being developed by conservative entrepreneurs and investors. Or at least an exaggerated version of it. The idea of the patriot economy is fueled by two convictions. The first is that the right needs its own economic infrastructure so consumers aren’t forced to buy goods from “woke” corporations.

Peter Wood

Disinfo-nation: the new censorship is here to stay

Lying is the great American pastime. We’ve been at it ever since some of the Pilgrim fathers shined on some of the folks back home with tales of the Eden they had found on the barren coast of Massachusetts: For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter; we have mussels; and ... As the American Socrates, P.T. Barnum, may once have said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Or he may have not said. The Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel in 1894 said he said it, but P.T. denied it.

Monday

July 17, 2023

Spectator Editorial

How to make debate great again

By the time you read this, tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg may have beaten the living daylights out of each other. Earlier in the summer, Musk tweeted that he was “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO responded on Instagram Stories, “send me location.” “Vegas octagon,” suggested Musk, referring to the arena where UFC fights are held. Cue an avalanche of hype, some of it serious, much of it tongue-in-cheek, about the possibility of this plutocrat showdown. The Spectator takes no house view on whether the jiu-jitsu-loving Zuckerberg or the barrel-chested Musk should be viewed as the favorite. But we will admit finding this approach to dispute resolution refreshingly old-school — dueling for the new Silicon Valley aristocracy.

Teresa Mull

A new war on obesity is underway

Consume American media for more than five minutes, and sandwiched between advertisements for KFC $5 Fill-Ups and a dramatic Golden Corral short pondering the age-old question, “Chicken tenders or baby back ribs?,” you’re bound to behold at least a half-dozen ads for prescription drugs. They tend to last longer than the straight-to-the-glutton-button fast-food commercials, and they play over and over and over again (who doesn’t know the Oh, Oh, Oh, Ozempic! jingle by now?) — and airtime ain’t cheap. “When Oprah Winfrey’s bombshell interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle aired in March 2021, the British tuned in, and many were gobsmacked at the number of drug commercials they saw,” Vox reported earlier this year.

Birdie Hall

The case against surrogacy

Last July, Albert and Anthony Saniger filed a lawsuit against a high-end California fertility clinic after their dreams of having a second boy were destroyed when their surrogate gave birth to a baby daughter. After already choosing male names and Gmail accounts for their future son, the couple had explicitly made clear that no female embryos were to be transferred into the body of their surrogate, who had experienced two failed cycles of in vitro fertilization before a successful pregnancy in 2020. To add to the trauma of being forced to live with a healthy baby girl instead of a male, the Sanigers were now forced to spend “staggering” amounts of money raising the two boys they wanted and a girl, all bought via costly fertility clinic services.

Bridget Phetasy

Why antivax is back

The first time I ever heard the term “vaccine injury” was when I was in rehab aged nineteen. One of the women who was living at the halfway house — we’ll call her Jane — lost her son and blamed the vaccine he’d had that morning. Jane said he was fine, got the vaccine and then dropped dead on the playground later that day. This was almost twenty-five years ago, so the details are fuzzy. I don’t remember how old her son was; I don’t remember what vaccine — but I do remember that story. Everyone told Jane she was crazy, including all the doctors and her husband. She and her husband split up and she drank herself into oblivion and near death.

Patrick Ruffini

The GOP’s tribal warfare

Open any national publication, and you’ll read all about a cultish, fire-breathing MAGA majority in the Republican Party, slavish in its devotion to Donald Trump. Nothing will shake their conviction that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. This is the group that fumbled the ball on the one-yard line in the 2022 midterms, nominating unelectable kooks who could not perform the most basic of political tasks: winning undivided control of Congress amid 8 percent inflation that Americans largely blamed on the incumbent Democratic president. And now they’re poised to do it again. The front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024 is (at present) the twice-indicted Donald Trump.

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Ben Domenech

Trump versus the party

When The Simpsons’s evil billionaire C. Montgomery Burns heads for a checkup, the doctor informs him he has virtually every disease known to man, including some just discovered for the first time. The odd thing is that all these diseases are in “perfect balance,” which the doctor illustrates by trying to shove a bunch of fuzzy novelty germs through a tiny door all at once. When they’re all jammed together, none can actually make it through — an example of “Three Stooges syndrome.” Despite the doctor’s warning that even a slight breeze could upset this balance, Burns happily concludes that he is “indestructible.” The Republican Party had a serious bout of Three Stooges syndrome in 2016.