Features

Sunday

June 18, 2023

You can never escape the suburbs

Had you told me when I quit drinking that one decade into sobriety I’d be a suburban Texas mom, I probably would have kept drinking. A friend and I were recently talking and I said, “I don’t know, a part of me feels like I’m giving up, moving to the suburbs.” She laughed and said, “That’s what the suburbs are — surrender.” The suburbs in all their sameness and picket-fenced perfection represented a life I never wanted — with their Live, Laugh, Love Etsy signs and swingers. They weren’t for eccentric artists or messed-up comedians. They were for sorority girls and women who loved game nights and crafts and the Bible and botox parties.

Ben Sixsmith

What happened to QAnon?

"There’s a storm coming,” popular historian turned esoteric political commentator Neil Oliver posted on Twitter in May, “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But there’s a storm coming.” As Mr. Oliver is a Scotsman who calls himself “the Coast Guy,” some of his followers might have thought he was referring to the weather. Others more acquainted with the tropes of modern conspiratorial thought, though, will see the reference to a “storm” as a reference to a time of social and political crisis. It comes — whether Mr. Oliver knows it or not — from the fevered discourse of QAnon. QAnon! The term almost makes you feel nostalgic.

Will Collins

What did the Habsburgs ever do for us?

Do you have a favorite Habsburg? Mine is Maximilian I, the first and last ruler of the Second Mexican Empire. Americans may be vaguely aware of him because a defeat of his French allies is commemorated annually on Cinco de Mayo. His struggles echo the experience of many unlucky rulers supported by fickle foreign patrons: Abandoned by the French and besieged by belligerent locals, the ill-fated emperor stubbornly refused to abandon a throne he hadn’t much wanted in the first place. His last words to the firing squad were, “Aim well, muchachos.

Peter Wood

In praise of encyclopedias

Simon Winchester recalls the time — he was not yet three — when, stepping into his rubber boot, he was stung by a wasp. He rates this penetrating moment as his first “acquisition of knowledge.” Readers of his many books may thank that wasp for starting Winchester on his ever-widening path to further knowledge. His new book, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge, from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic (KWWK for short), is what that wasp hath wrought. It follows close on the heel of Simon Garfield’s entertaining study, All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia (AKW for short). Despite the title, Garfield’s ambitions are more cabined than Winchester’s.

Roger Kimball

The known unknowns of 2024

I think it was the once-renowned critic Clement Greenberg who gratefully acknowledged that his job as a cultural commentator allowed him to conduct his education in public. I suppose we all do it, more or less furtively, though what prompts me to mention it now is the realization that I do not know the answer to any of the questions that have motivated this column. I write in the immediate aftermath of Ron DeSantis’s official announcement that, yes, he is running for the presidency of the United States in 2024. The announcement itself was no surprise — everyone has known DeSantis was running for months.

John Pietro

The Polish miracle

Poland’s Third Republic entered the world in 1989, after a dark period of occupation and oppression at the hands first of the Nazis and then the Soviets. As democracy was taking its first tentative steps in Warsaw, the USSR still had two years left to live and Germany was not yet unified. Yet somehow, over the next thirty-four years, Poland went from a poor post-communist state to a rapidly rising economic powerhouse and serious geopolitical force. Nothing about this rise was inevitable. Human agency, unforeseen events and providence play into every historical development — and Poland’s remarkable progress is no exception. It took leadership, will and luck. A central desire of the Polish people since long before 1989 has been to become a part of the West’s vision of Europe.

Bethany Mandel

Why civics test scores are falling in American schools

Twenty years ago, one of the most popular bits on late-night television was “Jaywalking,” where Tonight Show host Jay Leno quizzed passersby on world events, geography, history and more. He would ask random people on the street about literature, who the vice president was, or who we fought in World War Two. The clips that made the cut inevitably involved embarrassingly ignorant answers. Today, America is a nation of Jaywalking Allstars; whereas it was once a punchline for someone to be that ignorant, ignorance is now the norm. In early May, news emerged about record low scores for history and civics for eighth grade students nationwide.

Sunday

May 21, 2023

Spectator Editorial

The campaign against the Supreme Court’s legitimacy

Ask anyone about politics these days and you’re likely to hear that our government institutions are in crisis. And not just government institutions, really, but American institutions: the nuclear family isn’t what it used to be; the local community group is drying up; the glazed donut bacon double cheeseburger is harder to find than in our glory days. But in particular it’s our government institutions that are in crisis — which is why the Supreme Court is so important. As Congress buckles under the pressure of endless fundraising and cable news navel-gazing, as the presidency stagnates with its shambling commander in chief and massive bureaucracy, at least the Court still seems to work. In fact, it can seem like an oasis of deliberation in a political scene gone mad.

Ben Smith

Confessions of a media chronicler

We held the party for my new book, Traffic, at Umberto’s Clam House, by the office of our new news organization, Semafor. Umberto’s is best known as the site of a notorious 1972 mob hit — “they blew him down in a clam bar in New York,” Bob Dylan sang of Joey Gallo. I’d worried the space was too small, but it was perfectly packed and noisy, with blue oil paintings of crabs on the walls. I broke off a conversation with CNN president Chris Licht to take a call from a recently fired anchor from another network. When I came back our executive editor Gina Chua began the short program by spilling who I’d been talking to.

Rosie Gray

Inside RFK Jr.’s kooky White House quest

After Linda Como, a sixty-four-year-old administrative assistant from Quincy, Massachusetts, was fired from her hospital job for refusing to be vaccinated against Covid, she discovered Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine activism, and it resonated with her. But that’s not the only reason Como came to the Boston Park Plaza hotel one morning in April to see Kennedy launch his long-shot 2024 presidential campaign. “I grew up in Boston, went to Boston public schools, so you know the Kennedy family,” Como told me. “They’re like the royal family. So I’ve always been a fan of the Kennedys.” Kennedy lore runs deep in Boston. This is where Robert Kennedy’s father Robert F. Kennedy and his uncles John F. Kennedy and Edward M.

Matt Purple

Blink and you’ll miss this libertarian moment

Political years are the opposite of dog years: they pass by in a blaze, with entire epochs elapsing in the course of a few news cycles. Ideas, even movements, fade abruptly, recalled only years later when you clean out your garage and stumble on that old tricorn hat from your Tea Party days. If you want to know how jarring political change can be, consider that at this time in the 2016 election cycle — around the late spring of 2015 — the predicted frontrunner for the GOP nomination was Rand Paul. This was no coincidence. In those days, we were said to be in the middle of something called a libertarian moment. Voters were leery of Barack Obama’s deficit spending, Washington’s endless wars, the NSA surveillance that had been unveiled by Edward Snowden.

Ioan Grillo

How to stop the flow of guns south

Latavia McGee crossed the US border with three friends on March 3. The North Carolina resident was looking for the Mexican clinic for her tummy-tuck operation when she came under gunfire. Two of the group, McGee's cousin Shaeed Woodard and friend Zindell Brown, jumped out of the back of their vehicle and tried to flee but were cut down by bullets. The third friend, Eric Williams, stepped out the driver's side and was shot in the leg. The gunmen, who worked for the drug-trafficking mafia known as the Gulf Cartel, ran over, loaded the Americans onto a pickup truck and then held them in vehicles and stash houses for days. Woodard and Brown wouldn't make it through the kidnapping; McGee watched them die from their wounds.

Daniel McCarthy

Will DeSantis lose if he runs to the right of Trump?

"Negative partisanship” is a notorious feature of American politics. In presidential elections especially, voters don’t vote for the party and candidate they like; they vote against the party and candidate they fear. This is one reason third-party politics is a waste of time. If voters want to prevent the worst outcome, they will always choose the most viable alternative over the best alternative. For Joe Biden in 2020, it was enough that he wasn’t Donald Trump. For Trump in 2016, it was enough that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Next year, we’ll find out whether the voting public now views Biden as more like Clinton or still considers him better than Trump.

Ann Coulter

Why won’t conservatives ask Trump tough questions?

The US economy is faltering, crime is through the roof, the border is a disaster, everyone hates the vice president and Democrats are not backing off one inch on transgenderism. Only one Republican could lose to President Joe Biden next year. But Democrats’ trump card is, well, Trump. Infallible two-step Biden re-election plan. Step one: trick Republicans into nominating Trump. Step two: that’s about it. I still don’t think Trump will be the nominee, but never underestimate Republicans’ ability to embrace the worst possible thing, especially with conservative media wildly cheerleading the worst possible thing.

Bill McMorris

The legal challenge to assisted suicide

Lonnie VanHook was preparing to board the train to Oregon when his body gave out. The Navy veteran is accustomed to these sorts of betrayals. He is quadriplegic and legless to boot; a rare form of cancer is eating away at his skeletal-muscle tissues and bladder. He awoke in a facility surrounded by medical professionals wearing the plastic countenances of concern and sympathy they picked up during the med school lessons on bedside manners. During the interaction, Lonnie told them about the reason for his upcoming trip. You can picture the Oakland native rolling his eyes as he has prepared for the rebuttal. The doctors, no doubt, exchanged astonished glances. Lonnie, what were you thinking?!? You don’t need to take the train. We can do that right here!

Teresa Mull

Are electric vehicles really the future?

It’s a cloudless spring day, made for a country drive. Chartreuse trees explode with pollen and glow to near neon. I wind past pastures and stone and brick farmhouses and amiable old barns that could set the scene of a Beatrix Potter story, elatedly adding to the hum of provincial enterprise by perfecting my rev-matching skills over the rolling hills and 8mph switchbacks that mark PA-74. The quiet two-lane road spits me out into city limits, and suddenly I’m crawling through a crowd at the Carlisle Collector Car Auction. I’m here to learn what classic car enthusiasts think of electric vehicles, or EVs. In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order establishing that, by 2030, half of new passenger cars sold must be all-electric or hybrid, going up to two-thirds by 2032.

Ben Domenech

They wanted to break the internet. It broke them

Their declared intention was to break the internet. In November 2014, the winter issue of Paper magazine, a stalwart of the New York arts and music scene for thirty years, featured an image immediately declared iconic by social media: Kim Kardashian, her neck wrapped in pearls, popping a Champagne cork and catching the bubbly white stream that jets over her head in the coupe glass propped on her prominent derrière. And that was just the cover — the internet quickly shared photographer Jean-Paul Goude’s more pornographic images of an oiled-up Kardashian stripping out of her black evening gown to show off her famous buttocks, before going full frontal with a slightly unnerving smile. The gambit worked to the tune of 16 million views for Paper in a single week.

Roger Kimball

Is America a republic in name only?

Is the United States a one-party state? Surely not. Just look at the ballots the next time you vote. There are nearly always Republican as well as Democratic candidates, and often there are candidates from other parties as well (Green, Working Families, Libertarian, etc.). But when you go beyond the labels, what do you find? Tucker Carlson, a recent victim of the uniparty monopoly, put it very well. “Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state,” he said in a post-Fox video. “That’s a depressing realization,” he added. “But it’s not permanent.” I think he is right about both things: the depressing reality that the United States looks more and more like a one-party state and the fact that the situation is not, at least not necessarily, permanent.

Amber Duke

Can the Heritage Foundation unite the right?

Last September I was sitting in the crowd at the annual National Conservatism Conference, lamenting the fact that my hotel room had no hot water, when Dr. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, took the stage at Miami’s JW Marriott for his plenary address. Nationalists and populists at the conference were suspicious of Dr. Roberts’s presence. The “New Right” had spent the past few years accusing the right-wing establishment, including the cache of center-right DC-based think tanks like Heritage, of selling out ordinary Americans for profit and influence.

Omar L. Gallaga

Welcome to the crypto winter

Last year, Austin scored a major coup when it landed Consensus 2022, a big in-person conference focused on the digital finance industry, specifically cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. CoinDesk, a news and research company focused on the cryptocurrency industry, chose the Texas capital for its return to an in-person conference and it arrived splashy and huge, taking over not only the Austin Convention Center but several adjacent hotels and event spaces, its 17,000 attendees swarming downtown. This was June of last year. Three months earlier, South by Southwest, the city’s long-running big tech and culture conference had been a veritable playground for NFT enthusiasts, and dozens of panels hyped the transformative importance of the blockchain.