Features

Thursday

Spectator Editorial

After Afghanistan

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 will come in a matter of days. It will be marked by the victory of the Taliban in Kabul and the humiliation of America. The war in Afghanistan was one of the largest-ever undertakings of any major country, in any era. Adjusted for inflation, the Apollo Moon landing program cost the United States close to $300 billion. The Manhattan Project cost $30 billion. The Interstate Highway System, about $500 billion. Those three mammoth projects are dwarfed by the cost of 20 years fighting in Afghanistan, which will well exceed a trillion dollars when all is said and done. The amount spent on Afghan nation-building surpassed the cost of the Marshall Plan in 2014 and kept rising inexorably for seven years more.

9/11
slashfiction fanfiction
Katherine Dee

Why are young women writing homosexual erotica about men?

In the 2010s, fanfiction had a serious moment in the United States. After nearly 30 years of hiding — first in handmade snail-mail fanzines, then in closed-off fan communities online, then on websites like LiveJournal, Fanfiction and AO3 (An Archive of Our Own) — ‘geek culture’ broke into the mainstream. For a moment, fanfiction was everywhere. Finally, it wasn’t just the diehard fans who wanted to participate: it was everyone or, at least, what felt like everyone. Reporters took notice. Vulture published ‘It’s a Fan-Made World: The Fan Culture Revolution’. VICE commented on the ubiquity of fanfiction about the boy band One Direction and the impact of Fifty Shades, among other things. Jezebel and BuzzFeed both marveled at the Omegaverse, not once, but twice each.

Tuesday

Mary Harrington

The trans war on the body

'Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Some people choose their family And they love each other so proudly And they all go marching in The Big Parade!' In June, the Journal of Medical Ethics spelled out what it means in practice to teach children that family bonds are optional. If the world is to ‘take LGBT testimony seriously,’ argued Maura Priest, a bioethicist at the Arizona State University, then ‘parents should lose veto power over most transition-related pediatric care’. In many states, this is already well-established. In 2015, Oregon passed a law giving minors the right to receive transgender medical interventions at taxpayers’ expense, and without their parents’ consent.

trans jessica yaniv progressive misogyny
Robert D. Kaplan

Central Asia’s geography after America’s defeat

However much it is denied, we still live in an imperial age, at least metaphorically. Just as the withdrawal from Afghanistan registers the momentary decline of the American empire, it registers the momentary rise of the Russian and Chinese ones. America failed in Afghanistan because its military, while capable of fighting high-tech wars on land and sea, could not fix complex Islamic societies on the ground. Indeed, Afghanistan demonstrated how the deterministic elements of geography, culture and ethnic and sectarian awareness can vanquish Western ideals of democracy and individual liberty.

central asia
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

The long march to disaster

In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Americans came together in a spirit of grief, resolve and shared national pride. It didn’t last long, but this potent energy animated the US military’s mission and a new generation of recruits who signed up to ‘do their part’ in the wake of the tragedy. Twenty years later, it is not the same military. As an institution, its impunity, hubris and access to unprecedented financial spoils have led to corruption and mediocrity at the top. The exploitation of all-volunteer forces to fight protracted wars of choice without proper care and attention to their consequences has left veterans jaded and skeptical of the value of their service in a system that continues to fail them.

afghanistan iraq military
Mary Kate Skehan

Hot vax summer

Remember spring 2021? COVID cases dropped as the days lengthened, every balmy, breezy morning bringing happy news of America’s three-vaccine rollout. By the end of the season, vaccination wasn’t just for hospital workers and overweight asthmatics. As temperatures rose into the 70s in the Northeast, where I live, we heralded the arrival of ‘hot vax summer’: the triumphant return of fun to the 20- and 30-somethings whose social lives had been shut down tighter than last year’s Democratic National Convention. After a long, dark winter, hope sprang. Now it looks like hot vax summer didn’t quite pan out for many in our sex-recessed country.

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Saturday

Jesse Singal

Substack changed the business of journalism

When a tech guy named Hamish McKenzie first reached out to me in early 2018 to see if I would try out his new newsletter platform Substack, because he thought I could make some money from it, I was skeptical. When I finally wrote him back, in May that year, I said, ‘I’m slightly leery of devoting much time to anything that won’t guarantee pay — I know that sounds somehow crude, but it’s just the reality of being a freelance writer. My book has forced me to do less freelancing than I would have otherwise, and while I’m fine for now, I do need to make sure to budget my time in a responsible way.’ A few years later, I’m exceptionally grateful that I took the plunge. I’m also a bit worried about where it’s nudging me as a writer and a thinker.

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Friday

Roger Kimball

The future of liberal education

What’s liberal about liberal arts education? That question is not easy to answer; for one thing, really to answer it you have to know what the word ‘liberal’ means. Has any word accumulated more conflicting meanings than ‘liberal’? Deciding what ‘education’ means is no simple task, either. In my experience, the more you think about those simple words, the more elusive their meanings. According to James Madison, ‘liberty’ and ‘learning’ belong together. They ‘support’ each other, he says, and their connection supports a free society. In various forms, the nexus between liberty and learning is a very traditional idea, with epistemological and existential as well as political dimensions.

liberal
iraq
Paul Wood

How America squandered its moral authority in Iraq

Day by day, you could almost see America’s moral authority draining away in Iraq. The weapons of mass destruction that the US had invaded the country to find didn’t exist. And it sometimes seemed as if a monstrous trick had been played on American troops: they were promised a welcome with ‘flowers and sweets’; they got roadside bombs and suicide attacks. In 2004, a year after the invasion, a 19-year-old Marine — outside the US for the first time in his life — looked up at a minaret sounding the call to prayer and asked me: ‘What are they saying? “Kill Americans?

war
Daniel McCarthy

The last war for democracy

Twenty years after 9/11, the War on Terror has come full circle. Everyone expected the Taliban to surge back to power as soon as American forces left Afghanistan. Instead, the surge began while America’s embassy in Kabul was still open, inviting unwelcome flashbacks to Saigon in 1975 and Tehran in 1979. There are piquant memories of 1989, too — not of the Berlin Wall’s fall or a young Francis Fukuyama’s publishing ‘The End of History?’ in the National Interest, but memories of an Afghan insurgency’s triumph over a superpower. That triumph would inspire and ultimately contribute in the most concrete ways to a decade of terrorism, culminating in the 9/11 attacks.

Tuesday

Matt Purple

I think Donald Trump’s email team is trying to murder me

I remember well the day this all began. The rain was slanting through the gray air and drops were plinking against my office window. I was sitting at my computer, checking my email, when I noticed I had a new message. I opened it and saw that it had been typed in sporadic red and blue fonts, like someone had clipped each letter out of a magazine. ‘Don't let President Trump think he's lost your support,’ it read. ‘He has EXTENDED your PERSONAL 500%-MATCH DEADLINE FOR 1 MORE HOUR… This is your last chance.’ I sat back in my chair and exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. I had been receiving Donald Trump’s fundraising emails for years and certainly the language had always been insistent. But this was a new level of aggression altogether. My last chance, I thought.

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Sunday

Andrew Bacevich

Autopsy of a failed war

‘Your country just betrayed us.’ So Haji Sakhi, a resident of Kabul, recently remarked to a New York Times reporter. ‘Look at what they brought on us,’ the 68-year-old Afghan continued. ‘They lost the war and just fled the country.’ His they refers to us — the United States of America. Haji Sakhi’s unsparing judgment deserves sober consideration. Kabul is about to fall to the Taliban, faster than even the most gloomy experts predicted. Our nation’s ‘longest war’ is now ending in abject failure. How are Americans — at least those few of us who attend to such matters — to apportion responsibility for the outcome? Who or what is to blame for ‘losing’ Afghanistan? Was it ever ours to lose in the first place?

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Friday

Jesse Singal

Journalism’s class problem has gotten worse

It’s very unlikely that I’d be a reasonably successful journalist today if I hadn’t come from an upper-middle-class family. Fresh out of college, I got a series of non- or low-paying internships. It wasn’t until spring of the following year that I found a staff position with benefits (and a salary of $33,000, which at the time seemed like plenty to live on). Because my parents provided financial support and because I had no debt, I was able to gain the experience and connections that helped launch my career. Somewhere, surely, there is a 37-year-old who is very similar to me and who wanted to be a journalist, but who is now doing something else because it just wasn’t feasible, financially.

class
Dominic Green

The monsters we become

Nietzsche would have been great at Twitter. He excelled at epigrams, which are to philosophy as the fortune-cookie motto is to Chinese takeout, and he loved to hate. Scholars divide as to whether his epigrammatic excellence came from using a typewriter — he was the earliest philosophical adopter of this technology — or because he was no good at joined-up thinking but very good at vituperating about the news. It was Nietzsche who spotted that the emerging theme of democratic society was not the reign of reason and universal brotherhood, but the ‘stupidification of the world’ and resentment. He called it ressentiment. Philosophy goes better in French, and Nietzsche had lately turned against Wagner, anti-Semitism and German nationalism.

Nietzsche
bullfighting
Christopher North

Why we need bullfighting

Which US state will be first to legalize bullfighting? OK, I need to qualify the question. A few bloodless corridas were held in Nevada in 2009, and some Portuguese-style bullfighting — again, bloodless — is permitted in California, legally classed as part of religious tradition. It won’t stop there, though. A friend in California breeds fighting bulls for sale to the Mexican market (bloodlines matter more than almost anything else to aficionados, each breeder seeking to stamp his beasts with his own aesthetic). My friend, the son of Mexican immigrants, is convinced it is only a matter of time before the law changes — probably through a referendum. ‘But we don’t want to win with 50 percent plus one. We want a big enough margin to settle the argument.

culture
Daniel McCarthy

How to win the culture war

Last November, voters in California, one of the most reliably Democratic states in the Union, defeated a ballot initiative that would have restored the state’s ability to use race as a factor in government hiring and employment. Affirmative action, a supposedly positive form of discrimination, could not win over the public even in a deep blue majority-minority state. Over 57 percent of California’s voters opposed it. So it’s little surprise that ‘critical race theory’ and other forms of racial indoctrination promoted within businesses, universities and primary schools have engendered revulsion among Americans nationwide. Children are being taught to sort and rank one another by color and ethnicity.

bradbury
Rod Liddle

Read Ray Bradbury before he’s canceled

I was 14 or 15 when I first read Ray Bradbury, which is not a bad age to enjoy the man fully. It was the short story ‘Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar’, in which a lad called Tom does just that and it doesn’t end terribly well. Superficially, it is a silly story, but what hooked me from the outset was the vague yet pervasive sense of unease running throughout this minor small-town saga, disturbing the comfortable ennui of family life. Nothing spelled out — just a deepening disquiet, the common thread in all of Bradbury’s finest little vignettes. Back then, in the 1950s, the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear annihilation were hovering in the background, just beyond the edge of our eyesight, which perhaps explains the author’s state of mind.

anger
Peter Wood

Old Glory, new anger

America is no longer just angry. We have become a nation of wrath. It is a risky emotional condition, recognizable by our desire to obliterate our opponents. Wrath doesn’t seek reconciliation. It wants revenge. Nor does wrath want to accommodate what it can’t control. It wants to rub the slate clean. There is a wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters. But as the left is ascendant in the seats of power, it can pursue its effort to extinguish its opposition via the instruments of state. The wrathfulness on the political right is another story. Wrath reaches its zenith when people feel not just abused but hopeless in the pursuit of any redress.

Thursday

Mary Eberstadt

Critical father theory

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, my stepfather worked as an auto mechanic in Upstate New York, at a ‘youth camp’ nestled in a pine forest. The bucolic sobriquet was a euphemism; this ‘camp’ was a medium-security pre-prison of sorts for boys 14-17, mostly from New York City, sent up following precocious encounters with the law. These youthful offenders were not the worst of the worst. Boys implicated in rape, murder or similarly terrifying offenses were assigned elsewhere, to compounds with barbed wire and armed guards. As it happened, campers liked to hang around the garage, and over the years, some who showed diligence and aptitude with tools were taken under my stepfather’s wing.

father dad
cities
Sohrab Ahmari

Anti-anti-crime policies are ruining American cities

I didn’t meet Davell Gardner Jr. Yet his photo — and the bubbly personality it captures — will forever remain etched in my mind. The picture shows a baby with fuzzy curls; trusting, happy eyes; a beaming, gap-toothed smile. His chubby, loaf-like baby hands remind me of my own kids’ hands, which I often can’t help kissing or blowing raspberries on. There he is, crawling on his dad’s belly, enjoying one of the last playtimes of his life. On July 12 last year, a convoy of three cars pulled up in front of a residential building on Pulaski Street, in Brooklyn. Suspecting potential gang activity, officers in an NYPD cruiser flashed their lights, and one of the cars, a Volkswagen Jetta, sped away. The cops gave chase, exactly as the gangsters had hoped they would.