Life Archives

Wednesday

September 13, 2023

The establishment and the mob

In The Revolt of the Masses — first published in 1930 — José Ortega y Gasset proposed that the most important fact in the public life of Europe was “the accession of the masses to complete social power. As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations and civilization.” What Ortega did not live to witness is the ease with which the mass becomes a mob, or an aggregation of many and various mobs, by mental or emotional contagion similar to that of disease. This fact was left for the generations alive today to experience in the fulness of its reality.

Kevin Cook

Basketball is more popular, and soccer-like, than ever

Basketball is one of America’s best exports. Back in 1992, NBA rosters featured only twenty-three foreign-born players from eighteen nations. That was the year the US Olympic “Dream Team,” starring Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley, posterized its way to the gold medal by an average margin of forty-three points. The Dream Team helped spur a worldwide hoops boom that shows no signs of stalling. When a new NBA season tips off on October 24, there will be at least 120 foreign-born players from forty nations on league rosters. Basketball, born in a dusty gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891, is now one of the world’s two favorite sports, second only to soccer. The games are close cousins.

Friday

August 18, 2023

Bill Kauffman

Summering in Scranton

Our big adventure this summer was supposed to be a trip to the Capri for a young friend’s wedding, but there was a hitch in the plan. You see, in my six decades on this orb I never have gotten the hang of this whole money thing. (Whose idea was it, anyway?) But I am blessed in countless ways, not least by having married a woman who, when she moved east from Los Angeles, expressed a wish to see two places: Cleveland and Utica. So Lucine and I hitchlessly shifted to Plan B. Capri was out, replaced by an overnight in Scranton, Pennsylvania, followed by a visit to Centralia, the Keystone State’s ghost town, under which a coal-mine fire has burned since 1962. Don’t think that I was acting out of tightfistedness.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The liberal idea of sin

The Western world, once so firmly grounded in Christianity and its Gospels, dogma and teachings, retains in the twenty-first century virtually nothing of them, the almost sole exception being the notion of sin and thus of guilt — not the Christian concept of them, but rather the modern liberal one. To begin with, the liberal idea of sin is collective; it is also highly selective, being limited to the West in general and the Caucasian race in particular. And it is obsessive, as much so as was the Christian version among the Calvinists of Geneva, or the neurotic anticommunism prevalent among the more single-minded and hysterical outliers on the American right during the 1940s and 1950s.

Christopher Sandford

Danny Bonaduce’s guide to survival

It’s just after nine on a gray Pacific Northwest morning, and Danny Bonaduce, the once winsome redheaded child star of TV’s The Partridge Family, is dispensing life advice on Seattle’s 102.5 KZOK classic-rock radio station. “My ex-husband has a gambling problem and won’t ever show up for our two kids,” one distressed young woman announces. “Keep a journal. Write down what he does wrong, it’ll be useful one day in court,” says Danny, speaking in his familiar rapid-fire, gravelly voice. “He has to perform if he’s ever going to see the kids. You’re not a bad person, he is. The kids know that. Be strong. Hang tough.” “My twelve-year-old son is cool,” the next caller says, “but he’s rude to his mom. Should I intervene?” “Intervene?

Kevin Cook

Is Shohei Ohtani the GOAT?

How good is Shohei Ohtani? “If he were a Yankee, he’d be Taylor Swift-famous,” a friend says. That might be a rare case of overselling the Los Angeles Angels’s pitcher and designated hitter, the lone supernova in a sputtering old pastime that needs all the hype it can get. It has been more than a century since baseball had such a double threat. Babe Ruth was once one of the game’s best pitchers, but not even Ruth, who focused on hitting after the Yankees bought him from Boston in 1919, ever dominated on the mound and at the plate like the twenty-nine-year-old Ohtani has done since he left Japan to join the Angels in 2018.

Monday

July 17, 2023

Cosmo Landesman

Why I won’t grow up

Recently, a famous American novelist came to stay at my place in London. In her later Substack post she described me as “an older gentleman.” It’s an accurate description — I’m sixty-eight! — but why does it make me feel so uneasy? Older is fine. And so too is gentleman. But put them together and the phrase “older gentleman” brings to mind — at least my mind — a Prufrock-like figure. A rotund old guy who wears a bright cravat and a brave smile and potters through his pointless days, softly whistling half-remembered showtunes from the Golden Age of Broadway. A life punctuated with sighs and resuscitated with cups of tea. Reader, I’m not that man — yet. No, I don’t have a problem with growing older; I have a problem with growing up.

Bill Kauffman

Rage against the baseball machine

In a lifetime of attending perhaps a thousand professional baseball games, all but ten or so in the minor leagues — quondam site of the sport’s heart — I have finally encountered an umpire I would despise, disparage, spit upon, kick, and, yes, kill: ABS, colloquially known as “Robo-ump.” It happened in Rochester, New York, where the storied Red Wings took on the Scranton Wilkes-Barre RailRiders. The game being played on the field was recognizably baseball, but there was something off about the experience, rather like when the niece meets the pod-person version of Uncle Ira in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

In search of the perfect martini

“I like bars just after they open for the evening,” Terry Lennox tells Philip Marlowe in the early pages of The Long Goodbye. “When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar — that’s wonderful.” They’re drinking gimlets — gin and Rose’s lime juice — which some people, though not me, consider a type of martini.

Sunday

June 18, 2023

Cosmo Landesman

Literary festivals are no fun

This is the season when literary festivals start to happen all over the UK. From the highlands of Scotland to the South London lowlands of Deptford, there are book festivals for every taste and tribe. Festivals devoted to crime fiction, women writers, LGBTQ writers and young novelists. Even old Marxists are having their own summer festival. I’m thinking of starting a literary festival for neglected and bitter writers like me who don’t get invited to literary festivals. I ask myself: why should I care? But I do. I spend long nights of self-torment scrolling through the lists of people appearing at various festivals and shouting at my laptop screen: who the fuck is he? What has she written? Why is Bono there and not me? For heaven’s sake, who invited Minnie Driver?!

Bill Kauffman

How the NCAA twisted women’s sports

This has been a banner, or perhaps baneful, year for women’s intercollegiate sports, what with trash-talking basketballers, record TV ratings and biological men swimming in the distaff pool. But the focus on celebrity female athletes only emphasizes the degree to which the NCAA has twisted women’s sports into a depressing duplicate of the Y-chromosome side of the street. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The pioneers of women’s collegiate — not necessarily intercollegiate — athletics conceived and promoted a healthy and democratic ideal that was antithetical to what they saw as the elitist, corrupted and sloth-inducing male version.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The Age of Unreason

The present time, which has justly been called the Age of Unreason, is also an exceptionally confused and neurotic one. Indeed, it is unreasonable because it is confused and neurotic, a fact that its blind faith in liberalism and science make it unable to recognize. Confronted by what it views as the existential crisis of climate change caused by human activity, progressive liberalism promotes the widening illusion that Homo sapiens is actually and morally responsible for endangering “the planet”; that humans can accomplish anything, including reversing and even halting the process, supposing they have the moral will to do so.

Kara Kennedy

At home with Jacob Rees-Mogg

Before I arrived at Gournay Court, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s seventeenth-century home in Somerset, I’d missed the main event. Beforehand, I’d asked the Conservative Member of Parliament to lean in to whatever our photographer asked — and somehow, before I turned up an hour late, she managed to get him in a nearby field feeding sheep from the palm of his hand. He didn’t seem to mind. In fact, there were only a few times he said no to our increasingly deranged demands. Once was after we asked him to get up on the humongous dining room table, spread his legs and act natural. “Well, I couldn’t possibly do that,” he replied. When you drive up to Gournay Court, you encounter what I can only describe as the quintessential British upper class. Think afternoon tea at the Savoy.

Sunday

May 21, 2023

Cosmo Landesman

The joy of missing out

As I write this the coronation of King Charles hasn’t happened yet, but I’m having great fun watching the procession of those who have been royally snubbed by royalty. Only a thousand people have been invited to the King’s coronation in Westminster Abbey and a lot of other people — dukes, earls, A-list celebs, actors, society figures — are pissed they didn’t make the cut. The British press reports daily on the latest person to be “snubbed.” So far the snub scorecard is as follows: Prince William is snubbing his brother Harry. Harry is snubbing everyone. His wife Meghan is snubbing Charles and President Biden is snubbing Britain.

Bill Kauffman

Michael Cimino’s gift to cinema

In the spring of 1981, I committed what the entertainment press of that day regarded as an act of self-abuse: I bought a ticket and sat through Michael Cimino’s epic flop Heaven’s Gate, and then I went back for another viewing before the universally reviled film ended its one-week run at the local cinema. In the four decades since, I have abused myself in similar fashion four or five more times. Heaven’s Gate is a 200-minute-plus mess of beautiful incoherences and stupefying contradictions, its pattern set by a gorgeously preposterous prologue in which forty-something actors Kris Kristofferson and John Hurt waltz across the greensward as newly minted Harvard graduates, class of 1870.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The dangers of faux-education

François-Marie d’Arouet (1694-1778), commonly known as Voltaire, devoted his life to waging intellectual warfare against Christianity — the Catholic Church and Catholic culture in particular — along with its historic political and social allies, royalty and monarchy, which he condemned as a monstrous entity in his famous battle cry“Écrasez l’Infȃme!” Given his aims as a polemicist, a deist and a republican, Voltaire did not misconstrue the enemy whose destruction he called for.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Pet portraitist Mimi Vang Olsen marches to the beat of her own drum

Mimi Vang Olsen operates in the West Village equivalent of a goldfish bowl. Every day, the eighty-five-year-old pet portraitist settles in a chair in her studio-cum-storefront on Hudson Street and gets to work, painting dogs, cats and the occasional guinea pig. Tourists stop to peer inside, cooing over a haphazard display of postcards and paintings. Locals tap on the glass to wave hello. During the pandemic, curiosity intensified: Vang Olsen’s shop became an Instagram sensation after she attached a blue mask onto a pug portrait hanging in the window for some much-needed levity. Vang Olsen, however, is nonchalant about the attention. She doesn’t have a cell phone or social media.

Thursday

April 20, 2023

Cosmo Landesman

Make love, not culture war

I think I know how to end the culture wars at a stroke. My solution can be summed up in a simple slogan: make love, not culture war. Or, to put it another way — poke the woke. Let me explain. I have a new woman in my life and not just any woman. I have a Woke Woman. That’s right: a full-on, vegetarian, eco-activist, kill-the-rich, bisexual, transgender-defender and social justice warrior. She’s also a shrink. And not just any kind of shrink, but a Lacanian shrink! They’re the followers of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In the UK we have a soccer team called Millwall that all the other fans hate. Millwall fans have a song that goes, “No one likes us, we don’t care!” Lacan therapists are the Millwall of therapy — nobody in the therapeutic community likes them.

Bill Kauffman

How Karl Hess went from Mr. ‘Ultra-Conservative’ to supporter of the New Left

Some of the more interesting political figures of our day — Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson — crossed the street to find new friends, but few in our history have ever switched teams with the dramatic flair of Karl Hess, the centenary of whose birth we will toast this May 25. Born in Washington, DC to a beautiful switchboard operator and a rakish Filipino millionaire, Karl Hess quit school at fifteen and embarked on a career that turned into an anti-career. He was a police reporter, a Newsweek editor, a corporate flack, a Republican ghostwriter, and, ultimately, Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter and traveling companion during the Arizona senator’s 1964 presidential candidacy.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The death of the Western literary tradition

A regular reader of Le Figaro for some years, I have been noting the frequency with which the editors print articles relating to the Académie française, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1634 for the purpose of acting as the protector and patron of the French language, fixing its usage and giving it exact rules to make it competent to deal clearly and elegantly with the arts and sciences. It was decreed that the academy should consist of precisely forty members, and that upon the death of any one of them the candidate to replace him should pay court to the remaining thirty-nine to be selected to fill his numbered seat. The sitting forty were known as “les Immortels.