Us

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

What will survive of us

From our UK edition

The recent 25th anniversary of 9/11 reminded me of a detail from that time. A short while after that terrible day, a memorial service was held at St Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Tony and Cherie Blair attended, and in his address Mr Blair quoted the final paragraph of Thornton Wilder’s small jewel of a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Here, one of Wilder’s characters is remembering the five people who at the beginning of the story plunged to their deaths when a rope suspension bridge over a canyon in Peru snapped. She reflects that people still living remember them, but before long these people too will be dead.

Wednesday

Lionel Shriver

Don’t sympathise with Lindsay Clancy

The declaration of a mistrial in the filicide case of Lindsay Clancy coincides, for me uncomfortably, with a new UK reissue of my 2003 breakout novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. The book concerns a mother whose son becomes a high-school mass murderer. She agonises over whether something has always been wrong with him or something is wrong with him because something is wrong with her. Prior to publication, I’d imagined that the commercial hook would be the frequency with which self-pitying adolescents were taking their misery out on their classmates and teachers, since when I wrote the novel school shootings had yet to be fictionalised. Instead, what hit a cultural nerve was ‘maternal ambivalence’. The text dares to explore parenthood in de-romanticised terms.

Saturday

Jonathan Ray

On the bourbon trail in Cincinnati 

From our UK edition

Cincinnati. Wow, what a city! Who knew? Well, nobody, judging by a straw poll of dim and dozy friends, most of whom didn’t even know where it was. One was genuinely convinced that Cincinnati was in either Sardinia or Sicily but couldn’t confidently say which. Another vaguely recollected that trash TV host Jerry Springer had once been its mayor and that Cincinnati was most definitely in Ohio: ‘You know, down by Georgia, Alabama and, um, Nevada.’ A third had heard that Vice-President J.D. Vance lives in the city, and that abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe once had. All Simon knew was that it was home to consumer goods firm Procter & Gamble.

Friday

Zoe Strimpel

The problem with Maga maternity wear 

From our UK edition

The gestation of Usha Vance’s fourth baby – born on Sunday – has made for a politically revealing spectacle. Not only was she the only Second Lady to be pregnant since Ellen Colfax, the wife of Schuyler Colfax, in 1870, but she led, throughout the visible portion of the pregnancy, with just that: the visible bump. For J.D. Vance’s wife, there was no locking herself away or hiding her pregnant belly beneath frumpy maternity wear. Instead, she embraced the Trumpian vogue for ‘babycon’ through a range of clingy pregnancy dresses. Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration last year, the ‘Maga babe’ has become as much an aesthetic phenomenon as a political one.

Tuesday

James Phillips

Biological warfare is no longer the stuff of science fiction

From our UK edition

In the summer of 2020, while the country was between ‘waves’ of Covid, Dominic Cummings convened a meeting at my urging in Downing Street on pandemic biosecurity. Around the table sat the types of people you would want: scientists, key national security figures and officials. They explained that the thing Cummings was worried about, namely an engineered pathogen, obtained or built cheaply by a small group or even one person, was essentially science fiction. ‘You can’t beat Darwin,’ we were told. At the end, Cummings turned to me and asked what I thought. I said that much of what had just been declared impossible I had personally seen done in a laboratory five years earlier. Such work was, and is, openly published.

Saturday

James Delingpole

The Roswell incident is the setting for an enjoyably old-fashioned caper

Aliens are very fashionable right now. Steven Spielberg recently announced that they are real and have been visiting us since for ever – but then he does have a poorly reviewed new movie to push. Trump’s White House, meanwhile, has been busily trolling us with hints that it knows more about the subject than it has hitherto let on. I personally think it’s all bollocks – or, if you believe Project Blue Beam, worse than bollocks. But whichever camp you fit into, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy the three-part documentary series The Alien Autopsy Scandal. It has the feel of one of those old-fashioned capers where an unlikely band of English eccentrics with specialist skills – butchery, model-making monsters for Dr.

farm roswell

Wednesday

Geoffrey Cain

America’s Anthropic blackout won’t make the world safer

For the first time, the United States government has switched off frontier artificial intelligence and forced the world to go without it. Two of the most capable AI systems ever built, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, went dark last week. Not just in China or Iran. A researcher in London, a developer in Tokyo, an entire company in Berlin, all cut off at once, all treated as equally dangerous. A letter reached Anthropic at 5.21 on a Friday afternoon from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, citing national security authorities. It told the company to suspend access for every foreign national, anywhere in the world. There is no switch that lets in Americans and keeps out everyone else. To comply, Anthropic said it had to take the models down for all users at once.

Monday

Katie Glass

Why the best holidays are taken alone

From our UK edition

It’s because I was on my own in Los Angeles, smoking weed on Venice Beach, that I ended up at Coachella Festival with two girls I’d barely met and the DJs Belle and Sebastian. It was because I was on my own in Nashville that I woke up with a Texan soldier and never had to tell anyone. And it’s because I was on my own driving up the west coast of England that I could take a spontaneous detour to Anthony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ – just for the wonder of seeing those mossy, iron sculptures lapped by the waves.  Hell is other people – especially on holiday. Group trips give me chills. Words like ‘minibus’, ‘group tour’ or ‘kitty’ make me nauseous.

Monday

Freddy Gray

Is Assad’s downfall a ‘catastrophic success’?

From our UK edition

43 min listen

Over the weekend, the rebels from the Syrian opposition claimed Damascus and president Assad had fled to Russia. Keir Starmer has welcomed the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s barbaric regime in Syria and called for civilians to be protected after rebel forces took control of Damascus. Freddy Gray speaks to Michael Weiss, an editor at The Insider, and Owen Matthews, writer and historian. They discuss how this story could develop on the international stage, whether this is the reinvention of the Arab Spring, and what is left of Iran, now that several of its proxies have been destroyed.

Thursday

James Walton

When piracy meets protest

From our UK edition

Sometimes there are advantages to being ill-informed. Knowing embarrassingly little about why 30 Greenpeace activists were jailed in Russia in 2013, or the wilder assertions made by the broadcaster Alex Jones (emphatically not the woman from The One Show) meant that two documentaries this week unfolded for me like the twistiest – if not necessarily the most plausible – of thrillers. Twenty-four per cent of Americans still doubt that the Sandy Hook massacre even happened Then again, in my slight defence, such ignorance seemed to be what both programmes were assuming – because, unlike many documentaries, they didn’t summarise or give away the story they were about to tell.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Farage returns, Abbott reselected and Trump guilty 

From our UK edition

Home Nigel Farage took over leadership of the Reform party from Richard Tice and is standing for parliament in Clacton. This came as news on Monday to Tice, and to Reform’s candidate for Clacton, Tony Mack. Outside the Wetherspoons pub where he launched his campaign, Farage had a McDonald’s banana milkshake thrown over him. Farage proposed net-zero immigration. The Conservatives then said they would ask the independent Migration Advisory Committee for a recommended level for an annual cap on visas, and put that to a parliamentary vote. Invasive Asian hornets, which can eat 50 bees a day, were found to have survived a British winter and might stay permanently.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Trump’s indictment and the trouble with the law

From our UK edition

The latest charges against Donald Trump will do nothing to deter his many supporters within the Republican party. On the contrary, his indictment by a grand jury set up by special counsel Jack Smith plays into the former president’s narrative of victimhood and makes it even more likely that he will be chosen as a candidate. And that, curiously, is exactly what many senior Democrats want. To his electoral opponents, Trump seems reliably toxic – millions of Americans will turn out to vote against him.  It is a depressing development when legal processes are used as a political tool Even if he is convicted of the latest four charges – which include conspiracy to defraud the US and conspiracy against the rights of citizens – Trump might not be debarred from office.

Wednesday

Peregrine Worsthorne

What Washington was like during the Cuban Missile Crisis (2002)

From our UK edition

On 27 October 1962, US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara stepped out of crisis meetings and looked up at the sky. ‘I thought it was the last Saturday I would ever see,’ he recalled.  This month marks 60 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 2002, Peregrine Worsthorne wrote about what it was like to be in Washington during humanity’s closest shave. Forty years ago the Americans won what I hope will be the nearest thing to nuclear war between superpowers — of which only one is left — ever fought; and the fact that they won it without firing a shot should not diminish but rather increase the extent of the victory. What I am referring to is known, of course, as the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is how it will go down in history.

Friday

Matthew Lynn

Opec will regret taking on the US

From our UK edition

Production will be cut. Supplies to the rest of the world will be curbed. And inflation will rise just a little bit higher. No one ever expected the oil-cartel Opec(+), led by Saudi Arabia, to be friendly to the West, or to help out when it was needed. Even so, its decision this week to effectively side with Russia, and to make the energy crisis even worse, may quickly backfire. In reality, Opec was already in long-term decline. Picking a fight with the US will just make that worse. It was certainly the kind of news the energy markets didn’t need.

Tuesday

Katy Balls

What Truss’s US trade deal U-turn is really about

From our UK edition

Farewell to the UK/US trade deal. That's the news from Liz Truss's trip to the UN assembly in New York. The Prime Minister has told hacks on the flight over that the UK will not strike an agreement with America for many years. The former international trade secretary suggested that talks were unlikely to even start in the medium term: 'There isn't currently any negotiation taking place with the US and I don't have an expectation that those are going to start in the short to medium term.' The comments come ahead of her first proper meeting with Joe Biden since becoming Prime Minister. The former International Trade Secretary suggested that talks were unlikely to even start in the medium term Her comments have caused quite a stir back home.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Nato is no longer ‘brain dead’

From our UK edition

Finland and Sweden will be formally invited to join Nato today. Them joining the alliance will bolster Nato's presence in the Baltic and make it easier to defend Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The alliance now has a clear, strategic purpose again Turkey had objected to the two countries joining, regarding them as too soft on Kurdish separatists, whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees as 'terrorists' threatening his country. But having received some concessions on that front, Erdogan has dropped his objections. There’s also speculation that the US will sell F-16 fighter aircraft to Turkey in exchange for its cooperation on this matter.

Friday

Matthew Lynn

Why Biden’s inflation plan will fail

From our UK edition

It sounded impressive at the time. On the last day of May, a whole ten days ago, president Biden laid out a three-part plan for bringing inflation back under control. It consisted of making sure the Federal Reserve was allowed to do whatever it took to control prices, releasing oil and gas reserves to try to bring down the soaring costs of energy, and fixing supply chains to try to make industry and retailing more competitive. ‘I have made tackling inflation my top economic priority,’ he announced grandly. To listen to the rhetoric from the White House, you might think that this was an issue that could be fixed with a few tweaks to public policy, after which the President could happily go back to taxing and spending on an unprecedented scale. The problem would be solved.

Sunday

Lionel Shriver and Freddy Gray

Lionel Shriver on mass shootings, gun control and American carnage

From our UK edition

This is an edited transcript of a conversation between Freddy Gray and Lionel Shriver on The Spectator’s Americano podcast, which you can listen to here. Freddy Gray: Lionel, I feel a bit guilty asking you to talk about this, because I know you’ve become a kind of go-to person about mass shootings in America because you wrote a very significant novel – We Need to Talk About Kevin. You’ve written before about how awkward it is that every time there’s a mass shooting in America, people ask you to come on and talk about it. But in your book, the killer was using a bow, not a gun. So you don’t really feel well qualified to talk about the gun debate. Am I summing that up right?

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

The Biden Bust is here

From our UK edition

A wave of government spending would reboot the economy. Fairer taxes would pay for restored infrastructure. Skills would be improved, productivity raised, and new digital champions would emerge. When Joe Biden was elected, he promised the most radical programme of economic reform since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, and, to his army of cheerleaders at least, the American economy was about to be completely transformed. But hold on. Only a year into his term, the reality is very different from the promises. In reality, the Biden Bust has arrived. Donald Trump may have been personally obnoxious, but he bequeathed an economy in perfectly good shape The US GDP figures released today was genuinely shocking.

Sunday

Freddy Gray

Could Biden gaffe us into world war three?

From our UK edition

‘I want your point of view, Joe,’ Barack Obama once told his vice-president Joe Biden. ‘I just want it in ten-minute increments, not 60-minute increments.’ Obama understood Biden’s biggest flaw – his mouth runs away with him. He’s a verbal firebomb always threatening to go off. Last night, oops Biden did it again. As he rounded off his fiery speech in Poland against Vladimir Putin and autocracy, he concluded: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.’ The onset of senility had reduced the dangerousness of Biden’s loquacity The White House, in what is now a familiar routine, issued a quick clarification. The President was not demanding ‘regime change’ in Moscow.