Media

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.

How did you find out about the death of one of sport’s greatest legends? For me, it was while I was cooking dinner and idly scrolling through my phone, waiting for the oven to heat up. I saw a screenshot of a TMZ Instagram story posted to Twitter. 'KOBE BRYANT DEAD IN HELICOPTER CRASH', it blared. I did what anyone else does in this day and age and sent it down my groupchat. I had no idea whether it was true, whether it was a malicious prank, or hack, or anything else. I just wanted to be the one to share it first. As news spread across social media and screenshots turned into shots from the scene in Calabasas, the only certainty seemed to be that no one knew what was going on.

In general, there is no point in reading articles you know are bound to make you mad. Life is too short. Read a good book. Enjoy a walk with your loved ones. Learn how to fashion something out of wood. Sometimes, though, an article crosses our path and we are gripped with the despair and anger one might feel watching a drunk driver veer across a crowded street.One such article is GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch's introduction to the magazine’s ‘New Masculinity’ issue. ‘When I found out that I would be the editor-in-chief of GQ,’ Welch writes:‘...most people said stuff like “Amazing!” and “Congrats!” But one particularly perceptive friend reacted in a way that I'll never forget. “Yikes,” she said.

Roger Kimball, Spectator contributing editor, publisher of Encounter Books and editor of The New Criterion, was presented with the Thomas L. Phillips award at the TFAS Journalism Awards Dinner in Manhattan last week. Below is his acceptance speech. I am grateful to the Fund for American Studies for the singular honor of bestowing upon me the venerable Thomas L. Phillips Award. You will find a list of previous honorees in your program. To say that it is an impressive list would be to dally with frivolous litotes. It makes me blush to be among such company. Had the fates been more generous, one name that I feel sure would occupy a place on that escutcheon is that of Joseph Rago.

It’s a busy and exciting week for The Spectator in America: we are putting together our first US edition. It’s beautiful and big: an 84-page book, perfect bound, with a glossy cover. We’ve been pleased with the number of early-bird subscribers, and I’m pretty confident we will be able to reward them with a great magazine, the likes of which they haven’t read before. The Spectator’s brand of journalism is unique, and we are confident that it can thrive in America. We aren’t publishing stories in order to tell our readers how to think. We aren’t politics bores. We aren’t interested in shaping the conservative or any other movement.

The Spectator, which has published weekly out of London since 1828, will launch a US edition this fall. Spectator USA has had a successful digital-only presence in America since the spring of 2018. It will publish its first monthly US print edition on October 1, only 191 years after the launch of the London edition. ‘Better late than never,’ says Andrew Neil, Chairman of The Spectator worldwide. ‘With our unparalleled success in the UK and our happy experience in Australia, we’ve decided it’s time to bring our unique brand of magazine journalism to the US. Like its mothership back in London, The Spectator’s US edition will be no dour, dull, run-of-the-mill political magazine.

Let's get ready to rumble! Two viral sensations are squaring off on the Twitter. In the blue corner, from Massachusetts Bay, Barstool Sports president and whole pizza-eating aficionado David 'Davey Pageviews' Portnoy. And in the red corner, all the way from the Bronx, it's fiery congresswoman Alexandria 'The Red Scare' Ocasio-Cortez. The spat concerns the hottest new trend in New York media besides developing a substance abuse problem and getting fired: unionizing. Nothing offers comfort to an overcaffeinated 23-year-old fresh out of a liberal arts college quite like a big 'union' laptop sticker on a battered MacBook Air. Springsteen would be proud. The latest cluster of journavists to attempt this strategy hail from sports site The Ringer, a Barstool competitor.

Dear Valued Subscriber, For a mere $39.99 a month, about what you pay your Guatemalan nanny, you depend on us for thought-provoking personal reassurance, award-winning arrogance, hard-hitting sycophancy, and up-to-the-minute coverage of Orange Man – who is very, very bad. The New York Times remains the world’s most prestigious Viewpoint Validation Service because we understand the crippling emptiness permeating the wealthy liberal soul – we are that emptiness – and you entrust us to make you feel good, smart and worthy every day. While News and Opinion whisper watered-down postgrad nothings in your ear, Style and Dining guarantee you’ll be validated on the outside, as well as inside.

As a young journalist in the mid-2000s, there was the occasional circumstance where I was asked to ‘prove it’: upon showing up to a news event I was covering, whoever ran check-in insisted that I show some press credentials. You know, those badges you see on episodes of Law & Order to denote that someone’s a reporter. (More often than not, the guest star probably holds it up and indignantly yells ‘Press!’ in order to enter a crime scene.) Working for a digital-first outlet – CNET Networks, later acquired by CBS – I never had anything like it except maybe business cards. To me, it seemed like an antiquated request; to the people checking my legitimacy, it was an obvious question.