Features Archives

Sunday

June 20, 2021

A matter of life and death

The ice on my right breast is a painful reminder of the limbo I currently find myself in: the anxiety-provoking space between a biopsy and the results. The time when you try to think positively — as if your magical thinking could change the results, the nature of whatever cells the needle procured. I’m simultaneously telling myself ‘worry is praying to the wrong God’ and repeating the word ‘benign’ over and over and over again. But the knot in my stomach is wondering if I’m about to enter a nightmare. You do your best to stay present but work falls through the cracks. You explain it away by apologizing and vaguely mentioning that you have some ‘health stuff’ you’re dealing with: nothing serious, just annoying.

Friday

June 18, 2021

Spectator Editorial

America isn’t back. Global grandstanding is

'America is back at the table,’ Joe Biden wants us to know. ‘Diplomacy is back.’ After four years of Donald Trump, the new President seems rather too desperate to tell the world that the United States is on their side. It all sounds very positive, but what has Biden’s return to the global table actually achieved? What, if anything, is he likely to achieve over the next four years? Last month’s G7 summit in Cornwall, England, was full of grand talk of international cooperation, defending democratic values, confronting China and more.

Wednesday

June 16, 2021

Charles Murray

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2021 World edition. The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return. Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us.

Monday

June 14, 2021

Matt Purple

Can Mike Pence win in 2024?

The vice presidency, as even the most remedial student of American politics will tell you, is not the most exciting gig in the world. Our first veep, John Adams, famously hated it so much that he called it ‘the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived’. It’s a sleepy position, one that doesn’t typically involve, say, surviving a mob that believes you’re conspiring to steal the election away from your own ticket. Yet this is the fate that’s befallen Michael Richard Pence. Prior to January 6, Pence had been wraithlike even by vice-presidential standards, overshadowed by one of the most inescapable presidents in American history. The attack on the Capitol fixed the attention of the world upon him. Would he carry out his constitutional duties?

Sunday

June 13, 2021

Paul Wood

Biden’s Saudi problem

A few weeks ago, the Saudi human rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul was summoned to the offices of the General Directorate of Investigation at the Interior Ministry in Riyadh. Ostensibly, the Saudi secret police — the Mabahith — simply wanted to tell her that her appeal against her conviction for ‘treason and terrorism’ had been turned down. But her brother, Walid told me it was really a warning: Keep quiet, we’re watching you; the Americans may have got you out of prison; we can send you back whenever we want. She has been out of prison since February, serving the rest of her sentence on probation. Though aged 31, her long black hair is now streaked with gray, the outward sign perhaps of what her family say was an attempt to ‘break’ her in prison.

Wednesday

May 19, 2021

Dominic Green

America’s race to the bottom

America has become a nation of butt fetishists. I’m not judging. I’m not calling for a moral crusade; it’s far too late for morality in America. I’m just observing the passing of one dispensation in manners and the establishment of another, like Talleyrand after the French Revolution. The bottom is one of the few areas in which the US can claim to lead the world. California, with its porn and internet industries, saturates the global imagination with images of the callipygous American butt in action. Rap videos, a hybrid of music and porn, teach twerking to the innocents of Asia. Anal sex has become so vogueish that Teen Vogue advises its readers on how to do it. This reflects the pornification of absolutely everything in the names of entertainment and personal freedom.

James Panero

Son of a gun

In his late-middle age, my father cultivated more of the interests of the old neighborhood. His kitchen overflowed with pasta makers and deli slicers. His prep table was taken over by a home wine-making operation; we ate our meals beside a glass carboy as it bubbled up fermented gas. And scattered about the living room, tucked in the bookcases and stashed behind the coffee table, he positioned an array of locked cases and bags containing a growing collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns. The acquisitions that came to fill our Upper West Side apartment mainly came from the shops around Little Italy. Home winemaking was once common among Italian Americans. So too was a well-developed sense for gun culture.

Zoe Strimpel

Why are young men so scared of sex?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. Subscribe here. I am tired. Men — purportedly single and ready to mingle — have worn me out. Not, sadly, in the way one might hope but in the new, peculiar, nightmarish way of the times. Since becoming single two and a bit years ago, I have romped around a fair bit on the apps: Bumble, Tinder and lately Hinge. Interestingly, the only men who have seemed raring to go — and interesting, educated and good-looking — were under 25. Too young to have become the unwanted dregs, they are also too young to worry that an older woman (I’m 38) will badger them about kids. At first, I was dazzled by the idea of dating younger men. But the reality soon dawned on me.

Bridget Phetasy

Playboy of the western world

During my years writing for Playboy, I never got to meet Hugh Hefner, although I always wanted to. He was one of my heroes when I was just a young entrepreneur with big dreams of building a media empire. However, long before that, Hugh was an idol of mine during my teens because I actually did read Playboy for the articles. It’s how I learned everything I know about sex and men. I pored over every old edition I could find, educating myself as much as I could about the Playboy Philosophy and the American male psyche. Embedded in between the glossy photos of hi-res nipples were Hef’s politics. He championed civil rights, reproductive rights and was an advocate of the First Amendment. I dreamed of one day seeing myself in those sacred pages.

Cosmo Landesman

Do women really like porn?

I keep meeting women who claim they love porn as much as men do. The rise in the number of female porn consumers seems to confirm this is a trend. The popular internet porn site Pornhub reports that women make up nearly one-third of its audience, and that share is increasing. In 2019, Pornhub claimed that 32 percent of their visitors were female, a 3 percent increase from 2018. For many men the female embrace of porn is wonderful news. A porn-loving man loves porn-loving women because it legitimizes his love of porn. At a stroke, the stigma and shame surrounding his porn usage disappears. If a man’s girlfriend or wife enjoys porn, then it must be OK for him to enjoy porn too. Phew, he thinks, I’m no longer a misogynistic, sexist sleazebag! Thanks, babe.

Mary Kate Skehan

Help yourself to self-help

Self-help has been a popular American pastime at least since Dr Diocletian Lewis toured the countryside in the 19th century. Dr Dio preached to huge, rapt crowds about the salutary effects of gymnastics, chastity, sobriety and loose clothing. He eventually cofounded the temperance movement. Having deprived Americans of their preferred entertainment, Dr Dio went on to invent the beanbag. A century later, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey sold tens of millions of copies and inspired spinoffs for families, companies and teens, as I learned when my mother gave me a copy during a particularly ineffective period of my adolescence. Covey, a Mormon, was the spiritual heir to the clean-living crusaders of the temperance movement.

Paul Wood

The mad world of David Icke

Americans might need reminding about David Icke. He was a British soccer player who went on to become a popular sports presenter for BBC television in the Eighties, and that’s how most people thought of him until he popped up on the Wogan talk show in 1991 and agreed that, yes, the reports were true: he was the Son of God. Icke appeared with a mullet haircut, a turquoise tracksuit — turquoise is ‘the frequency of love and wisdom’ — and the blank eyes of a madman. The world would end in 1997, he told the audience, who reacted with laughter. He replied that people had laughed at Jesus too. The laughter was liberating. The mockery of the small-minded lost its sting and he became a proto-Alex Jones, the TV conspiracy theorist host of Infowars, only with more mysticism.

Roger Kimball

Paying the price of free speech

Last month in this space, I wrote a few words about what had happened to the practice of art in the West over the last century or so. That of course is a gigantic topic, and in a thousand words I was able to touch upon but a tiny part of the story — or, to tell the truth, only a tiny part of a tiny part of the story. Mostly, I described and lamented the eclipse of beauty in the metabolism of art, which is another way of lamenting the eclipse of aesthetic pleasure. In the 18th century, the world was awash in commentary that talked about the beautiful and the sublime as central categories in the appreciation of art.

Mary Harrington

The sexual counterrevolution is coming

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. Charlotte is a 23-year-old Harvard graduate. Beautiful and willowy, she grew up in — her words — ‘a super-liberal environment’. You might expect to find her Instagram full of sexy, pouting pictures. But Charlotte has deleted all the bikini photos from her online life. And six months ago, she embraced ‘modest dress’: nothing that exposes her collarbones or shoulders and nothing that reveals her legs above the knee. Narayan is seven years older than Charlotte. He is what matchmaking 18th-century matrons might have described as ‘very eligible’: a clean-living, highly educated and charismatic single guy with a well-paid job in tech.

Tuesday

May 18, 2021

Jesse Singal

Why the media is melting down

It’s 2021, and as your new Spectator media columnist I’m here to tell you that the American media is a disaster. It’s not that there aren’t still many exceptionally talented reporters and editors doing good work, against all odds — there are. It’s that the overall scene is being destroyed. Newspapers are on the verge of extinction. Newer, supposedly more agile online-only outlets are shedding staff or shuttering as well. No one has come close to developing a replacement for the funding model that kept journalism humming along nicely until the internet came along and broke everything. Of course, the destruction has birthed creation. Journalistic startups pop up frequently, though few do anything that seems worthwhile and sustainable.

Monday

May 17, 2021

Lisse Garnett

My ongoing war with the ‘vinfluencers’

‘Slut-shaming’, ‘sexist’, ‘garbage writing’, ‘offensive towards women’, ‘aggressively distasteful’, ‘nipple-ist’ ‘old bitch’ that I am, I stand by the article I wrote in the April issue of The Spectator about influencers and the social-media celebrities who use their looks to sell wine — despite the outrage of those who are so clearly and irreparably under the vinfluence already. My take on the new advertising powerbase that is ‘influencing’, and the media-doping tactics that are often used to gain that influence, remains the same.

Spectator Editorial

Joe Biden and the magic money nightmare

‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ said Franklin D. Roosevelt famously, at his first inauguration in the depths of the Great Depression in 1933. What he didn’t allow for was the danger of overconfidence. Yes, a country can talk its way into recession, but it can also print and spend its way into an inflationary nightmare. That is the worrying prospect now facing America as Joe Biden, a president often compared to FDR, tries to tempt the country into a post-Covid spending spree courtesy of magic money. It has become deeply unfashionable to worry about inflation. According to proponents of modern monetary theory, what happened in Weimar Germany and more recently in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe somehow is not relevant to developed economies.

Damian Reilly

Tim Dillon is seriously funny

‘I look at my father and it’s like he’s been lobotomized, but maybe he’s figured something out,’ 36-year-old comedian Tim Dillon tells me. ‘I may find out it’s the only way to survive.’ Dillon is increasingly recognized as the heir apparent to countercultural comedy greats such as Bill Hicks and George Carlin. It wasn’t so long ago he was selling subprime mortgages and photocopiers, and working as a New York tour bus guide. A recovering addict (11 years clean), his life changed in 2019 when podcast king Joe Rogan spotted his defense of canceled comedian Louis CK on Facebook and invited him to be a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast whose global audience is measured in the hundreds of millions.

Saturday

May 15, 2021

Ed Zotti

How Canada will conquer the US

It’s difficult to get people to take the idea of Canadian world domination seriously — and I admit the notion snuck up on me too. My first inkling came last year, when I found out Toronto was on track to overtake Chicago as the city with the second-largest number of skyscrapers in North America, New York being the first. But then came the news about Kansas City Southern, at which point I realized: Canada is on the march. You’ve probably never heard of Kansas City Southern. I hadn’t either, and my knowledge of railroads — that’s what KCS is — is well above average. Here are two of the three things you need to know about it: 1) The KCS originates in Kansas City and heads south. You might have figured that out for yourself, I suppose, but railroad names can be deceptive.

Friday

May 14, 2021

Matt Purple

How Jon Stewart killed comedy

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. Click here to subscribe. Somewhere along the way, Jon Stewart discovered he could make stupid people laugh by smirking at Fox News clips — and the world has never been the same since. Stewart, who anchored The Daily Show until 2015, is often remembered as the progenitor of a long line of left-wing topical comedians, from Stephen Colbert to John Oliver to Samantha Bee. Yet before that he was something else: the most gloriously subversive personality on television. The Daily Show’s heyday came at the turn of the century, just after Stewart had taken it over from Craig Kilborn.