Features

Monday

August 22, 2022

Why I’ll never make it in stand-up

I’m an idiot. Because only an idiot decides to seriously pursue stand-up comedy at thirty, which is when I began. Stand-up is something dumb you start doing in your twenties, like drugs or believing you can change the world. It’s for when you’re full of youthful idealism, energy and collagen. It’s not something you begin when you’re approaching midlife crisis, feeling insecure about your poor life choices and uncomfortable with your aging body in an industry that worships youth. Stand-up is undoubtedly the hardest, most unforgiving performance medium on the planet. Although I grew up memorizing comedy albums, it seemed like something only geniuses and lunatics such as Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Robin Williams got to do.

Art Tavana

How Netflix saved comedy

Comedy has been absorbed into Twitter’s zeitgeist tornado: a whirling panopticon inhabited by 23 percent of the most humorless and opinionated denizens of the internet (and the top 25 percent of them produce almost all the tweets, according to a study by Pew Research Center). Twitter’s superusers are journalists who have never left the eye of the storm; Twitter has become their “ultimate editor.” It has what the New York Times calls an “outsized role in shaping narratives around the world.” But what kind of comedy clicks for these dopamine-addicted trend chasers?

Daniel McCarthy

DeSantis is a Republican establishment win-win

What’s left of the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican Party doesn’t like Ron DeSantis. But it’s eager to see him run for president anyway. For if DeSantis challenges Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, the old establishment stands to gain no matter who ultimately gets the nod. The Florida governor certainly seems to be ideologically closer to Trump-style populism than to the neoconservatism that prevailed among elite Republicans from the end of the Reagan era to the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. Why, then, would those who pine for the likes of Bush and Romney want to see a choice between Trump and DeSantis, both right-wing populists, two years from now?

Bruce Bawer

Is the right about to backslide on gay rights?

In a speech to August’s CPAC gathering in Dallas, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán said a good many admirable things about the importance of liberty and the tyranny of the globalist left, and the audience was gratifyingly receptive. But the biggest cheers and the most prolonged applause came in response to Orbán’s citation of a line from the Hungarian constitution: “Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.” Not so long ago, that enthusiasm might have raised eyebrows. To be sure, the 2015 Obergefell v.

Matt Purple

Ukraine is the first streaming service war

Russia has invaded Ukraine, and the images are all over the news. CNN has gone to round-the-clock coverage of bombs falling near Kyiv, refugees pouring into Hungary, Putin’s war machine rolling down a misty highway. We’re outraged by this, roused to action, as we righteously hang a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag off the porch and learn to spell the names of places like Kherson and Mariupol. The West, listless and fractured, seems suddenly united again as opposition to Russian imperialism grows and... ...and it’s summer. The weather is warm and a gentle breeze is tinkling through the chimes. The kids are off from school, horsing around the kitchen, and the lawn isn’t going to mow itself.

Ann Coulter

My New York nightmare

Throughout the Covid shutdowns, I felt like Wendy Kroy in The Last Seduction. If you’ve never seen the movie, the only thing you need to know is that a running theme is that the protagonist, hiding out upstate after stealing a lot of money, has got to get back to New York. Even the alias she uses is “New York” spelled backwards (sort of). For nearly two years, every morning I’d wake up thinking, I’ve got to get back to New York. Well, I’m back, and this isn’t what I meant at all. I wanted to be in the city that never sleeps, where I could walk around carefree, even at night, take the subway, and live within a few blocks of every possible convenience. Instead, this happened.

Peter Wood

The strange effort to ‘decolonize’ global health

"Global health” has emerged in the last decade or so as one of the growth areas in the medical and quasi-medical world. The CDC has a Center for Global Health which “works to protect Americans from dangerous and costly public health threats, including Covid-19, vaccine-preventable diseases, HIV, TB and malaria — responding when and where health threats arise.” Global Health “is a collaborative effort by technologists and researchers from leading international institutions to build a trusted, detailed and accurate resource of real-time infectious disease data.” The Global Health Corps is “a diverse community of health equity leaders.

Bethany Mandel

The lost boys of Covid

Millions of American children are about to enter their fourth year of Covid-impacted schooling. In vast swaths of the United States, a child now entering second grade has never had anything resembling a normal school experience. No child entering kindergarten has a memory of life before the pandemic. A rising junior in high school has never had a normal high school experience. Over two years into the pandemic, we know that the effects of “long Covid” are basically nonexistent in kids. Following the release of a study published in the Lancet, Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in the United Kingdom, tweeted, “A new, large study on long covid in children using Danish registry data has some very reassuring findings.

Jesse Singal

The trouble with Tavistock

"In July, Britain’s National Health Service announced a major revamp of its gender identity services for young people. The famed Tavistock clinic — officially named the Gender Identity Development Service, operated by the Tavistock and Portman Trust and a flashpoint for the country’s debate about gender, trans issues and hormone treatments — would be shuttered. As the New York Times reported, it would be replaced by “a more distributed and comprehensive network of medical care for adolescents seeking hormones and other gender treatments.” This outcome was strongly hinted at in the interim report of the Cass Review, an ongoing investigation into gender identity services for children, headed by the accomplished pediatrics expert Hilary Cass.

Chadwick Moore

The scissor sisters

I needed a quick cut and shave, my usual guy was closed, and the shop down the road was a tinge more masculine, or so I thought, than the other joints nearby. It was still one of those Brooklyn neo-barbers, complete with tatted-up staff, dark walls, steel accents with live edge countertops, trailing golden pothos and old-timey photographs of men sporting dramatic mustaches. On the Brooklyn scale of pretension, it ranked low compared to the rest, where you’ll find a bundle of demure waifs stationed in leather aprons as they balance brass clippers with outstretched pinkies, like martini glasses, delivering fades with delicate upward flicks of the wrist — that’ll be $150. “She’s running a little late,” the owner said of the barber to whom I’d been assigned. She?

Ashley Rindsberg

Taylor Lorenz is a crybully

The Washington Post is one of America’s most revered news organizations. Once led by Katharine Graham, an era-defining media CEO, and edited by news legend Ben Bradlee, the Post is famous for the Watergate-era journalism of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which made it the nation’s political paper of record. Today, one of the Post’s most high-profile employees is an internet-culture reporter named Taylor Lorenz. Her involvement in numerous scandals involving reporting errors, frequent falsehoods, violations of journalistic norms and troubling online interactions call into question whether outlets like the Post can continue to function effectively as the Fourth Estate in the age of online clout-chasing and click-based news.

Roger Kimball

The real motivation for the FBI raid

I write a day after the FBI, without warning, raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach. According to Trump, agents even broke into his safe and made off with who-knows-what documents. They also rifled through Melania Trump’s wardrobe. Maybe they were looking for classified lingerie. Who knows? As many commentators pointed out immediately, this assault on a former president of the United States by what amounts to the Democratic Party’s secret police was unprecedented. Never before in our history has a former president been subject to the mafia-busting, terrorist-crushing might of state police power directed by the opposing party. That’s just in our history, though. Elsewhere the story is not so cheery.

Joel Kotkin

The revenge of the analog economy

The last few decades have seen the emergence of two rival economies: an older analog one built on the actual production of goods, and another that profits from financial transactions, images and customer surveillance. The contest between the two has been rather one-sided, with the “laptop economy” the big winner, particularly during the pandemic. But while lockdowns made this one-sidedness clear, recent developments have been an unwelcome reminder that the pain suffered in the analog economy still matters. Whether through inflation, energy shortages or supply chain issues, we are getting an uncomfortable lesson in the enduring relevance of the material world. Sadly, the needs of the analog economy aren’t taken seriously enough in Washington.

Monday

August 1, 2022

Spectator Editorial

Why ESG is sinister

In contemporary finance, a bank’s “head of responsible investing” is meant to be an apostle of woke capitalism: a very modern kind of money man who tours the world touting all the good their employer is doing. So you might have expected a speech on climate change and finance by Stuart Kirk, the man with that job title at HSBC Asset Management, to be a bromide-filled snoozefest about the win-win nature of the transition to the green economy. But Mr. Kirk’s address at a recent conference on “Moral Money” was nothing of the sort. Instead, he delivered a broadside against the fashionable idea that climate change is a risk that no financial institution can afford to ignore.

Madeleine Kearns

The ‘conversion therapy’ canard

In 2016, the Obama-Biden administration concluded that “the quality and strength of evidence” for medicalized gender transition was “low” and insufficient “to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria.” Six years on, such skepticism has evaporated. In June, the Biden-Harris administration issued an executive order directing the departments of health and education to “promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” What changed? Not the evidence, only the politics. At a special Pride Month ceremony for LGBT activists at the White House, the president promised to use the “full force of the federal government” in implementing their policy agenda, from education to healthcare.

Rikki Schlott

Why I joined the college exodus

In the spring of 2020, the pandemic catalyzed a startling personal revelation. As a begrudging student of Zoom University, I came to the realization that a college degree might not be worth it. Pre-pandemic Rikki was a dutiful, head-down student at New York University with a 4.0 GPA and her eyes set on law school. But when the world locked down in the middle of my sophomore year and my university still demanded full tuition for virtual classes, I began questioning everything. Although they certainly made a valiant effort at remote teaching, most of my professors proved too technologically inept to coerce twenty-five despondent teens to attend 8 a.m. Zoom lectures about medieval feudalism.

Daniel McCarthy

Life after liberalism

Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of national politics. Barack Obama should have been the beginning of a generational renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead the Democrats have been prisoners of their past. They looked backward in 2016 and nominated Hillary Clinton. After she failed, they reached even further back to nominate Joe Biden, a man born during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Biden is not simply old; he’s nostalgia personified. He’s a throwback to a time when Democrats were less radical, when the party of FDR and JFK, and even of Bill Clinton, could lay claim to being an everyman’s party.

Art Tavana

Vince McMahon’s final act

Vince McMahon displays a T-Rex skull in his office. It is mounted against blood-colored walls. But is it real? It doesn’t matter, as it’s authentically Vince McMahon to mount such a garish display of masculine bravado on his wall. It’s the kind of over-the-top centerpiece you’d expect from the mogul who built World Wrestling Entertainment into the behemoth it is today. A giant of a man, McMahon has spent four decades laughing maniacally as he feasted on the flesh of his puny competition. “It’s on my wall and symbolic of my voracious appetite for life,” he tweeted. There’s also prophetic symbolism to the dead-dinosaur skull. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that the WWE board was investigating a “secret $3 million hush pact by CEO Vince McMahon.

Ben Domenech

Dobbs has changed America forever

For nearly half a century, American politics has been defined according to the strictures of a single Supreme Court decision: Roe v. Wade. The 1973 case determined abortion policy for the entire nation, striking down state rules and creating a political movement in response which played out in unexpected and completely polarized ways. It drove southern evangelical Christians and northern Catholics into unorthodox political partnerships. It cut across the Democratic Party coalition, leading to constant squabbling even through the passage of Obamacare. It led directly to the creation of the conservative legal movement, the elevation of prospective judicial nominees as of the utmost importance in assessing presidential candidates.

Bridget Phetasy

I apologize for my white baby

I’m here to apologize to my brothers and sisters of color — my white daughter’s pale skin has brought me nothing but shame. I have failed as an ally. For if whiteness is the root cause of systemic racism, then what does that make me for having a white child? How can I extol the virtues of anti-racism and dismantle white supremacy while simultaneously birthing another white person? These two seem incompatible. If I were truly honoring my commitment to decolonizing white spaces, I would have had my tubes tied or had myself euthanized and done the BIPOC community and the planet a favor. I’m such a coward. My therapists will have their work cut out for them this week. “Love is love,” unless you fall in love with a cishet white male.