Culture

"Oxford or Cambridge?" No, it isn’t just shorthand for which of Britain’s most famous universities you attended — or were rejected from. It’s also a question about your taste in weekend vacation spots. Oxford is an urban, bustling city, full of multiculturalism, wide-eyed gangs of tourists and a literary heritage that’s long since tipped over into cliché. Think Alice in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, even — God help us — Harry Potter, claimed for posterity because of its use of Christ Church as a filming location. But its Eastern cousin — decidedly not Cambridge, Massachusetts — is a very different proposition.

The frame for virtually any discussion of American politics at the moment advanced by the hair-on-fire segment of our media elite is that democracy itself is under attack. We are surrounded, according to the likes of CNN's Brian Stelter (peace be upon him), by those who would tear down the foundations upon which the government and ordered law of the United States of America stands, in a frontal illiberal assault on the institutions that keep us free. Fear the QAnon Shaman and his Viking hat! We all remember how close he came to ruling us all astride the floor of Congress.

Millions of American children are about to enter their fourth year of Covid-impacted schooling. In vast swaths of the United States, a child now entering second grade has never had anything resembling a normal school experience. No child entering kindergarten has a memory of life before the pandemic. A rising junior in high school has never had a normal high school experience. Over two years into the pandemic, we know that the effects of “long Covid” are basically nonexistent in kids. Following the release of a study published in the Lancet, Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in the United Kingdom, tweeted, “A new, large study on long covid in children using Danish registry data has some very reassuring findings.

A new Arizona law which funds all the state’s K-12th grade children to attend a school of their family’s choosing, public or private, has been widely hailed as a landmark education reform, although evidence suggests the benefits will go far beyond academics. Studies by the Manhattan Institute, New Jersey’s E3, and Connecticut’s Yankee Institute all show that subsidizing students to use alternative placements would save any state millions each year. But perhaps the most unexpected promise of universal school choice is the impact it would have on area real estate markets, simultaneously lowering the cost of what families must pay for a desirable home, improving the value of distressed areas, and equalizing the quality of life between rich and poor communities.

Each July, the American Motorcyclist Association — the policy advocacy organization for motorcycle riders — holds Vintage Motorcycle Days, a weekend-long celebration of old bikes. My father and I attend in whichever years the work and family commitments of summer allow for a momentary escape. Vintage Days is indeed an escape from all of these things, and in many ways, from the normalcy of polite society. This is because the AMA, an organization which normally stresses safe and courteous riding, allows Vintage Days attendees to cut loose. The event is held at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, a race track with a large campus that allows for a swap meet, seminars, campgrounds, bike shows and all disciplines of dirt and road racing. Those are only the organized activities, however.

I grew up in a northeastern state, and when I moved to Washington, there were plenty of culture shocks I had to get used to. The Metro seemed like a revelation, a magical train that whisked you under the White House and the National Mall (this was back when DC public transportation actually worked). Less appealing were the crime notices slapped about my neighborhood: I saw one once — I'm not making this up — that reported a real-life nunchuck attack. But the biggest shock of all was, and still is, the heat. Where I grew up, a 100-degree day was an event. That's all the more so because my parents didn't have so much as a window air conditioner until I was around ten years old. In the frozen reaches of Up North, this was a perfectly normal way to live.

Cockburn saw Papa John last week at CPAC — and he had some strong words about his old stomping grounds. John Schnatter, founder of Papa John’s Pizza, was ousted from his company in 2018 after saying the N-word on a conference call. Cockburn thinks he had it coming. Schnatter, who ate 800 pizzas from the chain over the last eighteen months, claims the company is now “down with Little Caesar’s,” among the gravest insults you can level in the pizza business. The Pizza Papa made it clear that he knows why the company is losing its way: "We built the whole company on conservative values. Conservative ideology has two of the most critical attributes: truth and God." Without truth and God, he said, the pizza had gotten worse.

I remember still the foreboding language and tone when I was learning to drive in New Jersey over a decade ago. First, you needed to earn your permit. Never forget that driving is a privilege, not a right (which only works if driving is an option, not effectively a requirement, though drivers ed isn’t in charge of land use). After your permit, you start with your probationary license. And in a twist that somehow passes civil liberties muster, you’re not even allowed to appeal a ticket issued to you during your probationary period. You feel a bit under suspicion until you finally get that license. Yet for all that, it’s still, basically, a lot of bureaucracy and paper-pushing.

Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons is the latest in a spate of streaming service exposés that seek to deconstruct the image-obsessed culture of the 2000s and 2010s. Netflix’s documentary about Abercrombie & Fitch taught us that the retailer was racist, fatphobic and potentially brimming with predatory closeted homosexuals. Hulu’s three-part documentary series about Victoria’s Secret teaches us that the company was sexist, fatphobic and potentially linked to pedophilic sex trafficking. Both take issue with the billionaire Les Wexner, who these days is more famous for his association with Jeffrey Epstein than his role in defining mall culture. (His retail conglomerate was also behind The Limited, Lane Bryant, Bath & Body Works and several other retail staples.