Culture

Peter Salovey must be fretting. The longtime president of Yale University has done everything in his power to pander to the forces of woke identity politics. He changed the name of Calhoun College at Yale because students didn’t like that it was named after John C. Calhoun, a supporter of slavery in the early nineteenth century. Salovey covered over or ripped out artwork across the university that a specially appointed committee deemed insensitive or offensive. He shoveled tens of millions of dollars into “diversity” initiatives in an effort to appease student crybullies. But Salovey has one insuperable handicap. He is white. In the great racial sweepstakes of the day, that is (if I may so put it) an insuperable black mark. Harvard understands this.

It’s just after ten o’clock and about a dozen activists are gathered in a hotel meeting room near Dulles airport. Christopher Stio, an educator with Americans for Prosperity, reminds the group for about the third time, “We are not normal!” He has a point. After all, who in their right minds would spend Saturday in a five-hour grassroots training session at a DoubleTree? The attendees here, though, have an important and timely motivator: improving their local school systems. Education policy became a top issue in 2021’s gubernatorial race in Virginia. Parents were fired up about the breakdown of public schools, from extended school closures during the pandemic to contentious left-wing doctrine being inserted into official curricula.

The pandemic of the past two years had many casualties — everything from lost lives to faith in bureaucratic and medical expertise. All-you-can-eat buffet restaurants were among the hardest-hit subsectors of the service economy. Buffets were already in steep decline nationwide by 2019, owing to evolving American preferences for fast casual dining and farm-to-table menus with Golden Corral as arguably the sole remaining buffet chain in America. By 2022, even that venerable franchise  — a Raleigh, North Carolina-based symbol of American excess and dependent on high gross revenues to offset narrow per-order profit margins — had seen its footprint shrink 25 percent, down to a mere 360 restaurants after losing eighty due to pandemic-related closures.

Chesapeake, Virginia  If you're looking for a Christmas display to rival Clark Griswold's 25,000 twinkling incandescent lights, the Chesapeake City Hall is a good place to start. The building lights up each year for its "Deck the Hall" event, a drive-through light display featuring candy cane-wrapped trees, glittering snowflakes and City Hall itself glowing red and green. The decorations were so bright I had a difficult time reading the signs that would point me to the Chesapeake Public Schools building. Luckily, it only took a few more turns before I saw two parking lots full of cars and a line of people sprawling down the block. The crowd wasn't there to take in the beautiful Christmas lights.

The After School Satan Club being hosted at a Virginia elementary school faced a temporary setback Tuesday when its unnamed sponsor decided to no longer host the event. However, according to the Satanic Temple, which hosts the ASSC around the country, a new sponsor has resubmitted the group’s application. Chesapeake Public Schools Superintendent Jared A. Cotton sent an email to parents on Tuesday indicating that the initial application had been withdrawn. “Today, the Chesapeake citizen requesting to use the facility on behalf of the ASSC has officially withdrawn their request,” Cotton wrote. “As such, the application no longer meets the requirements of School Board Policy. At this point, the approval for building use has been canceled.

Americans are truly excellent at four things: ingenuity, marketing, making chicken wings and inventing their own sports. The first three, of course, are also all foundational pillars of American sporting glory; it would be nothing without the wings. And so, as the US gears up to face the Netherlands on Saturday, its first ever appearance in the knockout round of the World Cup this century, I am duty bound to issue a plea: for the love of all that you hold sacred, please America, don’t get into soccer. This would be a huge mistake. While covering the World Cup in Doha, I’ve watched the US men’s national team, or USMNT as they are unforgivably referred to, play in a couple of games. And I have to say I'm pretty concerned.

For most of my life, I was a night owl. Up-and-at-‘em types would tease me for my sleeping-in habits. I’d go on the defensive by saying, yeah, you get up at the crack of dawn, but you’re also in bed by dusk like a nerd, whereas I burn the midnight oil like some mad genius tinkering away with the romantic moon and my fellow nocturnal beasts. I preferred, until relatively recently, to work late rather than get up early to complete tasks. In college, I avoided 8 a.m. classes like Joe Biden avoids news conferences. But deep down, I always longed to be one of those people who was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first thing in the morning, accomplishing half their to-do list before I had hit the snooze button for the third time. For years, I thought it just wasn’t in the cards.

The 1-0 Team USA victory over Iran in a World Cup match that was crucial to both teams seemed to take place in a different universe from the grand geopolitical narratives that swirled around it. This was nothing like the infamous 1956 Melbourne Bloodbath between the Hungarian and Soviet water polo teams, facing off weeks after the USSR's bloody suppression of Hungary's revolution. The stakes in Doha were very high: for Iran, only a win or a draw would see them advance; for America, win or go home. Yet there did not appear to be any tension or enmity between the players on the field. No screaming matches, head butts, or dirty fouls. There were few controversial calls by the referee.

The word “colony” meets with a sharp intake of breath these days, but “province” raises no eyebrows. How very odd. The ancient Greeks invented the western notion of the colony. But “colony” is the term the Romans applied to it and is of Latin derivation, from colo, “I cultivate, inhabit” and so colonia. The ancient Greek term was apoikia, literally “a home apart, away”, or perhaps a “home from home.” Greeks established these apoikiai widely around the Mediterranean, mainly from the 8th to 6th centuries BC, clustering along the coasts of Turkey, northern Greece, all around the Black Sea, southern Italy, the eastern Adriatic, Sicily, parts of southern France and Spain, and Cyrene, as Plato said, “like frogs around a pond.

Joshua Weissman’s number-one bestselling An Unapologetic Cookbook is misnamed. You won’t catch the potty-mouthed, long- haired chef saying sorry for making a mild ethnic slur against Italians or a penis joke, but in a philosophical sense, apologetics is exactly what he’s doing: he champions the joys of home cooking to an uninitiated audience. Weissman’s unlikely following is made up of the type of guys who consume a lot of quasi-educational content on YouTube and Wikipedia. They won’t buy the latest Barefoot Contessa volume, but they are curious about how things are made, whether it’s bridges or Big Macs.