paywall Archives

Thursday

February 13, 2020

My vegan hell

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The children are eating eggs and bacon by the time I make it downstairs. A pair of frozen hash browns sits lonely on the plate at the head of the table. They have been cooked in a separate pan, one greased in vegetable oil rather than butter. I scold myself for the bitter glare I cast upon the urchins crying ‘Good morning, Daddy!’ They cannot know that the crisp pork fat and fried eggs lie on their plates only because Daddy has agreed to go vegan for the amusement of Spectator readers. The English never seem to tire of starving the Irish. At least there are potatoes this time around. Vegans forsake leather in their belts, wool in their coats and any animal product in their mouths.

Tuesday

February 11, 2020

Joseph Bottum

The way we read now

For almost 300 years, the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world — the device by which we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves. Something new came into art during the transition out of the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and the Reformation, and into the modern age. We might call it the turn to the interior — an increasing agreement that domestic life and drama are real, not merely minor activities necessary to keep body and soul together while we play out our real lives on the world’s stage. Think how rare domestic drama was before the novel.

Monday

February 10, 2020

Meghan Murphy

You can’t cancel the truth

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Those who want me canceled should probably admit that their efforts have been mostly unsuccessful. I have been banned from Twitter for speaking about the impact of gender-identity legislation on women’s rights, but I haven’t been silenced. Long before I began on trans issues, I’d already fallen into disfavor among those who claim progress as their own, on account of my opposition to the sex trade. The New New Left, for those not in the know, believes the invisible hand of the market will regulate the global sex trade, mysteriously transforming one of the most dangerous and exploitative industries in the world into something ethical, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Tuesday

February 4, 2020

Roger Kimball

Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address was nothing less than magnificent

One of the many things that F. Scott Fitzgerald said that sound good but isn’t true is this: 'There are no second acts in American lives.' Consider the life of Donald Trump. Five years ago he was a dubious real estate developer and professional celebrity. Now he is not only president of the United States, but he is, three years into his first term, the most ostentatiously successful president in memory. Donald Trump is a walking refutation of what is perhaps Fitzgerald’s second most quoted line. Possibly Fitzgerald’s first most quoted line is this: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.' That isn’t true, either.

Monday

February 3, 2020

Benjamin Riley

Cape of many colors

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The pretty, preppy town of Chatham, Massachusetts sits more or less at the elbow of Cape Cod, just after the swollen bicep of Hyannis and just before the Cape’s forearm tapers upward to Wellfleet’s freshly disembedded oysters, Truro’s schools of Subaru station wagons and Provincetown’s shallow-swimming shoals of gays. People who’ve never seen the Cape assume that it’s universally charming in an Olde Newe Englande sort of way: shingled houses and lobstermen, homely pubs with whaling paraphernalia on the walls and yellowed photos of Norman Mailer behind the bar. But, like any 340-square-mile place, it’s multifarious.

Bridget Phetasy

We’re all high-schoolers now

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Political tribalism is high school all over again. I moved every year and a half growing up, and one of the many side effects was that I became deeply distrustful of groups. I went to 10 schools in 12 years — three of them in eighth grade. It was hell. I was always the outsider. If I was acknowledged at all, it was as ‘new girl’ and, once they got to know me a bit better, ‘Bitchit’ or, my personal favorite, ‘Birdshit’. I went to schools in rich suburbs where I was ‘poor’ and schools in inner cities where I was the minority.

Sunday

February 2, 2020

Godfrey Elfwick

Speed-dating in Portland with Godfrey Elfwick

Portland, Oregon A polyamorous friend recently extolled the efficacy of speed dating. Relationship-wise, I’ve had a rather long dry spell, but I must stress that I’ve crossed this sexual Sahara entirely by choice. I actively embraced celibacy to holistically detox my chakras, because chastity, like meditating on an icon of Rashida Tlaib, clears the mind of toxicity. If you assume I haven’t had sexual contact with another human being for 17 months, two weeks and four days because I have failed to attract partners, you would be embarrassingly wrong. Your racist narrow-mindedness amuses me. So, whatever. Now that I have utterly destroyed your bigoted preconceptions, perhaps I can continue my story?

Chadwick Moore

The rise of cancel chic

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Last summer, at a secretive dinner in Manhattan, I heard a New York Times staffer regale our table with some tales. He told us about how a dozen or so people had, like him, faced the most perilous horror imaginable for a blue checkmark Twitter person. They’d been canceled. For some, it was a tweet. For others, posing in a photograph with a Republican, or clicking ‘like’ on a Facebook post written by a known transphobe, or perhaps expressing an unhealthy familiarity with the work of Milton Friedman. For the Times staffer, he deigned to question gender theory in the office and sent half his team hyperventilating into paper bags and the other privately giving him the thumbs up.

Wednesday

January 29, 2020

Luke Haines

Land of hope and Victoria: The Kinks’ lost empire

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Was there ever a more audacious album title than Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire? The name of the Kinks’ 1969 masterpiece could almost be described, in Sixties vernacular, as ‘far out’. But just two years after the lysergic hurricane of 1967, the content of Arthur was ‘far in’, even by the Kinks’ distinctly un-psychedelic standards. Not for them the late Sixties’ return to Americana of the Stones (Beggars Banquet), the Band (Music from Big Pink) and Dylan (John Wesley Harding).

Paul Wood

How far will Trump go in Iran?

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Get lost ayatollahs!’ ‘Death to Khamenei!’ The bravery of the anti-government demonstrators in Tehran is incredible, each one knowing that their actions could end with a bullet or a noose. I reached one through their favored encrypted app, Telegram, the interview arranged by a leading Iranian opposition group outside the country. ‘Elias’ — not his real name of course — is 25 and a postgraduate politics student in Tehran. The security forces were everywhere, he told me; everyone was very afraid. Still, he went on, ‘There is only one way this ends: toppling the regime.

Ross Clark

After Brexit

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The US-China trade war is easing; a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico has been passed by a large cross-party majority in the House of Representatives — largely unnoticed, as it happened in the same week as Donald Trump’s impeachment. The idea that the president is taking the world down a blind alley toward an era of protectionism is beginning to fade. So what now of the prospects for that other trade deal that Trump has promised: between the US and Britain?

Tuesday

January 28, 2020

Gavin McInnes

The mob and me: my life in the crosshairs

Millennial journo-geeks have declared cancel culture over. Tim Pool cites Ricky Gervais’s ability to host the Golden Globes despite a campaign to stop him and J.K. Rowling’s refusal to apologize for insisting there are only two genders. TIME magazine’s resident black Muslim Sarah Hagi also claims that cancel culture is a non-issue and tells us, ‘While some powerful men may not have the status they once did, they have hardly been canceled.’ She then goes on to cite Louis C.K.’s recent sold-out shows. She ignores the fact that his sexual transgressions cost him $35 million and forced him into hiding for half a decade. Well, as someone who has been canceled, I can tell you this culture is far from over.

Monday

January 27, 2020

James Delingpole

The Witcher’s hours

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. If you want to get really depressed about the future of television, consider this: over Christmas, The Witcher was Netflix’s highest-rated original series on IMDb, beating everything from Black Mirror to Stranger Things and The Crown. The reason you should be depressed is that The Witcher’s popularity may send a dangerous signal to screen producers: don’t worry about the script or the acting, just chuck in lots of monsters, ultra closeups of swords cleaving heads, arrows going into people’s eyes and girls in body-hugging leather fantasy outfits, like a Dark Ages version of Hooters.

Sunday

January 26, 2020

Amber Duke

The left’s real cause is muzzling its opponents

In February 2019, I appeared on the now-defunct NRATV to discuss anti-Semitic comments that Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib had made. Timothy Johnson, a so-called researcher for Media Matters for America who has spent nearly a decade lying in wait for conservative pundits, was watching. He didn’t like that I opposed the new de facto leaders of the Democratic party. In revenge, he posted several screenshots of inappropriate jokes about Jewish people I made on Twitter seven years earlier. The screenshots went viral. My mentions and DMs flooded with demands for an apology, calls for my firing and orders that I kill myself. Bookers reached out to tell me that upcoming television and radio appearances were canceled.

Jonathan Miller

French disconnection: how Emmanuel Macron went from savior to failure

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Montpellier, France As the new year dawned, it was business as usual in France, with transportation paralyzed, hundreds of cars burning in the suburbs, violent demonstrations in the cities, a whiff of tear gas in the Métro, police beating protesters. Train drivers, air-traffic controllers, nurses, garbage collectors, ballet dancers, opera singers were all on strike — and so, even, were lawyers. If the country is not wholly immobilized, it’s because the French are pretty adaptable and, to be honest, some only pretend to strike. My garbage was picked up in the normal way. Making the French swallow bitter medicine is hard, even in a nation of hypochondriacs.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Novel inspirations: H.L. Mencken, the bad boy of Baltimore

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In this age of dim digitized media in which E.J. Dionne and David Brooks are honored as distinguished columnists, the byline Henry Louis Mencken is virtually forgotten. Mencken, who died in his sleep 64 years ago this week after listening to Die Meistersinger on the Saturday afternoon broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, is unlikely to be remembered by the mediacrats who abhor everything the man stood for. Yet Mencken in the 1920s was one of the most celebrated figures in America, and even the western world.

Saturday

January 25, 2020

James Panero

Stayin’ alive in ’75

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’ was the headline of the New York Daily News. To which the City said to Ford, you first. When the Daily News ran that famous headline on October 29 1975, New York was teetering on bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford had declared he would veto a federal bailout. It looked like the Big Apple was stewed. The world had written off New York. The feeling was mutual: the city had written off the world. Between 1970 and 1980, the city lost nearly a million residents, over a tenth of its population. Still, New York attracted people who, against the reigning wisdom, would not or could not live anywhere else.

Alice Pfeiffer

French women do get fat

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Paris ‘And please meet Alice, who has brought industrial cheese,’ said our Parisian host as she introduced me to the other dinner guests. Imagine my despair! I had failed her, not to mention her guests, on the sacrosanct fromage. A fate worse than death. Food is a national obsession for the French. The couple throwing the party presented us with a three-course meal, all made from scratch using seasonal produce from the local market. To think that I almost brought a six-pack of beer.

Daniel McCarthy

Donald Trump, president of peace

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Groupthink is the last thing a country needs when debating questions of war and peace. But groupthink is what America’s pundits have succumbed to once again. In 2003, voices of opposition to the Iraq War struggled to be heard, with even the progressive cable news channel MSNBC silencing its most outspoken critic (Phil Donahue) and telling a right-wing dissenter from President Bush’s war (Pat Buchanan) that he was expected to represent Republican opinion — which is to say, pro-war opinion. So much for press freedom. Today, groupthink is on the side of peace, or rather on the side of caricaturing President Trump as a warmonger.

Friday

January 24, 2020

Toby Young

So you’ve been canceled. Here’s how to fight back

In April 2017, a group of students at Dartmouth College met with Dr David Bucci to complain about sexual harassment in the department of psychological and brain sciences that he chaired. The allegations didn’t sound particularly grave — none of the students complained of rape, for instance — but Dr Bucci flagged it up with the Title IX office even so. It was that office’s responsibility to follow up sexual harassment complaints and it duly did, suspending three professors and mounting several investigations. You can imagine Dr Bucci’s surprise, therefore, when seven female students named him in a lawsuit they filed against Dartmouth 19 months later, accusing him of ignoring the original complaint.