Culture

Vogue is on a hot streak when it comes to elevating the underqualified ladies of the Biden administration, with Karine Jean-Pierre the latest to receive the magazine's star treatment. The women's fashion mag gave Vice President Kamala Harris the cover just one day before her inauguration in January 2021... a cover which was heavily criticized for its awful lighting and less-than-chic fashion direction. The VP's famously restrained entourage let anyone who'd listen know that they had not approved the image, and cowed the magazine into releasing their preferred shot as a digital edition. First Lady Jill Biden — a "joy multiplier" and "goddess" — nabbed her own cover that July.

The new school year is just a few weeks away, and that can only mean one thing: right on cue, school districts are once again bemoaning a “lack of funding.” It’s the same story every year. Along with notices advertising the local high school drama department’s production of Grease come headlines announcing the school district is in dire straits and schools will literally fall to pieces if they aren’t pumped full of life-saving funding, stat. Year after year, it’s the same old song and dance: school funding increases, and the next year they need even more. Why is it never enough, though, and where does all the money go?

Early on the morning of September 27, 2021, Middlebury College president Laurie Patton had a stone bearing the name of the campus chapel removed from the building. It was done deftly. I don’t imagine she showed up with her own hammer and chisel, but the campus groundsmen executed her orders. Later that day, Patton and the chairman of the board of trustees sent out a message to the community announcing that they had de-named Mead Memorial Chapel, which henceforth would be known simply as Middlebury Chapel. The de-naming was a stealth operation. Outside of a small circle, no one knew it was coming.  Picture a small liberal arts college tucked away in the American hinterland. Picture on the crest of a hill a white marble church with an impressive spire flanked by academic halls.

Next to the Harvard Club in Boston’s Back Bay stands the old Eliot Hotel, named after Harvard’s most famous and probably most influential president, Charles William Eliot. The hotel was built in 1925 as a genteel way of easing aging Harvard professors into semi-retirement. In 1939 it was purchased by a private family and became one of the city’s finer hotels, with many amenities including a top-of-the-line Uneeda Shine-O-Mat.  Any well-dressed gentleman striding out onto Commonwealth Avenue would be embarrassed to show a scuffed wingtip, and shoeshine boys were not exactly welcome in that part of town. The Shine-O-Mat, installed in about 1947, solved the problem.  The Eliot Hotel had its ups and downs over the years.

What would it do to the credibility of the American Heart Association to accept a sponsorship deal with McDonald’s to give nutritional advice? What about the American Lung Association taking cash from a tobacco company to talk about healthy habits? It sounds far-fetched, but that’s exactly what the American Academy of Pediatrics just did.   Healthy Children, the official parenting website of the American Academy of Pediatrics, has sent out a few tweets that read: “Are you considering a cell phone for your child? What age is the right age? Find out by answering ten short questions.” The link is a co-branded campaign between Healthy Children and the cell phone company AT&T.

Mental health therapists are supposed to be deliberate in making sure that their personal politics don’t get in the way of treating their patients. I was taught during graduate school that separating my “stuff” from my patients’ therapy was essential. After all, their therapy was all about them.   But that has changed in this country — everywhere from college-level classes and professional organizations, to therapy practices both public and private.   Earlier this summer, in a private group of mental health professionals that I administrate, I witnessed how the critical theory ideologues are destroying mental healthcare.

Juul, the once dominant e-cigarette company, is back with a new proposed product that it hopes will rescue it from the brink of bankruptcy: age-restricted vapes.   In their attempts to make smoking less accessible for minors, the company is prepared to make the simple pleasure a pain for everyone. Users first must buy a new e-cigarette that pairs with a phone app. They will then upload their government ID or a real-time selfie to the app and have a third-party database verify their identity. A unique Pod ID chip within the Juul device will detect counterfeit cartridges made by other companies, who have flooded the market with illegal fruity flavors that appeal to minors. To further combat the problem, the new device only comes with just one flavor—Virginia Tobacco.

Thanks to a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, firing faculty members for “lack of collegiality” is suddenly a bright prospect for college administrators eager to rid themselves of gadflies, diversiphobes, conservatives and other riffraff. The case involved Stephen Porter, a tenured professor in the school of education at North Carolina State University, who had had the bad grace to object to various forms of mandatory diversity saluting. Some details to follow, but let’s first roll around in the hay of “collegiality.”  The two members (out of three) on the Fourth Circuit who invoked the term were not entirely breaking new ground. The woker sort of faculty and college administrators have been fondling the idea for a while.

There’s a disturbing trend Cockburn has noticed lately that involves men d'un certain âge being inappropriately ripped. We’re not talking about the darling geriatric mall-walkers taking laps for their heart health; Cockburn is referring to the Jeff Bezoses (Bezii?) and the RFK Jrs. and the Sylvester Stallones of the world who are buffer than their aged bones might naturally allow. For starters, when you see Jeff Bezos’s fifty-nine-year-old “muscular physique” as he climbs aboard his “$500 million superyacht,” admit it: you’re disturbed. Before his billions, Bezos was a skinny nerd with the brawn of a wet spaghetti noodle.