Features

Thursday

November 18, 2021

Latinas are the shape of things to come

When we focus on the rise of the Hispanic male Republican, we overlook the emergence of his consort and counterpart, the right-wing Latina. Donald Trump made gains across the board with Hispanics in the 2020 election, but the media fixated on “multiracial whiteness” and “toxic masculinity” in the voting choices of Hispanic men. Meanwhile, Trump gained more votes between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic women than any other sector of the electorate. The woke tell themselves that Hispanic men, with their supposed chauvinism and machismo, control the lives and voting choices of the Latina. But the opposite is the case. The Latina, with her preternatural seduction skills, holds the power in the relationship. If her curves sway to the right, the men, as they always do, will follow along.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The death of the phone call

Scientifically, the jury is still out on whether women are better multitaskers than men. A 2013 study suggested that women do, in fact, outperform men, while a 2019 German study found no demonstrable differences between the sexes. In my entirely unscientific opinion, I think the stereotype is real. Women are engaged in all kinds of things at the same time. At any given moment, I’m engrossed in my work while also contemplating the contents of my freezer, making a mental note to order more diapers, and simultaneously clipping my daughter’s toenails. A New York Times piece on why women do the household worrying described a woman’s mental load as a “combination of anxiety and planning that is part of parenting.

Andrew Roberts

Have Americans got George III all wrong?

Americans are rarely accused of underestimating themselves, but might they in fact be a greater people than they think? That thought has regularly occurred to me over the past three years while I was researching and writing my new biography of their last king, George III, and especially when I read Richard Brookhiser’s insightful comment in his recent book Give Me Liberty, where he points out that Britain’s thirteen American colonies in the 1760s and early 1770s were among “the freest societies in the world.

Jesse Singal

Netflix’s Chappelle of hate

The difference between what I call accuracy and right-side norms within newsrooms is simple. Accuracy norms require journalists to get to the truth. Right-side norms require journalists to prove they’re on the “right” side of controversies. If this includes obscuring or spinning certain facts, so be it. For reasons ranging from politicization to the gutting of smaller and traditional outlets, most American journalism now adheres to right-side norms. Consider the Dave Chappelle controversy. If you don’t yet have an opinion about the jokes Chappelle makes about transgender people in his Netflix special, The Closer, watch it to get them in full context. There’s been enough bloviating about the jokes themselves.

Roger Scruton

Our gadgets are misleading us

Human beings are wanderers who roam the world in search of adventure. And this love of adventure creates a need for home: homecoming makes wandering worthwhile. Hence human beings have devised instruments that help them to navigate, so as to guide them to their destination and — most importantly — to guide them back again, to the place where they are at home. The sextant was one of the most beautiful examples of this: an instrument for steering by the stars, which you held to your eye, and which reminded you of the vastness of the space across which you peered and the littleness of your own ambitions. Our ancestors who steered by the sextant never doubted the fixed background to human life, the unchanging heavens by which they navigated.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Wokeness is the return of white supremacy

There are white people in this country and elsewhere who rank human beings by race, with the whites at the top, blacks at the bottom and everyone else in between. They are convinced that whites have a divine or natural right to rule, and they abhor racial intermarriage. They are a minuscule minority, here and elsewhere. White supremacists hold no government power. Their resources are negligible. They gather in obscure places, online as in person, and their conventions are ridiculous spectacles in which the costumes are as odious as the fantasies are pathetic. It wasn’t always like this. From about the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the world was theirs to exploit. Western politicians, thinkers and scientists theorized freely about racial hierarchy.

James Kirchick

Black tie in NYC

Visiting New York for my first black-tie dinner since the onset of the pandemic — a benefit for PEN America, the writers’ organization dedicated to free expression and the promotion of literature — I open my suitcase to discover I am sans black tie. I hit the streets, slaloming through crowds of unflappable Manhattanites who have surely witnessed stranger sights than a frazzled man in a mulberry tuxedo, desperately searching for a cravat. To my shock, Neiman Marcus is out of bowties. I purchase a black necktie. On my way out the door, another customer comes in. “Where are your bowties?” he asks aloud. “You won’t find any here,” I volunteer.

David Patrikarakos

What Bernard-Henri Lévy sees for the West

I meet Bernard-Henri Lévy at his apartment in central Paris on a chilly autumn afternoon. Considerations of security prohibit me from revealing its location. A French Jew who is a public and vocal enemy of both Islamism and some of the world’s worst regimes, Lévy is both perhaps the most important public intellectual in Europe, and a man with enemies. I have come to ask him about the future of the West — if, that is, he feels there will be one. Lévy, internationally known by his initials BHL, is a philosopher who has been at the heart of French — and international — society for half a century. But he remains an idiosyncratic figure.

Paul Wood

Florence with Dante

The trouble with Florence, says Ricardo, a local journalist, is that we’re just living off our past glories. “Aren’t we all?” I reply. Florence could perhaps be forgiven when it has accumulated such vast cultural and physical capital, built up over centuries. Signs remind you that it’s 700 years since the death of its most famous son, Dante, father of the Italian language. I must admit I’ve always been too intimidated to read his epic, The Divine Comedy, which T.S. Eliot said was “as great as poetry ever gets.” To prepare for my assault on the summit, I have been reading about Dante himself. I hadn’t known he had no more than a passing acquaintance with his great love, Beatrice.

Jake Wallis Simons

Has Micah Goodman found the path to peace?

He makes an unlikely prophet, winding his way through the tables at an outdoor café in Jerusalem, scruffy baseball cap cupping his head, flashing a 100-watt smile and laughing too nervously and long. But this is the visionary who may have just found a way to ease the Israeli-Palestinian puzzle. Dr. Micah Goodman is an iconoclast. His 2017 book Catch-67 sought to identify pragmatic ways to “shrink the conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians, rather than aim to resolve it. The left accused him of being too right-wing. The right derided him as a leftist. Catch-67 catapulted Goodman to the bestseller list and instant celebrity.

Karol Markowicz

Life after sex

Sex is everywhere in America, except in the bedroom — or anywhere else you’d like to have it. This has been going on so long that it’s got a name: in a 2017 article for the Atlantic, Kate Julian called it the “sex recession.” The research she cites found that “American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s.” Nine times fewer a year might not seem so bad, but every other marker of sexual activity was also down. A 2018 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that sexual activity had dropped among men between eighteen and thirty-five and women between twenty-four and thirty-five. Young people were having fewer sexual interactions and also fewer partners.

Monday

October 18, 2021

Spectator Editorial

The sleepwalkers

It is customary for presidencies to lose vitality and purpose in their last months. It is unprecedented for a presidency to lose its way in its first year, and when it still holds a majority in both houses of Congress. The Biden presidency has donned Jimmy Carter’s cardigan of shame in only nine months. If, that is, it ever was the Biden presidency. It was sold from the get-go as the ‘Biden-Harris presidency’. Double-barreled names are an inveterate mark of snobbery, and in this case the snobbery is that of the higher tokenism. Even the Democrats’ own members didn’t want Harris on the card in 2020. Harris’s symbolic merits as a woman of color seem to have been outweighed by her blatant falsity and opportunism.

Harry Shukman

What’s on Biden’s mind?

Delaware used to be Cale Boggs country, almost as much as Massachusetts belonged to the Kennedys. Boggs served as governor, congressman and twice as Delaware senator, so in late 1972, when he was seeking a third term, the race looked sewed up. But as summer turned to fall, his 28-point lead evaporated. Voters started paying attention to Boggs’s rival, a Democrat youngster with fire in his belly and a spring in his step. Anti-Boggs ads said his best days were behind him. According to his fresh-faced opponent, Boggs was a ‘helluva nice guy’ but, after decades in power, he had ‘lost that twinkle in his eyes’. On election day, Boggs lost by a margin of 3,000 votes. The people of Delaware sent to Washington a 30-year-old thruster named Joe Biden.

Daniel McCarthy

Welcome to the age of entropy

Americans and other westerners have long been accustomed to thinking that history has a clear direction. Sometimes the direction is contested, as it was during the Cold War. The future could have been capitalist or communist, or perhaps a blend of both systems — ‘convergence’ was a trendy notion for a time — but one way or another the alternatives were clear. After the Cold War, there were no alternatives. Capitalism, democracy and liberalism were here to stay, and soon they would be everywhere else too. All the Islamic world needed if it was to join us at the end of history was a nudge: regime change would speedily bring about social and economic change.

C.A.E. Goodhart

The numbers game

The most important macroeconomic development of the last three decades has been the extraordinary growth of the Chinese economy. In 1990, it was largely a subsistence peasant economy with a negligible footprint in world trade. China now provides the largest share of world exports, and by some standards has already become the world’s largest economy. In 1990, the wage of an average Chinese worker was perhaps 1/40th of that of an American worker. By 2020, it was just about a quarter: a tenfold gain in just 30 years. Before the 18th century, all societies were basically subsistence peasant agricultural societies with a small upper layer of landowning nobles and clerics. Then the Industrial Revolution began.

Bridget Phetasy

America needs a 12-step program

When I got sober in October of 2013, my sponsor said many things I didn’t want to hear. One of those things was ‘You have no idea who you are.’ Another was ‘Many of the things you thought you wanted, you’ll realize you don’t want and vice versa. If you manage to stay sober long enough, you’ll look around and marvel at who you have become.’ She turned out to be right, but I never could have predicted that in the span of five years I’d go from waiting tables to writing for Playboy to representing Independents on the Ben Shapiro Election Special on a Fox News panel. At a certain point, sometime around 2018, I looked around and said to myself, ‘Wait. I’m a conservative now? How much weed was I smoking!?

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Feminism has failed us

I’ve lost count of how many seminars I’ve had to sit through on Diversity & Inclusion, how many times I’ve been asked for my preferred pronouns and expected to discuss what I think ‘bringing my whole self to work’ really means. Conservatives mock these practices and complain that our lives seem to be dictated by a new moral order to which we did not consent. But we’re missing the forest for the trees. The problem with virtue signaling goes far beyond its annoying and unwelcome intrusions into our lives. We have been utterly hoodwinked. Or at least, I was. Sitting in my bathroom last week in the middle of my third miscarriage, blood, tears and expletives pouring out of me, I felt frustrated and stressed out.

Matt Purple

Here come the Nineties

Everyone is bullish on natural gas, but I think America’s most inexhaustible resource might be 1990s nostalgia. Every time it seems our BuzzFeed badlands have run dry, another Friends reunion or reassessment of Francis Fukuyama comes gushing through the soil. So it is that the most hyped series on TV right now is American Crime Story, dedicated this season to Ryan Murphy’s telling of the Clinton impeachment. Legends of the Hidden Temple, perhaps the most beloved children’s show from the Nineties (and that’s saying something), is being remade for adults. Even the recent death of comedian Norm Macdonald elicited callbacks to the days of cynical wiseasses and O.J. Simpson cracks. What is it about the Nineties that remains stuck in America’s craw?

Chadwick Moore

Why trigger warnings don’t work

The science is in, but don’t expect that to change anything. According to at least 17 recent studies, trigger warnings — those advisories posted ahead of content some readers may find distressing — not only fail to alleviate suffering in the emotionally disturbed but may actually induce greater trauma in those individuals. There are, to date, no studies that indicate trigger warnings work to their intended purpose. They were dreamed up in the 1970s after psychologists began to diagnose a new condition, post-traumatic stress disorder, in Vietnam War vets. But trigger warnings only reached popular consciousness in the 2010s, when feminist blogs used them ahead of content about sexual violence.

Paul Wood

Goodbye, Lebanon

I’m sorry, Lebanon. We love you but we just can’t take it anymore. We’re breaking up with you. We’ve lived in Lebanon, on and off, for almost a decade. Our retreat began over the summer when we decided we couldn’t risk going to the beach with our daughter, who’s almost two. Every year, the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research puts out a report that says that the seawater around many of Lebanon’s beaches is full of fecal bacteria. Raw sewage is discharged into the sea: you are literally swimming in shit. From some beaches, you can see the pipe and a murky flow of streptococci. We tried. We really did. We visited a private beach club that was supposed to have some of the cleanest water in the country.