Features Archives

Monday

October 18, 2021

Whipping up a crisis

'It’s a little thing, but a big little thing.’ I’ve been using this not-exactly-eloquent phrase lately to describe a category of observation that could be written off as nitpicking, but which isn’t, really. If you notice enough big little things, you might just be able to explain how the world works. One big little thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately comes from ‘Another Crisis at the Border’, the September 27 edition of The Daily, the blockbuster New York Times podcast. The episode was hosted by Astead Herndon and was mostly a conversation between him and his fellow Times reporter Michael Shear. They discussed the growing crisis at the US/Mexico border, and the large group of mostly Haitian migrants fleeing political and natural disaster.

Allison Schrager

Evergrande illusions

At the height of the 2008 financial crisis I was invited to an off-the-record media lunch with a famous investor. I was taken aback when one of the world’s most successful capitalists announced that the crisis showed the Chinese had a superior economic model. China has tried something different from traditional capitalism, with its reliance on the ‘hidden hand’ of the free market. Since the first economic reforms in 1978, the heavy hand of the state has grown and modernized the economy with staggering results. If you believe the data, eight hundred million Chinese people no longer live in poverty and China has averaged 10 percent growth a year since reforms began.

Karol Markowicz

Social media is nothing like heroin

On Tuesday, Frances Haugen, speaking to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, compared Facebook to tobacco and opioids while pushing for similar regulations. Haugen, a 'whistleblower' who came forward after Facebook dissolved her team and who admits she never worked on child safety during her time at Facebook, told a terrifying story about an app that harms young girls. Social media is like a drug. We hear this all the time. We’re powerless addicts in the face of its influence. We need to keep the kids safe from it. But is it? And do we? I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night.

Michael Bhaskar

How we can keep innovating

If the history of humanity is the history of big ideas — from the wheel to space flight, cave painting to the multiplayer game, monotheistic religion to special relativity — then the same is true of our future. By the 1960s the developed world had witnessed 200 years of extraordinary activity on every front. This was the era of the moonshot; of political obsession with technological mastery; of experimentation in music, culture, knowledge and relationships. Humanity had undergone a big-ideas revolution and the expectation was that progress would keep accelerating. In 1967, Herman Kahn, the futurist and theorist of nuclear war, and fellow futurist Anthony J. Wiener published The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation Over the Next Thirty-Three Years.

Benjamin Riley

Scotland by sleeper

Traveling internationally these days is a bit like how Dicky Umfraville, a character in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, describes aging: being punished for a crime one hasn’t committed. After taking my pre-departure COVID test, alerting the British government to my whereabouts for the next week (no small undertaking given I’d be in a different bed every night), and proving all this plus my vaccination status to the British Airways check-in desk at JFK, I finally settled in my seat and supplemented my mandatory mouth-muzzle with an eye mask as though bound for Gitmo, not Heathrow. An hour into the flight, the woman in front of me started bawling: a panic attack brought on by mild turbulence.

Roger Kimball

The problem with Ovid

'The Rotation Method’ is one of the most amusing sections of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The second-most famous melancholy Dane has some good advice for dealing with irritating absurdity: cultivate arbitrariness when confronted with flagrant examples of it. There is someone whose conversation you find insufferable. What to do? Kierkegaard’s narrator has some tips: ‘I discovered that he perspired copiously when talking. I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body.’ There is much about cultural life today that can be profitably approached with the Rotation Method.

Thursday

September 16, 2021

Bridget Phetasy

Worse than porn

I never wanted any of this. I came to Los Angeles like any broken, lost 19-year-old searching for fame and fortune, running from myself, my past and my family. As I made a beeline for the West Coast a mere six months after getting out of rehab for heroin addiction, I daydreamed about what my life would look like. I envisioned myself sitting on the deck of my Malibu beach home, idly flipping through scripts after my morning yoga session. Against the backdrop of the mighty Pacific, I would eat mango, listen to the waves, watch dolphins and smoke that sweet California weed. A superstar must always flip through scripts idly. I wanted to be a superstar.

Sean McMeekin

History returns for Putin and Erdogan

Washington’s allies are deploring the Biden administration’s mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan, and they’re worrying publicly about its implications for Nato. Russian leaders, resisting the urge to gloat, express well-founded concerns over the spread of jihadist terrorism northward into Central Asia. And China is moving in, cutting deals with the Taliban to mine lithium and other critical minerals. The reaction in Turkey has been more ambiguous, but also more interesting. Early in the evacuation, Turkey sent soldiers to Kabul to secure the airport. It is already clear that Turkey’s Islamist government is ready to recognize and work with the Taliban — while also loudly discouraging Afghan refugees from trying to enter Turkey.

Karol Markowicz

The United States of Fear

We recently left the country for the first time since the pandemic began. I could say that we’d always wanted to go to Iceland, but the truth is, we’d wanted to go to Iceland ever since we heard how sanely they handle visitors. Even at the height of the pandemic in 2020, they didn’t require COVID tests for children. They still don’t. Iceland is the world’s most vaccinated nation, with 86 percent of the country having gotten the jab. A recent ‘spike’ (they peaked at 170 cases per day in mid-August) led to an indoor mask mandate, but it doesn’t apply to kids. The mandate is also very loosely enforced. There are no Karens shrieking at people to mask up in shops, and I saw many unmasked Icelanders indoors.

Wednesday

September 15, 2021

Matthew Continetti

Joe Biden’s Swamp

President Biden told Americans to expect an era of unity and normality after four years of disruption. What they got was a chief executive unable to cope with the overlapping crises of the coronavirus pandemic, consumer price inflation, illegal immigration, crime and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet there is one thing that Biden has restored to good working order: the DC gravy train. In Biden’s Washington, well-connected liberal Democrats in the influence industry have no problem enriching themselves. The world is a mess but the Swamp is as fetid as ever. Not long after taking office, Biden issued an executive order restoring and strengthening the government ethics provisions that had been in force under President Obama. He banned gifts from lobbyists.

Roger Kimball

The great unraveling

The smart money says that Donald Trump will not run in 2024. The smarter money says that he might, but that he shouldn’t because he’s too old and too divisive. I have no accounts at either of those depositories, so am not going to participate in that panel discussion. Instead, I propose to make a few obvious points. If they’re obvious, why make them? Because the obvious is not always so obvious. René Descartes is widely detested by all the clever people, for whom ‘Cartesian’ is term of snobbish contempt. I think Descartes was a great genius but one who was wrong about a couple of important things. No, I do not mean what he says about ‘extended substance’, the ‘Cogito’ or any of his other epistemological and metaphysical flights.

Chadwick Moore

If the Croc fits

'I don’t get Brooklyn fashion,’ an out-of-towner said the other day. We were brunching at a French restaurant on Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue, and eyeing a couple by the door — she dressed in faded black pipe-leg men’s jeans crudely cut off at the ankles above a pair of two-inch granny heels, he in a stained and tattered, burnt-orange Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt draped like a cobweb on his skeletal frame. ‘It’s all about looking as shitty as possible,’ I told the tourist. ‘They like to blur the lines between the guy who just crapped his pants shooting up on the corner and having $200,000 in art school debt.’ In my youth I too was a thrift-store aficionado. I loved the hunt, digging around for the amusing, exquisite, old and odd.

Matt Purple

Jeopardy! is in trouble

THIS...iiiiiis Jeopardy! And it’s time now for today’s final answer. This pack of gibbering monsters is witlessly tearing down everything that’s good and decent about our society. What is us? All of us. The vicious and grievance-obsessed people we’ve become. Jeopardy! is that rarest of American traditions, one that really hasn’t changed. The quiz show has remained a granite bulwark against the pop-cultural tides: same sober presentation and aesthetic, same challenging questions and unforgiving pace. There are no blazing graphics, no CGI car chases through downtown Montpelier during the ‘State Capitals’ category. There hasn’t even been a crossover with the Real Housewives — ‘Bitch, the largest fossil-fuels producer in Central Asia isn’t Uzbekistan!

Mary Kate Skehan

Crypto casino

When I was in high school, I worked at an ice rink in the winter and a swimming pool in the summer. My friends toiled at Target and gofered at golf courses, making minimum wage and spending it on gas and low-rise jeans from Abercrombie: it was 2008, after all. These days, gas may still cost $4 per gallon, but now the jeans are high-waisted and the teens are more ambitious. My youngest brother Ted is 18. He spent the summer before his first year in college working in a cheese shop, sweeping floors and straining ricotta: a classic summer job, tedious and stress-free. Yet some of his friends are taking a different route. Ted’s buddy Tom just cashed out $3,000 in bitcoin winnings to buy a weeklong Airbnb in Ocean City, Maryland for all his friends.

Tuesday

September 14, 2021

Jesse Singal

The myth of the good Afghan war

There’s a disgusting scene I can’t stop thinking about. It comes about midway through This Is What Winning Looks Like, a 2013 VICE documentary about America’s efforts in Afghanistan you can watch for free on YouTube. The film switches between the documentary footage itself and a sort of metafilm in which the filmmaker, Ben Anderson, discusses aspects of his work with Eddy Moretti of VICE, with Anderson’s footage from his time overseas frozen on a computer monitor behind them. The scene in question starts at 51:00 in the YouTube cut, was filmed around 2012, and involves a series of horrific murders. These were perpetrated not by the Taliban, but by America’s supposed allies: the country’s nascent police force.

Monday

September 13, 2021

James Panero

Hunter Biden, artist of modern life

Why do we keep hearing about Hunter Biden? Why is this disgraced political son and aspiring amateur pornographer now making art? Why must we even contemplate his creations? The reason is that much of our culture — at least its sanctioned, outward-facing elements — now operates ‘against nature’. I refer to that 1884 novel by the Symbolist author Joris-Karl Huysmans. À Rebours, known in English as Against Nature, is the book in which French literature dispensed with naturalism and its common-man struggles, and instead gave voice to the rot of the elite. Before we dwell on Biden fils, let us briefly revisit Jean des Esseintes, the main character of Against Nature. He is the withered end of a once noble family.

John Meroney

Life in LA is murder

It was a punch in the face, followed by a thick spray of blood. Then another punch, another victim. More blood. I was witnessing a random assault on two elderly tourists in broad daylight. A man walked up to a couple, hit the woman so hard she fell to the ground bleeding and when the husband stepped forward to protect her, he too was pummeled. ‘I saw what you did!’ I yelled as the assailant fled. I called 911 and followed him through a parking garage and onto a side street. In a few minutes, police arrived and apprehended the man. As rescue workers attended to the victims, an officer asked if I would testify in court. I agreed and watched as the attacker was handcuffed and removed.

Ruth Wisse

How Harvard went woke

On January 1, 1993, I arrived at Harvard to take up a newly endowed professorship in Yiddish literature. It seemed preposterous: me at Harvard, Yiddish at Harvard. The university had never figured in my aspirations. My impressions of the university had been formed mostly from what I knew of its program in Jewish studies, which was jokingly referred to as ‘the Yeshiva on the Charles’ because of its emphasis on Talmudic and medieval sources. Its almost exclusively male Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations felt obliged to appoint a female. My gender played an even more prominent part in the deliberations of the Department of Comparative Literature where I was to hold a joint appointment.

Saturday

September 11, 2021

Jay Caruso

Trump’s second wave

When Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator from the heights of Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his run for president, the press, political pundits, the consultant class and pretty much everyone else viewed it as a high-profile publicity stunt. It was a means for Trump to do what he does best: draw attention to himself. The consensus was that he’d make a splash before fading, making way for Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Despite losing reelection and likely taking down the Senate GOP with him, Trump still remains very popular in the Republican party — particularly among a small but hardcore percentage of the base that chooses presidential nominees during the primary season.

Spectator Editorial

The disconnect

President Biden’s impromptu remarks on 9/11 spoke volumes. His erratic and frequently irritated presence in recent weeks — when, that is, he has been present at all — reflects a presidency that is struggling to maintain its focus and its sense of reality. Biden was promoted in 2020 as the candidate of restoration. Despite nearly five decades of successful operation in Capitol Hill, one of the least normal places on Earth, Biden, we were told, represented normalcy, common sense and empathy. Candidate Biden did his best to deliver all three, when his handlers let him. President Biden has delivered none of them — when, that is, he has delivered at all, for no modern president has dodged the cameras and questions so assiduously.