Life Archives

Sunday

October 20, 2019

Taki

The differences between British and American readers

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. New York This feels strange. Since 1977, I have been writing the High Life column in the London Spectator and concentrating on American goings-on for a British audience. Now I am about to write the High Life for an American readership. Are American readers very different? You betcha, though they are supposed to speak the King’s, or the Queen’s, English. Never mind. Both countries take their democracies seriously, and their freedoms even more so. One difference is that, over in the Old Country, people know that democracy is rare in distant parts of the world.

Monday

October 14, 2019

Godfrey Elfwick

The best comedy is the type that makes white people feel terrible about themselves

Portland, Oregon Allow me to introduce myself. I am Godfrey Elfwick. I am a genderqueer Muslim atheist. I am also WrongSkin, which means I was born white but identify as black (West Indian to be precise). I came out on Twitter as transrace in January 2015. When Rachel Dolezal confirmed her WrongSkin status later that year, it was a great comfort to me to learn I was influencing others to be proud of their transethnic identities. I only wish this level of awareness had been around in 1990. It would have been so much easier for Vanilla Ice. Living with so many levels of minority status can be extremely difficult. As a biologically born white male who identifies as a black woman, I am constantly vilified.

Benjamin Riley

Hog wild in Indiantown

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. My old college roommate and I were sitting on a 180-pound wild male boar. Neither of us were habitual hoggers. It was our first rodeo. Florida Route 710, the Beeline Highway from Palm Beach to Indiantown, is a two-lane straight shot out of the tropics and into the scrub near Lake Okeechobee. In the Twenties, a Baltimore banker, S. Davies Warfield, built a railroad into central Florida from Palm Beach. Up went Indiantown’s gridded streets and houses, and the Mission Revival-style Seminole Inn, where Warfield’s niece Wallis Simpson stayed both before and after marrying Edward VIII. But Warfield’s plans were scuppered by two hurricanes and the Depression.

Wednesday

October 9, 2019

P.J. O’Rourke

Puritanism is back…and welcome to it

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Cole Porter sang: ‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking / But now, God knows, / Anything goes.’ Everything went, and with it: humor. World War One was followed by a licentious riot of amoral libertinism, with the collapse of religious convictions, ethical norms, societal conventions and plain good manners. Nothing was sacrosanct and this turned laughter into hard work. Like going to see Waiting for Godot and waiting for the punch lines. Or skating over the thin ice on the river of despair in the novels of Evelyn Waugh.

Bill Kauffman

I am a part of Batavia, New York

This article is the American Life column from The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Batavia, New York, my favorite place in the world, was described by Alexis de Tocqueville on his American tour: ‘Scattered houses then marshes. Rooms built of tree trunks.’ OK, it wasn’t the Frenchman’s most memorable passage. But Tocqueville was more charitable than my landsman John Gardner, the 20th-century novelist who called Batavia a symbol of ‘both spiritual death and the death of civilization’. Gardner, a nomadic academic who had left town years earlier, was responding to the federally funded razing of Batavia’s core in the 1960s under the cruelly misnamed Urban Renewal Program.

Tuesday

September 17, 2019

Spectator Editorial

Good morning, America

‘The Spectator is the best written paper,’ the American Whig Review said in 1851. ‘It has a place for every thing, and every thing can be found in its place.’ Not much has changed. The Spectator is still the greatest magazine in the English language. We will soon become the first magazine in history to publish a 10,000th edition. As that milestone approaches, we are expanding: this first American issue marks the beginning of an exciting New World chapter. It’s odd, perhaps, that it has taken us 191 years to come to America. The Spectator, rooted in true liberal and radical thinking, has long had an affinity for the Land of the Free. Our history is full of American connections.