Features Archives

Thursday

July 22, 2021

My role in our demographic disaster

When you come from a family of a certain size — in my case, one with eight children — you often get asked: ‘How many kids do you want?’ Innocent on its face, this question is carefully phrased in terms of my personal preferences, and I’m happy to answer: I’ll take what I can get! It’s an easier question every year, because biology has largely made the decision for me. My mother had four kids by the time she was my age, and as of this writing I don’t even have a boyfriend. Childlessness at 30 has its inadvertent blessings, of course: I get lots of rest and exercise; I spend my disposable income on haircare and loungewear and coffee, and the most stress I regularly endure is over WiFi connectivity.

Matt Purple

Let’s make it a Hot Bartender Summer

Is renaming the seasons a sign of late-stage capitalism? Or empire? Or decadence? Whatever the case, our cultural commissars have spoken and they’ve decided that seasonal epithets are back in. No longer is it acceptable to wistfully recall the summer of ’69; we must now commemorate it as Raspy Canadian Dreamboat Summer or some such thing. The Chinese have long categorized their years according to animals — dogs and rabbits and tigers and so on. Not us. What we’ve done is to head to the Narcissus pool, hold up a calendar, and demand that the months and equinoxes look a little more like us. This began two years ago when someone called Megan Thee Stallion released a rap single called ‘Hot Girl Summer’.

Bridget Phetasy

My country, right or left

A funny thing happened to me this Fourth of July and, at the risk of having every jaded member of the blue-check Twitterati respond, ‘I’ll take things that didn’t happen for $200, Alex,’ I’m going to tell the story. My aunt and uncle invited me and my husband to join them in their annual excursion to the Fourth of July celebration at the Hollywood Bowl. This has become a ritual for us and as it was the first event at the Bowl since the pandemic, everyone was in a festive mood. For the occasion, I wore American flag leggings and a headband that spelled out U-S-A. On springs. As we settled into our box, we chatted with the women drinking wine and eating tapas next to us. Standard small talk. How excited we were to be back at the Bowl. What a gorgeous night it was.

Wednesday

July 21, 2021

Paul Wood

Iran’s president is a mass murderer

The US and other western countries are faced with a dilemma: how to bring to justice a man with the blood of thousands on his hands when you have to do business with him. Ebrahim Raisi’s path to the presidency of Iran is strewn with corpses. He comes to office this month already under American and European sanctions for the mass murder of prisoners in 1988. Some 5,000 may have been killed, though we can only guess at the true number of dead. It was a crime against humanity in the strict legal meaning of that term. At an earlier stage in his career, Raisi is said to have personally supervised the torture of dissidents, but in the 1988 case his responsibility was bureaucratic. He was a grim fanatic, eager to carry out orders. He was — and remains — Iran’s hanging judge.

Tuesday

July 20, 2021

Ed Zotti

Lori Lightfoot’s inner Republican

It’s not known when Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot experienced the first stirrings of her secret GOP gland, but knowledgeable conjecture puts it perhaps two nanoseconds after taking the oath of office in 2019. It’s then that Lightfoot, buoyant after having been swept into office with 74 percent of the vote, surely had an alarming thought: ‘OMG, I’m mayor. What do I do now?’ All Democratic politicians aspiring to executive office have a secret Republican gland, although it’s vestigial till they sit behind an executive desk. When it’s dormant they can sign up for any damn fool notion. During her mayoral campaign, Lightfoot had cheerfully endorsed both an elected school board and an elected police board.

Roger Kimball

The FBI has lost the plot

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous. Consider the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That once-respected institution has been busy wiping (or, more to the point, not wiping) egg off its face at least since the moist tenure of James ‘higher loyalty’ Comey. For those wondering why it is that Comey is cashing fat royalty checks instead of stamping out license plates at Club Fed, the answer is part of my story. There is the Elect, of whom James Comey numbers himself, and there are the Serfs, among whose number, Dear Reader, you probably belong. But I am getting ahead of myself. James Comey was plenty ridiculous, as were his jesters and factota, the love birds Lisa Page and Peter ‘Dracula’ Strzok, Andrew McCabe and the rest of that unlovely Brady Bunch.

Monday

July 19, 2021

Andrew Cockburn

How the US military got rich from Afghanistan

The departure of American troops from Afghanistan is being lamented (or hailed — see the Chinese press, passim) as a defeat. But this is a shortsighted attitude, at least from the point of view of the US military and the multitude of interested parties who feed at its trough. For them, the whole adventure has been a thumping success, as measured in the trillions of taxpayer dollars that have flowed through their budgets and profits over the two decades in which they successfully maintained the operation. The truth of this was forcefully brought home to me once by a friend of mine who, as a mid-level staffer, attended a conclave of senior generals discussing Donald Trump’s Afghan mini-surge back in 2018.

Friday

July 16, 2021

Spectator Editorial

Give peace a chance

The American war in Afghanistan is over. In the predawn hours of July 2, US troops slunk away from Bagram Air Base, without even informing the local Afghan commander. It was a sorry end to a sad and futile war. For 20 years Bagram was the Gibraltar of American power in Afghanistan, the single largest Nato base in the country, housing 10,000 troops, thousands more support personnel and a Pizza Hut. Now Bagram, and the adjacent prison holding 5,000 Taliban fighters, are in the hands of the Afghan military, which soon showed its mettle by letting an army of looters plunder the base.

Wednesday

June 23, 2021

Daniel McCarthy

Is J.D. Vance the right man for the right?

J.D. Vance is the man Republicans have been praying for since the day Donald Trump stormed to the party’s presidential nomination five years ago. He has a lot of the traits conservatives liked about Trump: Vance, too, is a political outsider with proven appeal to an audience beyond politics, thanks to his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Like Trump, Vance offers himself as an avatar for the people who have been discarded by globalization and demonized by a left-wing media and education establishment. And he is as radical as Trump — maybe more so — in his willingness to reject the merely liberal side of American conservatism. Trump defied elite orthodoxy on trade and immigration. Vance adds proposals to curb the tech companies and tax Ivy League endowments. But if J.D.

Dominic Green

Time to end the MAGA madness

The Republicans need to separate the MAGA from the message. The Democrats are already doing this. While congressional Republicans pander to MAGA, which is now a racket for conspiracy theorists and the con artists who exploit them, the Biden administration is lifting Trump’s policies and stealing the Republicans’ thunder. Trump’s ‘America First’ has become Biden’s ‘Made in America’. The Democrats now offer almost everything that Trump promised — and sometimes more. At home, infrastructure spending, rebuilding the industrial base and reshoring essential supply chains; plus subsidies for the wallet-sapping disaster that is Obamacare.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Why the West is best

‘Western civilization would be a good idea,’ joked Mahatma Gandhi, one of its most successful pupils. We are accustomed to hearing what is wrong with Western civilization: racism, sexism, colonialism and (gasp) capitalism. The world would be a kind of utopia, we are told, if only we could purge these sins from our societies. But if Western civilization is evil, what is the alternative? Four other -isms vie for our attention. The first is socialism. Its proponents include some old-fashioned Marxists, faithful to the old egalitarian nostrums, but most are pseudo- or neo-Marxists. The ‘woke’ activists fundamentally oppose capitalism and are aggressively committed to intersectionality, but they are vague on the alternatives. We can assume that they will not end in utopia.

Roger Kimball

A party and a half

The future of the GOP is the same as the future of the Democratic party. That is because the parties are not two things, but (to compare low things with high) somewhat akin to that union described in the Catholic creed: ex patre filioque procedit: ‘it proceeds from the father and the son’, one substance, two faces (well, three, really, but we can leave that to one side). As I have had occasion to observe elsewhere, the current political disposition of the United States is not a two-party system. It is at most a one-and-a-half party system. There is a regime party, which basically calls the shots. And there is a junior, adjunct party that has different branding but sells mostly the same goods under different labels.

Sohrab Ahmari

Is New York coming back?

New York Well, at least P.J. Clarke’s survived the lockdown ordeal. Founded as a ‘saloon’ by an Irish migrant in the late 19th century, the restaurant-bar is a Manhattan dining icon — and a defiant one at that: it’s housed in a modest two-story building, nestled among the skyscrapers of Midtown East, a relic of an older, redbrick Gotham, refusing to give way to the titans of law and finance who occupy the commanding heights of glass and steel nearby. Reality is a little more complicated than that, of course. These days, P.J. Clarke’s is owned by a consortium of financiers, and before the lockdowns, its patrons very much included the finance bros dressed in their standard-issue uniforms (button-down, slacks, Patagonia vest).

Paul Wood

What happens when your currency collapses?

I’m a millionaire. A million in crisp, new bills is stacked up on the table in front of me. Unfortunately, it’s Lebanese lira and cost me about $75 a week ago. It’s already worth only $65, and by the time you read this, it will be worth even less. The Lebanese currency has lost more than 90 percent of its value over the past 18 months and is continuing its steady decline. It would be foolish to keep more than a few days’ spending money on hand, so everyone has a moneychanger. Mine is Mohammed, who pops round on his moped with ever-fatter stacks of notes with ever more zeros on them. The currency grows physically as it shrinks in value. He passes over a wad of cash and says, smiling: ‘Our leaders are stupid and corrupt.

Mary Kate Skehan

How to fight with your family

Like many families, mine is home to a diverse array of political orientations, ranging on an ideological spectrum from Calvin Coolidge to somewhere around Attila the Hun. In 2021, this means arguments can get quite heated. Should the government subsidize young families? Should tech companies be regulated? Should America reconsider its support for Israel? Should you, personally, get the vaccine? The first half-year of the Biden administration has already given even broadly right-of-center communities plenty to in-fight about. My left-leaning friends who have also spent more time with their families during the pandemic report a similar phenomenon: their good boomer liberal parents are skeptical about critical race theory, for instance, or are suddenly nervous about the national debt.

Laura Dodsworth

When do vaccine incentives become coercive?

The vaccine programs launched this year appear to offer a Happy Ending to the Horrible Story of the COVID-19 Pandemic. But I am cautious. Not because I am ‘antivax’, but because lasting ‘ever afters’ are never written in the language of emotional manipulation and coercive control. Herd immunity, when enough people have either recovered from COVID or been vaccinated, will end the pandemic. The pressure to get there has given us a vaccination drive with an unprecedentedly strong behavioral psychology and emergency response approach. A panoply of persuasions has been deployed to encourage the hesitant, the slow and the complacent. From dating app bonuses to donuts, lotteries to laminated vaccination cards — when do incentives become coercive?

Tuesday

June 22, 2021

Amber Duke

The DeSantis doctrine

The term ‘Florida man’ usually comes loaded with negative connotations, but not if you’re talking about Ron DeSantis. The first-term Republican governor’s approval ratings have reached 64 percent; a recent poll had him at 55 percent, still high for an unabashed conservative in a swing state. Enterprising apparel companies are already selling ‘DeSantis 2024’ gear — and a Trafalgar poll of likely contenders (excluding Trump) shows DeSantis leading the pack with 35 percent support among Republican voters. The Florida governor also bested Trump in a straw poll conducted during June's Western Conservative Summit in Denver. DeSantis’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has earned him adoration from the right.

Monday

June 21, 2021

Andrew Stuttaford

The return of the UFOs

By the time you read this, Uncle Sam’s latest ‘definitive’ report on UFOs (it’s not the first) will have been made widely available, with the exception of a classified annex (there’s always room for a sequel). If the leaks are to be believed, we will have learned that there’s a lot more out there that we don’t know. Some of the material may well be impossible to explain, but inexplicable is not a synonym for extraterrestrial. Could we instead be catching glimpses of something the Russians or the Chinese have dreamt up? E.T., though, will neither be ruled in, nor, crucially, ruled out. For their part, ufologists will take what they can get.

Phoebe Greenwood

Will the right save Julian Assange?

In late 2018, Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture, was contacted by lawyers representing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, asking him to intervene on their client’s behalf. ‘I was like, “No. Not this guy. Isn’t this the rapist hacker guy?”’ Melzer recalls. He ignored the email. Three months later, the lawyers contacted him again, this time warning that Assange’s extradition to the US — where he faces 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents — could be imminent.

Sunday

June 20, 2021

Jesse Singal

What the media gets wrong on gender reassignment

Two things can be true at the same time. First, the Republican-backed state laws banning medical gender-transition treatment for youth — one has already passed in Arkansas — are a very bad idea. Second, there is a serious dearth of solid evidence in this area of medicine — and some reasons to be genuinely concerned about these treatments. If you’re a consumer of mainstream American media, you’ve likely received a heaping dose of the first message. But the second, if you’ve encountered it at all, has probably been presented to you as a deeply unscientific, bigoted talking point. This is a problem. It’s impossible to unpack what’s going on here without summarizing the recent history of youth medical transition.