paywall Archives

Monday

May 11, 2020

Him too: is Alec Klein a predator — or a victim?

Alec Klein has spent a lot of time on the telephone to people in jail. As a reporter, Klein investigated wrongful convictions and excessive sentences. He freed many unfairly incarcerated people. Then the tables turned. Today, Klein is a social and professional pariah. For more than two years, he has been effectively confined to his home after being accused of sexual harassment while working as the director of the Medill Justice Project at Northwestern University. Is he yet another victim of injustice? Klein took over the Medill Justice Project in 2011 after its founder, David Protess, was accused of fabricating evidence and manipulating a man into falsely confessing to a murder he didn’t commit.

Sunday

May 10, 2020

Mary Kate Skehan

Cooking for dad: real food is nothing fancy

I fled New York City in March for my hometown in Pennsylvania. I brought with me one suitcase, a good chunk of it filled by my favorite book: the bestselling Nothing Fancy by Alison Roman of the New York Times. I’m now facing weeks here with three shirts and an impractical selection of underwear, but I regret nothing about my packing. As my father drove up the turnpike to evacuate me, I had decided in a burst of wartime can-do spirit that my contribution to the household would consist in cooking for the family, and damn if I wasn’t going to make a go of it. There was more than a little self-interest in this idea. Like all middle children, I long for a chance to shine in front of my family.

Wednesday

May 6, 2020

Revd Steve Morris

Ghost riders in the sky

Christmas Eve 1944, and the airfield near the tiny Suffolk village of Lavenham shook with the noise of bombers from the 487th Bomb Group, part of the 8th US Army Air Force. The commanding officer, leading more than 2,000 aircraft from various airfields, was brigadier general Frederick Walker Castle, and today was to be his 30th and final mission. Over Allied-held territory in Belgium, Castle’s B-17 Flying Fortress developed engine trouble. Dropping back from the bomber stream so as not to slow it down, he refused to jettison his bomb load on the Allied troops below. He was a sitting duck. After repeated fighter attacks, his plane on fire and in a tailspin, Castle ordered his crewmen to bail out.

Tuesday

May 5, 2020

Bridget Phetasy

It’s gonna be a long day with myself

I wake up confused. Oh. This is really happening. I wasn’t dreaming that the entire world is on house arrest. It’s actually real. I’m disoriented. What day is it? What month is it? What is time anyway? I’ve lost all concept of it. Am I in Vegas? Oh that’s right, Vegas is closed. Today is going to be the day. The day I live my best quarantine life. I’ll practice guitar and spend an hour learning Arabic and bake sourdough bread and do some YouTube workouts. This is the 19th day in a row I’ve said that. Who am I kidding? I don’t even own a guitar. And where the hell am I gonna use Arabic other than when I’m binge-watching Jack Ryan? Again. I don’t trust the subtitles. I don’t trust anything anymore. Except the mirrors.

Saturday

May 2, 2020

Philip Hensher

Going both ways

Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for instance, may be at once one of the million speakers of Berom, one of the 64 million speakers of Hausa and one of the 1.13 billion speakers of English. The same pattern is repeated across the globe.

Wednesday

April 29, 2020

Roger Kimball

Wine is for lovers: mein Gott and yours

Ovid’s little how-to manual, The Art of Love, is full of good advice. Let’s say you are interested in a girl. Take her to the games. Sit close to her. If a speck of dust falls on her lap, ‘flick it off with your fingers. If none falls, flick off — none.’ The Art of Love is full of such useful tips, elegantly expressed. Practical chap that he was, Ovid knew that even so subjective a pursuit as love could be helped along by the mastery and deployment of certain techniques. Among the many impressed by Ovid’s handbook was the German Renaissance humanist Vincent Obsopoeus. In 1536, he published De Arte Bibendi (The Art of Drinking), an allegro poem deeply inspired by Ovid’s Ars Amatoria.

Bill Kauffman

What can we learn about coronavirus from classic cinema?

Batavia, New York With the first blizzard of every winter I take John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-Bound off the bookshelf, and though I never quite make it through to the end, when the snow is ‘melted in the genial glow’, I feel as if I have hunkered down for the week with the ‘Barefoot Boy’ poet’s besieged shut-ins. So when the Kung Flu — excuse me; I forgot for a moment that mild humor is now as verboten as sweaty raves and square dances — kicked its way into our lives, but before the local library shut down, I, like everyone else — well, like a tiny sliver of the populace — reached for Camus’s...Camus’s...oh, the hell with it: The Plague by Albert Camus.

Monday

April 27, 2020

Sam Leith

Heads in the cloud

‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’ You hear a lot of that glibly categorical punditry around the COVID-19 outbreak. Already, the progress of a mindless virus through the human population is being touted as the herald of the reorganization of the world’s economic system and the end of neoliberalism, the harbinger of a world in which nurses and shelf-stackers are valued more highly than investment bankers. Well, we’ll see. There are, as has been often said, two great things of which we can always be certain: death and taxes. The former is currently enjoying a bit of a moment. But the latter, sooner or later, is going to make the sort of roaring comeback not seen since First Blood Part II.

Saturday

April 25, 2020

David Prycejones

Dedicated to literature

The convention is that if you happen to meet authors and have just bought or acquired a book of theirs, you ask them to sign it. Particularly stuffy authors might refuse, but in most cases they feel flattered and duly inscribe your name and theirs on the title page or the flyleaf of the book in question. If the mood is right, they may add ‘with best wishes’ or something of the sort. At a superficial level, of course, such signatures are only the equivalent of an autograph album. There’s more to it than that, however. Added value perhaps, but association certainly. The human race lives by the stories we tell ourselves about our identity and our purposes, and that signature helps to make the author’s story part of the reader’s story.

Tuesday

April 21, 2020

Roger Kimball

There are lies, damned lies and epidemiological models

I think it was Sir Charles Dilke who warned against ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’. I live in a small, fairly isolated neighborhood of about 100 houses on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound. Most of my neighbors seem to be trying out for the part of Prince Prospero in The Masque of the Red Death. Our neighborhood association issues frequent, increasingly shrill bulletins. Most appeal to the authority of the CDC, warning us and our children to stay at home, wear a mask and, should we dare to venture out, to keep at least six feet apart from one another. We are forbidden from congregating in public spaces. We are discouraged from socializing with friends inside.

Monday

April 20, 2020

Paul Wood

What if a virus were ever used as a WMD?

Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump declares ‘I’m a wartime president’, echoing George W. Bush after 9/11. For both men, the jaw-jutting self-flattery was absurd as both had been draft dodgers during the Vietnam war. W. used the family name and connections to secure a place in the Texas Air National Guard, Trump getting a draft deferment because of bad feet (a condition that was never so debilitating as to slow down his golf game). 9/11 did produce two real wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, so W. had some claim to the title. But should we really be talking about a war against a virus? It’s a strange kind of war that drafts you to stay at home playing Xbox and watching the shopping channel from your couch.

Thursday

April 16, 2020

A.S.H. Smyth

Climbing the walls

Colombo In January, I promised a visiting Army reservist friend that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when I came down with dengue fever. But I’d climbed Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas 2004, when the tsunami struck, probably saved my life) and there would always be another chance to do it, right? Things change. Like everyone else in town, I was already bored and irritable from the first week of our lockdown when I saw a burst of British news items on COVID-19 nixing Everest expeditions, pensioners trying to keep fit indoors and some chap figuring out how many stairs it took to ‘top’ the mountains of the British Isles. Challenge accepted.

James Delingpole

Joe Exotic is an ordinary American

Netflix’s Tiger King has been touted as ‘the only show that’s crazier than the world outside right now’. Besides being weird beyond measure — a seven-part freak show combining meth-heads, involuntary amputees, firearms, sex cults, gay polygamy, cocaine, rednecks, attempted murder and, yes, more tigers than you could shake a flaming torch at — it offers fascinating parallels with the most important debate of our time: the eternal conflict between liberty and authority. As you may have noticed, this coronavirus pandemic has brought out the best and the worst in people and produced two highly polarized visions of the world.

Spectator Editorial

After the lockdown, the breakdown

We are told that ‘we’re in this together’ by people who can afford to wait out the epidemic in the way the aristocrats of old retreated to their estates when the plague arrived in the city. It is more accurate to say that we are, as this edition’s cover puts it, ‘together, alone’. The coronavirus has revealed that people today can live in ‘connected solitude’, as Sam Leith describes. It has never been easier to retreat from society if you have the money. But it has never been more vital to sustain real-world connections. We may feel atomized but the truth is we can no more insulate ourselves entirely from other people than we can from the economic effects of an unprecedented shutdown.

Wednesday

April 15, 2020

Niall Ferguson

Who will win the corona wars?

The COVID-19 pandemic came along just as Cold War Two was getting under way between the United States and the People’s Republic of China — the superpowers of our time — with the European Union and a good many other US allies quietly hoping to be non-aligned. Far from propelling Beijing and Washington towards détente in the face of a common enemy, the new plague has only intensified the Cold War. For the first time, China’s campaign of disinformation has been on a Russian level, with wild anti-American conspiracy theories being disseminated by senior Foreign Ministry officials.

Tuesday

April 14, 2020

Christopher Caldwell

Sovereignty rules

Washington, DC At the end of March, about two weeks into the coronavirus emergency, I looked out my window onto the street below and saw something that made me uneasy about the future of the country. There was a commotion down there. Two white teenagers were standing in the street with their hands up. A man — who looked and sounded like an East African immigrant — had stopped his car in the middle of the road and sprung out. I squinted to see what it was he was holding in front of him that made the kids look so alarmed. It was a pizza. The kids had ordered it. The car was marked with a Domino’s insignia. ‘Whoa, whoa, man!’ said one of the kids. ‘Take it easy!’ He was grotesquely corpulent.

Sunday

April 12, 2020

William Rosenau

The bloody decade: think America’s divided now? Try the 1970s

Late on the afternoon of November 29, 1984, Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk were loading boxes into a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan and a U-Haul trailer parked at a self-storage facility in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia. The boxes were heavy, so despite the autumn chill and the wind, Rosenberg and Blunk were working up a sweat. Both wore glasses as part of their disguises. Blunk had an ill-fitting wig that he barely managed to keep on his head. An FBI wanted poster called Rosenberg armed and extremely dangerous, and the Bureau wasn’t wrong. On the front seat of the Olds, purses held semiautomatic pistols — an Interarms Walther PPK .38 caliber and a Browning Hi-Power 9mm. They were both fully loaded.

Roger Kimball

Cab and conversation

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the US edition here. I had to go to Hillsdale, Michigan, home of Hillsdale College, to make my first visit to Healdsburg, the Sonoma County town that is the epicenter of about 100 California wineries and tens of thousands of vineyard acres. On this first, virtual trip, I dipped my toe into the Alexander Valley, the region north-northwest of Healdsburg. There are more than 40 vineyards in the Alexander Valley and I sampled two of the best, Silver Oak and Jordan. At least since Plato’s Symposium (Greek for ‘drinking party’), it has been understood that the essential accompaniment to wine is not food, though that is nice, but conversation.

Saturday

April 11, 2020

Jane Stannus

Salami of the sea

‘Seacuterie’ is a crime of a word. It looks OK in writing, if you don’t think about it too much, or if you’re the kind of person who approaches words like a scientist observing a new strain of bacillus. A linguistics student would point out that seacuterie is a portmanteau word, in which segments of multiple words are cut loose from their motherships and roped together into rafts of new meaning, producing such fantabulous and indispensable neologisms as ‘sheeple’ and ‘frenemies’. ‘Seacuterie,’ he’d tell you, is a portmanteau of ‘sea’ and ‘charcuterie.’ That’s all very well, but portmanteau or no portmanteau, ‘seacuterie’ sounds silly when you say it aloud.

Bill Kauffman

The guns of Alexander

Batavia, New York I’m motoring down Route 98 on my yearly trek to the triannual Alexander Gun Show, held in the Alexander volunteer fireman’s hall. I’m croaking, blissfully off-key, to the music of Gram Parsons, the Florida trustfund Harvardian (one semester) who countrified the Byrds and sought to bring together hippies and rednecks and truck drivers and churchgoers and groovy chicks under his Cosmic American Music banner. It’s a dream still worth dreaming.