Covid

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The ‘experts’ who enabled RFK Jr’s rise

From our UK edition

22 min listen

The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be secretary of health and human services in the second Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, hates big business, rails against the ultra-processed food that Donald Trump likes to eat and wants climate sceptics jailed.  But in the magazine this week Matt Ridley explains how the experts who now bash him have contributed in putting him where is, and that official Covid misinformation has contributed to his rise. So what could he do in office? Will he release these Covid files? Matt joins Freddy to discuss.

Tuesday

Oliver Soden

A geriatric Lord of the Flies: Killing Time, by Alan Bennett, reviewed

From our UK edition

Somewhere, there must be a PhD: Flashing: Exhibitionistic Disorder in the Oeuvre of Alan Bennett. It’s there in the first of his Talking Heads monologues (‘He’s been had up for exposing himself in Sainsbury’s doorway – as mother said, Tesco, you could understand it’) and in the last, Waiting for the Telegram, which opened with Thora Hird, one-time presenter of Songs of Praise, saying: ‘I saw this feller’s what-do-you-call-it today.’ It takes three pages for a what-do-you-call-it to appear in Killing Time, Bennett’s new novella, which is set in Hill Topp House old people’s home. Mr Woodruff, a resident, is indefatigable, his self-exposure a running motif as ‘not for the first time, he tried to show Audrey his willy’.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Malcolm Gladwell: Revenge of the Tipping Point

From our UK edition

39 min listen

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Malcolm Gladwell. Twenty-five years after he published The Tipping Point, Malcolm returns to the subject of his first book in Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering. He tells me about the 'magic third', why it's not just Covid that gave us superspreaders, and how what he calls an 'overstory' can have dramatic effects on human behaviour. He talks, too, about why counterintuitive discoveries are easy to find, and why we're all wrong about everything all the time. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.

Monday

The Spectator

The Trump-Kamala showdown

The long-awaited debate between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is kicking off Tuesday night at 9 p.m. ET on ABC News. This is a high-stakes moment, mostly for the Harris campaign: Kamala’s predecessor at the top of the ticket, President Joe Biden, was forced by his own party to drop out of the race after an abysmal performance against Trump in June, and Kamala has only done one unscripted event on camera since launching her own campaign. Unlike that CNN interview with Dana Bash, Kamala will be challenged and will not have her running mate, Tim Walz, sitting next to her for support.

Monday

Teresa Mull

Is there a solution to chronic absenteeism in schools?

I hated going to school so much as a kid that to this day, the sight of Back to School! signs printed in cutesy kiddy font on glowing school-bus yellow that fill stores every August strikes me with dread. I want to punch them. My elementary school years were fine; I attended a teeny-tiny Catholic school where I think most of the dedicated teachers qualified for food stamps. I knew my classmates so well that they were essentially extended siblings (and a couple of them still are). I graduated first in my class (out of ten) and was star of the pathetic basketball team. High school was a Catholic school too, but insular and snooty. I was an outsider there, from “over the mountain.” I wasn’t bullied or anything, but no matter what, I always felt like I was imprisoned.

absenteeism

Friday

The Spectator

Kamala unleashes radical economic agenda

The long wait for Vice President Kamala Harris’s policy platform is over... well, at least on the economic front. Harris released her economic plan on Friday after weeks of running at the top of the ticket for the Democratic Party. The rollout, however, was less than stellar, as Harris proposed a mix of Soviet-style price controls with more popular policies pilfered from former president Donald Trump’s speeches and policy platforms.Harris said in the past week that she would end taxes on tips for service workers, which Trump promised back in June to do. The plan also runs counter to policies the Biden-Harris administration implemented that empowered the IRS to go after serviceworkers’ tips. Today, reports said Harris also intended to increase the child tax credit to $6,000.

Thursday

Cockburn

MSNBC’s hell week: Lord of the Rings racism, Covid and no Joe

It’s been a rough few days over at MSNBC. Since the attempted assassination on Donald Trump over the weekend, the network seems to be the one unable to regain its footing. From J-13 truthers to The Lord of the Rings conspiracies, here’s Cockburn’s rundown of everything that's gone wrong so far. Much like Joe Biden’s weekly routine, MSNBC got off to a shaky start on Monday after it pulled Morning Joe from air following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. Executives were worried Mika Brzezinski planned to pull out her hand-stitched Trump voodoo doll. Whatever the couple had cooked up, Joe Scarborough was not happy that they weren’t able to pull it off.

msnbc
standing
Roger Kimball

The Supreme Court on not standing for standing

Human beings are animals that often operate by proxy. Here’s a familiar example from the world of — well, I was going to say “the law,” but what I have in mind is not the law but its perversion, so let’s say “the legal bureaucracy.” Everyone has heard the phrase “the process is the punishment.” It covers a multitude of sins. In its core signification, the phrase describes an increasingly common situation in which the machinery of the law is deployed to harass, enervate, stymie and otherwise hobble someone the regime does not like but whom, for the time being anyway, it chooses not to incarcerate. Sometimes it is easier to bankrupt and demoralize an opponent into submission.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Democrats turn on Joe Biden

There’s been a vibe shift in Washington. After Thursday night’s debate debacle and a Biden family meeting at Camp David on Sunday in which it became clear the president was not interested in dropping his re-election bid, Democrats closed ranks around Biden. Excuses were workshopped to the press: the debate was a one-off, Biden was actually over prepared by his debate prep team, the president was tired from his overseas travel and Biden’s cognitive decline is nothing compared to Trump’s lies. Unfortunately for Biden, none of these landed well with the public and Democrats are now putting out smoke signals that it’s time to let it go. Representative Lloyd Doggett became the first Democratic elected official to call on Biden to step aside as the nominee.

Tuesday

Chris Mullin

One damned thing after another: Britain’s crisis-ridden century so far

From our UK edition

Asked about the greatest challenges he faced as prime minister, Harold Macmillan is said to have replied: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ The first quarter of this century has seen no shortage of events that have blown prime ministers off course. There was Tony Blair by 9/11 and the resulting war in Iraq; Gordon Brown by the financial crisis of 2007-8; David Cameron and Theresa May by Brexit; and Boris Johnson by Covid. With the exception of May, none of these people had any inkling, on taking office, of the bolts from the blue that would ultimately define their premierships.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Have I finally found the most incongruous leftie?

From our UK edition

As the disappointingly unmacho South African toddled off after giving us a lecture about hedgehogs, I declared the contest over. ‘You win,’ I told the builder boyfriend. We have been having a competition all week to see who can find the most incongruous leftie. The liberals flock to West Cork from all over the world to get away from whatever it is they can’t cope with, and then stick out like sore thumbs in the farming landscape, totally at odds with the earthiness of the Irish. The builder boyfriend had been working in the yard when this particular fellow walked by our gate dressed in full safari outfit, as though trekking up Kilimanjaro, with a golden retriever on an extender lead.

Monday

Lewis M. Andrews

The good news about the left’s growing resort to intimidation

It has not escaped the attention of media observers that the current outbreak of violent campus demonstrations is but the latest in a series of disruptive left-wing movements, starting with Occupy Wall Street in 2012, followed by the Black Lives Matter riots over the summer of 2020 and now the anti-Israel protests. The right, too, has been associated with disorderly conduct — most notably during January 6 and the Charlottesville rallies — but neither of these events were as well-planned or long lasting as what progressives have been up to. And this fact has led many journalists to speculate as to why the American left has become so attached to civil disobedience.

intimidation

Thursday

Melissa Kite

A meeting with my past in an NHS hospital

From our UK edition

Pushing through a crowded hospital corridor behind my father, I heard a voice calling me. Then a nurse grabbed me and threw her arms around me. She had heard my father’s name and recognised me, her old school friend from St Joseph’s. As we walked and talked, she told me, ‘We all read your articles’ and I thought: ‘Oh dear I’m about to be exposed as an anti-vaxxer in the middle of A&E while my father’s having a heart attack.’ But she was smiling, pleased to see me. In fact, she was beaming as she said, ‘I remember Alma!’ referring to my maternal grandmother. People would come in for a shampoo and set and book in again for the cabaret I haven’t heard someone talk about my nan for many years but she was a well-known character in my small home town.

Sean Thomas

Paris, city of blight

From our UK edition

You know that feeling when you haven’t seen someone for several years and when you do, you really notice the changes? Generally it is a melancholy moment: you spot the extra wrinkles, the added pounds. Occasionally it can be positive: gym-toned physique, amusing new green-and-orange hair. Lots of us had these moments as we emerged, blinking and bewildered, from the bunker of Covid. I’ve just had this same experience, but with a city. Paris. The French capital is a place that I know well. I must have visited a dozen times over the decades. I’ve seen the Louvre Pyramid go up, I’ve seen Notre-Dame go down in flames (on TV, in a horrified airport in Vegas). But I have not been to Paris since before the pandemic, so I was keen to check out how the old girl was doing.

Thursday

Manfred Manera

Why were Germany’s Covid files redacted?

From our UK edition

There are two kinds of long Covid. One is a medical syndrome, the other manifests as a healthy obsession – an urge to shed light on what happened during the pandemic crisis. Too many questions remain unanswered: why did Sweden come out of the pandemic better than other countries without having endured a lockdown? Why were masks imposed when scientific studies repeatedly demonstrated that they were unnecessary? Why was discrimination introduced between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated when it was clear that vaccines were incapable of blocking the transmission of the infection? And why, since the lockdowns, has there been such a high excess-death rate in Europe? Why were masks imposed when scientific studies repeatedlyshowed they were unnecessary?

Tuesday

Stuart Jeffries

Are we all becoming hermits now?

From our UK edition

Long before Covid, wi-fi and Deliveroo, Badger in The Wind in the Willows showed us how to live beyond the manifold fatuities of this gimcrack world. Cosily tucked into his burrow with a roaring fire and well-stocked cellar, he was unbothered by importunate weasels and other denizens of the Wild Wood. He padded his underground realm for six months a year in dressing gown and down-at-heel slippers not just because he was a hibernating animal but out of existential temperament. ‘Badger hates Society,’ explained Rat. But, really, don’t we all? Not for him the ‘Poop! Poop!’ of Mr Toad, always going places and doing stuff.

gaslighting
Roger Kimball

The rise of reverse gaslighting

We live now in an age of reverse gaslighting. Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity. Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal. Imagine: practically the entire population quarantines itself because a couple of government bureaucrats tell them to. Everyone starts wearing little paper masks as patents of their capitulation and, secondarily, as badges of their virtue.

safe
Chadwick Moore

Must we ‘be safe?’

Atlanta, Georgia "Be safe,” the grocery checkout girl says as I grab my box of orzo and turn to leave. From what, I wonder? Had there been a surge in pasta-related fatalities? Were packets of orzo exploding in homes across America and, if so, why are these dangerous things still on the shelf? Or was it some kind of threat? “Have a great weekend and be safe,” says the flight attendant over the intercom as we stand to deplane. Does she really care about my safety? Granted, we just touched down in Atlanta and some situational awareness isn’t a bad idea. But maybe she could have been more specific. “Have a great weekend, don’t take the MARTA after dark, and avoid Lenox Mall.

Thursday

Peter Tonguette

Peter Duchin makes us happy 

If I could be like anybody, I would wish to be like Peter Duchin. The pianist and bandleader — who, each year during his prime, oversaw from his perch at the piano dozens of debutante balls and scores of society events — has always seemed to me to embody style, dignity and grace.  Arguably Duchin came by some of these qualities as a consequence of his heritage — his father was the equally famous bandleader Eddy Duchin — but it has always been obvious that he must have worked hard at them, too. He had certainly had his share of reversals: his mother, the former Marjorie Oelrichs, succumbed to complications experienced during childbirth; about thirteen years later, his father was felled by leukemia. He was raised in large part by diplomat W.

peter duchin

Thursday

Bill McMorris

How Covid amnesia spread through the right and left

In August 2020, the US Centers for Disease Control released new Covid testing guidelines, which called for increased vigilance in nursing homes and other hotbeds, while leaving hypochondriacs free to sodomize their noses to their hearts’ delight. The document sought to move away from mass testing for its own sake, which served the dual purpose of, first, generating panic-inducing headlines that could be used to justify lockdowns and drive cable TV ratings and, second, not doing a thing to protect the elderly. The Coronavirus Task Force led by Vice President Mike Pence had signed off on the change a week before in a situation room meeting without any objection from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases lead Anthony Fauci, as White House advisor Dr.

covid