The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types
My social life is meeting a different character every week
Life
Tuesday
How Trader Joe’s became a way of life
The supermarket is a kind of secular religion with frozen orange chicken as communion
The anti-Masonic roots of the Republican party
The Morgan Affair in 1826 led to the first third party in American political history
Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?
Human intelligence: you either use it or lose it
Wednesday
The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco
Each city serves Power while sacrificing meaning
Where can I get some meth?
Welcome to the People’s Republic of Santa Monica
In Cuba, a revolution is over
There’s a good chance you’ll have heard someone say that tactless phrase: ‘See it before it changes’
Has Los Angeles killed America’s imagination?
I suppose I should hate this city, the Typhoid Mary of cultural imperialism
Tuesday
A Neil Young concert in the waning days of summer
A brilliant meteor blazed through the Summer Triangle early in the show, eliciting oohs and aahs and apolitical cheers
The tyranny of the mass-intellectual
Progressive education along narrow lines is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority
Tuesday
The devil over Washington
I turned to film to re-enchant myself with the city in which I live
The Emmys are a waste of time
The good news about these execrable awards shows is that they tend to expose who these people are in real life
Polite society is a thing of the past
Table talk in London these days is so relentlessly gloomy that we need some irreverent juvenile banter to lighten things up
Tuesday
The pace is quickening in DC
This is Washington’s particular joke, sharpened in the second Trump era: violence is never just local
Thoughts on moving houses
Technically we are moving south, though I doubt we qualify as snowbirds
How the Democratic party became the party of the aggrieved
The Democrats are stone deaf, their hearing destroyed by their own high-decibel shouts and screams against the Great Sauron in the White House
Tuesday
It’s a frustrating time to be a college football fan
Despite the multitudinous sins committed against the game and its culture, I’m once again giving it the old college try
The problem of the progressive middle class
They believe in everything and anything – and thus in nothing at all
Tuesday
Who’s buying up Palm Beach?
Donald Trump continues to make news in his hometown
California is doomed
It’s almost beyond belief that the state used to be a glorious paradise of tennis-playing, churchgoing, hard-working patriotic Republicans