Georgetown

Tuesday

Solveig Lucia Gold

In Georgetown, the scariest part of Halloween is the virtue-signaling

Halloween has never been my favorite holiday, but as I was warned when we moved here last November, in Georgetown it is a serious affair. For the entire month of October, giant spiders scale the rowhouses, ghosts and cadavers dangle from trees, cackling animatronic witches guard the cemetery and the local bed and breakfast, parking spaces are “reserved” for ghostbusters and on every other block there’s a 12-foot-tall skeleton waiting to send my two-year-old into shrieks of delight. Then there are the pumpkins: every shape, size and color, stacked by the dozen in tasteful arrangements on every step of every stoop in town. How does everyone pull this off, I asked my real-estate agent, my one-stop source for all Georgetown-related trivia.

georgetown halloween

Wednesday

The Spectator

The top election takeaways from Trump’s beatdown

President Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States after a historic political comeback and complete annihilation of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris called Trump to concede this afternoon after failing to appear at the campaign’s planned victory party at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, DC. Instead, she delivered her concession speech there this afternoon. More on that below the fold. Biden is also said to have called Trump to congratulate him and express his desire for a smooth transition. It was a relatively short night compared to most predictions, with Trump sealing victory a couple of hours after midnight (although the result seemed obvious by that point).

Friday

Cockburn

Cockburn’s Christmas party chronicles

Shaker Heights, Ohio This year, Cockburn’s annual call for Christmas party invitations took him all over the country: DC, New York, even to one to “the longest-running libertarian-hosted Christmas party in Ohio.” What type of libertarians were these? he wondered, as visions of a drug-laced hors d'oeuvre platter and laissez-faire lovemaking danced in his head. “The party has spawned one marriage and three children,” Cockburn’s invitation said, confirming his suspicion (and hope) that all libertarians are also libertines. The Ohio party was advertised as “multi-generational,” and Cockburn’s would-be hosts helpfully added, “We managed to kill no one attending during Covid years.

christmas party

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Meet the man taking on the anti-free-speech left

For the anti-free-speech left, the most dangerous man in America today is Greg Lukianoff. The president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for the past 16 years, the free-speech attorney has now decided to guide the organization, previously focused on free-speech battles within academia, into the broader territory of free-speech battles across the nation. FIRE has been rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and Lukianoff intends to take it into space once occupied by free-speech stalwarts like the ACLU. He has a massive new investment from supporters to the tune of $75 million.

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Give me back my homecoming, Georgetown

Georgetown University announced Tuesday that it is canceling its fall homecoming festivities 'out of an abundance of caution' due to the spread of the delta variant of COVID-19. To my alma mater I say: trust the science — give us back our homecoming. A college campus, particularly Georgetown, is one of the safest places in the country to be if you are worried about the pandemic. Students, faculty and staff were required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine before they were allowed to step on campus this fall. The data tells us that the vast majority of hospitalizations and nearly every death from the coronavirus is among the unvaccinated.

georgetown

Sunday

Amber Duke

Arise, the cupcake

Do you know the milquetoast muffin man? His name is Charlie Brooker, he’s the co-creator of the hit television series Black Mirror and he thinks cupcakes are ‘bullshit’. ‘A cupcake is just a muffin with clown puke topping,’ Brooker wrote in 2012. ’Once you’ve got through the clown puke there’s nothing but a fistful of quotidian sponge nestling in a depressing, soggy “cup” that feels like a pair of paper knickers a fat man has been sitting in throughout a long, hot coach journey between two disappointing market towns.’ I’m usually quite skeptical of gastronomic fads — the rainbow bagel and matcha ice creams can go pound sand — but I’m here to defend the cupcake.

cupcake