Culture

Monday

Travis Aaroe

In praise of Trump’s architecture

I was in Budapest last month, where the city’s castle is now being rebuilt in its old neo-Baroque style. The plan is to create a near-exact replica of the complex as it stood before the city’s siege in 1945, when it was reduced to rubble during the fighting. So much of the original was destroyed that whole wings – like the palace of the Archduke Joseph – will have to be rebuilt from scratch.  The new complex has been accused of being a sort of Disneyland. This isn’t helped by the fact that many of its structures are made largely out of concrete, with the baroque facades added later as an outer shell. Yet there is a deeper reason. The project is much too self-conscious.

Trump ballroom library

Thursday

Peter Watson

Palm Beach gets a European twist

In these parts, it is always said that the most disappointing aspect of Palm Beach life is… well, the beach itself. Yes, it has sand, sea, minimal surf (and, as often as not, “dangerous marine life,” as the deep purple flags flown at the lifeguard stations indicate). But that is all. There is nothing like what you get, for example, in the north shore of the Mediterranean where, from Gibraltar in the west to Bodrum in Turkey, thousands of miles to the east, every few hundred yards you have a chic café or a ritzy restaurant, or boutiques selling everything from bikes to bikinis. No, the beaches of Palm Beach are socially inept, empty of entertainment, where the most exciting thing I have seen (twice) is a seven-foot shark caught on a line, which is a touch off putting for bathers.

Friday

Atbin Moayedi

How the Islamic Republic tried – and failed – to destroy Iranian culture

The Islamic Republic in Iran is not only at war with the United States and Israel. For years, the country's government has been waging war on Iranian culture. Music, poetry, storytelling, dogs, dancing, singing, art, dice and card games, romance, tolerance and the honoring of women are central to Persian culture and its ancient history. Yet under the Islamic Republic, these cherished expressions are banned or stigmatized, especially when pursued by women. The departure of Iran’s enlightened and educated from the country they love is one of the most poignant brain drains in history In the dark, dystopian times immediately following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, couples holding hands or a man so much as looking at a woman could lead to arrest, or worse.

Friday

Clare McHugh

Love Story’s counterfeit Kennedys

Last June, Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy nepo baby currently running for the open seat in New York’s 12th Congressional District, called out the television mini-series, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Executive producer Ryan Murphy was, Schlossberg declared, exploiting this couple’s courtship, marriage and death, and “profiting off of it in a grotesque way.” On a key point, Jack can rest easy. Love Story, now airing on FX/Hulu, treats his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. reverently. Elizabeth Beller, Bessette’s biographer, praises the show for “honoring the legacy of everyone involved.” If JFK Jr.

Wednesday

Katherine Dee

Nancy Guthrie and the gamification of crime

Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already under way, with FBI agents crawling the Catalina Foothills and more than 30,000 tips flooding in from the public, but the thing building around her disappearance, the thing that one could generously call “journalism” in both its legacy and citizen varieties.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

No, Jacob Elordi isn’t a ‘whitewashed’ Heathcliff

For those of us who associate Wuthering Heights either with high-school English classes or Kate Bush caterwauling over the moors while exhibiting some remarkable interpretive dance moves, the news that the new Emerald Fennell-directed film of what she calls “my favorite book in the world” has become the subject of a race-based controversy may come as a shock. Yet the latest interpretation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, which is being released, appropriately, on Valentine’s Day, has already been met with contempt and derision by many before anyone even sees it.

jacob elordi

Sunday

Chris Tookey

What Catherine O’Hara gave cinema

There are actors who dominate the movie screen, and actors who deepen it. There are stars who are "bankable" and have names above the titles, and there are artists who, almost invisibly, give a film its weight, its texture, its lasting emotional impact.  Catherine O’Hara, who has died at the age of 71, belongs emphatically to the second group. She was one of the rare performers whose presence elevated everything around her. She understood precisely how to serve the story, the tone and the ensemble. Over a career that spanned many decades, genres and registers, O’Hara enhanced every film she appeared in.  What made her exceptional was not merely that she was funny, though she was one of the great comic performers of her generation.

Saturday

J. Scott Turner

How mediocrity took over the Grammys

Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in the popular music canon. One could ask the same question about science: has it gotten worse? My answer, I have to say, reflects Beato’s for music.

Friday

James Tidmarsh

France’s bistros are dying

Emmanuel Macron says France’s traditional bistros should be granted Unesco world heritage status. Speaking at the Élysée this week, the French president vowed to help save the country's traditional cafes. "This is a fight that we want to take on, because our cafés and bistros aren’t just selling croissants, baguettes and traditional products – they’re also on the front lines of preserving French craftsmanship and know-how," Macron told a group of French bakers at the annual Epiphany cake ceremony. France doesn't need to list its bistros. It needs to decide whether it still wants them Macron is right about what the bistro represents. For generations, it has been a shared meeting place as much as a commercial one; somewhere to linger and belong.

Monday

Daniel Johnson

Tom Stoppard was himself to the end

"Tom Stoppard is dead." For anyone who cares for the theater, the English language, and especially for those of us who knew him, these words are as unthinkable as they are hard to bear. How can such a force of nature, such a generosity of spirit, such a voice of sanity, have fallen silent? And yet he has gone. To the end, his body emaciated by cancer, he was still the old Tom: self-deprecating but full of ideas and plans. He might have one more play inside him, he told me, but his fingers could no longer physically write and dictation somehow stopped the words from flowing. He was cared for by his magnificent wife Sabrina, who entertained us tirelessly.

Thursday

Tucker Carlson

The strange death of England

Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they're calling it? We can't even agree on what it's called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you're over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of World War One?  Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled literally a quarter of the Earth's surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things.

Tuesday

Kelly Chapman

The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types: Dr. Strangelove (The theorist) The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors.

dr strangelove
Alexander Larman

Franco Zeffirelli’s slice of paradise in Positano

If you say the name Franco Zeffirelli to anyone under about 40, you’re likely to be met with bemusement. Find any opera or film lover over that age, however, and you will be greeted with a warm exclamation – “Ah!” – followed by a recitation of the Italian director’s greatest achievements. From his emergence in international culture in the 1960s with his seminal film of Romeo and Juliet to his legendary work on stage with such operatic titans as Maria Callas and Plácido Domingo, Zeffirelli became synonymous with tasteful, intelligent productions of the classics, all of which made him, for a time, the best-known cultural figure in Italy. It is fair to say that Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, didn’t always get it right, personally or politically.

Friday

Orson Fry

Don McCullin shows no signs of slowing down

“Life to me has been bigger than any Hollywood film,” says legendary photojournalist Don McCullin when we meet to discuss his latest exhibition A Desecrated Serenity at New York’s Hauser & Wirth. But when I broach the subject of actual film in the works - a big Hollywood biopic involving director Justin Kurzel – McCullin would rather I didn’t: “I feel ashamed even thinking about it. If you celebrate your success, it’s damaging. I’ve always done what I’ve done because I wanted my father’s name to be important. I’ve done my best to tread the path and behave myself because his name belongs to whatever I do. He didn’t have a very long life, you see. He died at 40 when I was 13.

Tuesday

Chris Mondics

Is conversion therapy free speech?

Kaley Chiles is a Christian therapist who places the Bible at the center of her practice. To many of her patients, religious faith is often more important than Freud. They see Bible readings, prayer and a focus on spirituality along with traditional principles of psychotherapy as essential elements of any treatment plan.  While outside the mainstream of psychoanalytic practice, Chiles’s technique combining traditional psychotherapy with Biblical precepts for years had been deemed non-controversial, if confined to more conservative regions of the country. But that all began to change in 2019 when the state of Colorado enacted legislation banning so-called conversion therapy for minors, a technique that aims to help gays change their sexual orientation.

conversion

Tuesday

Don Baton

How to fix the Met

The Metropolitan Opera has been in the hole for years and for most of that time company leadership has pleaded ignorance as to why. Just this February, general director Peter Gelb lamented audiences’ lack of interest in the Met’s slate of contemporary operas. “It’s impossible to predict hits,” said the man paid $1.4 million a year to, well, predict hits. In its 2025-26 season slate, the Met finally seems to be wising up – but it faces an uphill climb. For the better part of a decade, the company has been financially unprofitable, artistically boring and actively hostile to its audience. ‘It’s impossible to predict hits,’said the man paid $1.

Met

Tuesday

Katherine Dee

Nihilism is destroying young minds

Sandy Hook was supposed to be the tipping point in our national conversation about mass shootings. This wasn’t a shopping mall or movie theater. It wasn’t a high school. We could imagine this happening at a high school. We had seen that before. But we could not imagine anyone shooting six-year-olds. It was so monstrous that it seemed beyond the realm of possibility. Since that day, 13 years ago, the killings have continued and their settings have shifted. Earlier this month, a gunman opened fire at a Turning Point USA event, fatally shooting conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. In the past year or so, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow killed a teacher and a fellow student in Madison, Wisconsin, before taking her own life. Solomon Henderson opened fire in a Nashville school cafeteria.

young

Tuesday

Max Horder

Left-wing violence is being normalized

Something has changed in America’s psyche. Violence has become more acceptable. It’s not just that we’ve seen two attempted – and very nearly successful – attacks on Donald Trump’s life, it’s that a worrying number of young Americans cheered on those attempted assassinations and still wish they had succeeded. Since early this year there has been widespread public support for smashing up Tesla dealerships – and for shooting Elon Musk. An unprecedented 10,000 new threats have been made against Senate and congressional members just this year, according to Capitol Police. Applause for the actual murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December goes on, unabated, online.

luigi mangione political violence
Belichick
Christopher Caldwell

Why everyone is talking about Bill Belichick

In early May, the 73-year-old former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick published The Art of Winning, an autobiography of sorts, laying out the principles that made him the greatest coach in the history of professional football. It’s the book fans have been waiting to read for 20 years. Yet hardly anyone noticed, not even people thrilled at the prospect of Belichick’s move to the University of North Carolina next fall – his first crack at coaching college ball. People are distracted by his relationship with a 24-year-old beauty queen: two-time Miss Maine finalist Jordon Hudson. You can see why. Forty-nine years is an attention-grabbing age difference and Hudson is a force in her own right.

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

Why is America so unhappy?

According to the annual World Happiness Report (WHR), America has dropped to 24th in the rankings, down from 11th in 2011. The study found that Americans are not just disgruntled, we’re not very nice to one another, either. “The impact of caring and sharing on people’s happiness” was the theme of this year’s report, and researchers concluded that following “the golden rule” of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you brings contentment. “Like ‘mercy’ in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,” the WHR authors write in their executive summary, “caring is ‘twice-blessed’ – it blesses those who give and those who receive.

America