Lyndon johnson

Thursday

Peter Wood

The unforgiving history of student loans

Republicans in the House are considering a bill to make major changes in federal student loans for college, and President Trump is floating the idea of making colleges responsible for borrowers who fail to repay. For decades student loans and their repayment are never far the center of controversy, but it wasn’t always that way. I grew up in the era before massive student debt. Student loans were available in 1971 when I went off to college, but they didn’t dominate the terrain like a Tyrannosaurus rex. They were more like Barney, the joyful purple denizen of PBS, who had a ferocious appetite for public funds but had not yet evolved into the carnivore who preys on the livelihoods of college graduates.   But the student-loan monster had already been born.

student loans

Friday

Antonia Fraser

The time I danced with Lyndon B. Johnson

There is general excitement among the legions of fans of A Dance to the Music of Time: next week a plaque to Anthony Powell will be placed on 1 Chester Gate, the London house where he started to write the many-volumed work of genius. I have a particular interest in attending, not only because Powell was married to my father’s sister Violet, but also because I took advantage of the relationship to lodge for several years in Chester Gate. This was when my parents chose to live maddeningly in Hampstead Garden Suburb and at the age of about seventeen I was beginning to go to parties. Go to them? But how to return? That was the problem. No taxi would go so far. I batted my eyes in vain. Fortunately, Violet was one of the kindest and most tolerant people I have ever encountered.

Johnson

Wednesday

Taki

Why the world needs Richard Nixon

From our UK edition

Gstaad The Speccie arrived just in time for me to read about the rudeness of one Lyndon Johnson, then vice-president, toward Lady Antonia Fraser. A later occupant of the White House, Jimmy Carter, was not as discourteous as the Texan, but in somewhat similar circumstances he left the poor little Greek boy standing alone surrounded by secret service heavies. This took place at a grand New York dinner party given in Carter’s honour by a real-estate lady, and I was seated with Norman Mailer who was busy trying to make whoopee with my ex sister-in-law, Betsy Kaiser.

Wednesday

Antonia Fraser

I’m glad Anthony Powell didn’t take my writing advice

From our UK edition

There is general excitement among the legions of fans of A Dance to the Music of Time: next week a plaque to Anthony Powell will be placed on 1 Chester Gate, the house where he started to write the many-volumed work of genius. I have a particular interest in attending, not only because Powell was married to my father’s sister Violet, but also because I took advantage of the relationship to lodge for several years in Chester Gate. This was when my parents chose to live maddeningly in Hampstead Garden Suburb and at the age of about 17 I was beginning to go to parties. Go to them? But how to return? That was the problem. No taxi would go so far. I batted my eyes in vain. Fortunately, Violet was one of the kindest and most tolerant people I have ever encountered.

Sunday

William Murchison

How we got to inflation

And just when everything was looking so tidy — the Ukraine war, a new Covid subvariant, mass shootings, a woked-up Disney operation — what should come along to light up our lives but 8.5 percent inflation? And who, I ask you, ought to wonder? Like acid reflux and obstreperous two-year-olds, inflation ranks high among human durable goods: always looming, never gone for long, even when it pulls back, and even then leaving its indelible marks. This, due to another human durable: the determination of governments, autocratic as well as democratic, to mishandle the pretended spreading of economic joy.

bewilderment

Wednesday

Mary Dejevsky

The UK’s very American political realignment

From our UK edition

The speed and scale with which voters, mainly but not exclusively in the north of England, have switched their allegiance from traditional Labour to Conservative has been described as unprecedented. Professor Tony Travers of the LSE called it ‘amazing’ and spoke of ‘a massive shift of tectonic plates’. Nor can the results of last week’s elections be dismissed as a one-off. The breaches in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ began well before the Conservative landslide in the 2019 General Election and what happened last Thursday is unlikely to be the end.