Bret Stephens

Bret Stephens has come a long way in his estimation of Donald Trump. Back in 2016, when Trump was first running for the presidency, Stephens wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.” As the election season progressed, Stephens mostly dropped the sewer talk, sliding into its place evocations of Trump’s “darker antipathies” and warnings that his “candidacy is manna to every Jew-hater.” A “Trump administration,” he explained,“would give respectability and power to the gutter voices of American politics.” At one point he giddily announced that Trump’s chances of victory were “next to nil.

There is nothing writers love to write about more than writers. We are an extraordinarily self-important breed. Find a group of plumbers, office workers or electricians and they will talk about anything except their line of work. When writers come together, though, the subject of conversation is invariably their peers and themselves. But I can hardly talk. Here I am, coming to you today not just to write about writers and writing but to write about a writer writing about writers and writing. (Did you make it through that sentence OK? I'm sorry for inflicting it on you. Have a drink or something. You deserve one.) What have we done to deserve this kind of self-absorption? Writing, at its best, adds a little truth and a little beauty to the world.

There I was, watching my old VHS copy of The Boys from Brazil, idly reading the lab reports on the swabs I took from my gentile neighbor’s kids when he wasn’t looking, and revising the bassoon part of a concerto I’ve been working on, when I saw something alarming trending on Twitter. Not ‘eugenics’, but ‘Bret Stephens’.‘What’s he done now?’ I asked in six languages, two of them not from the Indo-European language family.In today’s New York Times, Bret Stephens discusses Norman Lebrecht’s excellent new history of the Jews in modern times.