Ben Sixsmith

Wednesday

Ben Sixsmith

Dave Rubin’s lazy new book

From our US edition

I didn’t want to review Dave Rubin’s Don’t Burn This Country. One Dave Rubin book seemed like enough — arguably too many — for a lifetime. Yet like a burglar who retires from his life of crime only to pass a mansion with its doors wide open and the glint of jewels beyond the hallway, I was pulled in again. Just one more job. In case anyone has never heard of Mr. Rubin, he is an interviewer and commentator who began as a mildly left-wing contributor to the Young Turks and then drifted towards the “anti-woke” realms of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” where his talk show became a hub of the phenomenon as he interviewed anyone and everyone who didn’t like “safe spaces” and blue-haired transsexuals.

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

The New York subway shooter’s private hell

A common theme among America’s spree killers is a fondness for rambling online. Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger griped about his inability to get a girlfriend. Troy Sesler made videos about anime that grew increasingly dark before he flipped out and killed his family. Randy Stair made numerous sketches and vlogs detailing his fondness for serial killers, his issues with his body image and his problems with his masculinity before massacring several of his co-workers.  The shooter who injured ten people on the New York subway this week did not become a spree killer, but only because of his blessedly incompetent aim. Frank James, the waddling sexagenarian suspect, was arrested a day after the shootings.

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

The Ukraine war is not a video game

In a typically baffling column in the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman has said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might represent ‘our first truly world war’ because, among other reasons, ‘virtually everyone on the planet can... observe the fighting at a granular level.’ This is primarily absurd because it implies that being able to observe the conflict from anywhere around the world is more significant than the fact that many millions died there, as women and children once did from Tokyo to Tobruk. But another question is whether we are observing the conflict on a ‘granular’ level at all.

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

The men who want to be castrated

From our US edition

Seven men were arrested in England last month on suspicion of involvement in a “castration cult.” Led by a man from London who apparently goes by the name “The Eunuch Maker”, the group is alleged to have castrated people and uploaded footage of the dangerous deeds to a pay-per-view platform. I suspect the use of the term “cult” is overheated. Certainly, castration has resulted from deranged theological or ideological tendencies. The Skopty sect in the Russian Empire believed in the removal of male genitals and female breasts on the basis that they represented the two halves of the forbidden fruit. (This must have made it remarkably difficult for the sect to grow.) Members of the Heaven’s Gate cult believed in castration as well, seeing it as a means of achieving ascetism.

castration

Saturday

Ben Sixsmith

Biden’s Warsaw speech was both baffling and moving

From our US edition

Poland “Biden fell asleep.” Perhaps a thousand jokesters posted this and similar jibes in the livestream comments as we waited for the president to speak from Warsaw. Thousands of Poles, and doubtless many Ukrainian refugees, were gathered around the Royal Castle in the center of the Polish capital to wait. Biden trotted out — old but amiable and very much awake. In fact, after spending two days meeting refugees, Ukrainian representatives and Polish politicians, he looked surprisingly sprightly. God help me for saying this but I have a soft spot for the president.

warsaw

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

Eating donuts in Poland as the bombs fall

From our US edition

Tarnowskie Góry, Poland  There was something faintly obscene about lining up outside the bakery to celebrate Fat Thursday. Granted, it made no difference to Ukrainians whether I ate donuts or scrambled eggs for breakfast. But I had a brief sense of how fortunate it is to live in a peaceful society. Ukraine is not so lucky. Missiles have been falling throughout the night and day, and Russian soldiers have occupied key positions, right up to the outskirts of Kyiv. Some of us expected Putin to occupy Donbas and leave Western Ukraine alone. That has been proved entirely, tragically mistaken. After such a long, mysterious military build-up, the speed and scale of the Russian offensive has been stunning.

poland

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

Fifty years of Fear and Loathing

From our US edition

God bless Hunter S. Thompson’s editors. Imagine paying someone a handsome amount of money to cover an off-road race and getting thousands of words of rambling prose that have a great deal more to do with drugs than with cars. It was a good time to be a writer, I suppose. The manuscript that became Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas appeared in two installments in Rolling Stone in November 1971. (Sports Illustrated passed.) Somehow, this rabid work of “gonzo journalism” spawned a book, a film, a graphic novel and a host of imitators, catapulting Thompson to the higher realms of fame. He never recovered from his own success. Fear and Loathing is easily summarized. Raoul Duke (Thompson) and his friend Dr.

thompson

Monday

Ben Sixsmith

Blackpill: inside the incel death cult

From our US edition

Young men are giving up. They are the losers of the endless beauty pageant that is online life, dating in particular. Their failure to attract women or find rewarding employment is the stuff of jokes: they are “incels” (involuntary celibates), basement-dwellers, forty-year-old virgins. Meanwhile, they sink into a digital swamp of gloom and isolation that leads to resentment, radicalization, murder and suicide. In their internet forums, they call this “taking the blackpill.” The blackpill had yet to be named in 2014, when twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger rampaged through Isla Vista, California, killing six people and injuring fourteen more before his suicide, but he was fueled by its spirit of nihilism.

blackpill

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

‘West Elm Caleb’ and the vindictiveness of a social media feeding frenzy

The saga of ‘West Elm Caleb’ will make you wish that you had never used the internet. It will make you wish that you had never heard of the internet. It is the sort of thing that would make Ted Kaczynski feel vindicated, if his prison guards forced him to look at social media as some kind of esoteric punishment. I will keep the background short and sweet, or, rather, short and sour. On TikTok, last week, various women in New York uploaded videos about a young man, Caleb, who had both ‘love bombed’ and then ‘ghosted’ them — or, in other words, made it seem as if he was intensely attracted to them and then disappeared into the night.

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

The Capitol riot transformed right-wing activism in America

From our US edition

The invasion of Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 represented the rise and fall of pro-Trump anti-governmental activism in a matter of hours. Its sensational success ensured its immediate collapse as the power of law enforcement came down on its head. Anyone involved must have experienced emotional whiplash. At the time, as millions of us watched on social media, there were smiles, and pranks, and a sense of deranged pageantry. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” seemed to be the mood, perhaps accompanied in some cases by, “What can we do next?” Soon, many of the participants had an answer as they were booked into extended spells in jail. One year on, the organizations involved in the “Stop the Steal” rally and the subsequent rioting are in pieces.

january 6 capitol riot

Wednesday

Ben Sixsmith

Are Bored Apes racist?

A plague of apes has spread across social media. Wherever you look, blank simian faces stare back at you. Their features? Sickening. Their prices? Equally so. The apes have brought in more than $1 billion (£750 million) in sales. Eminem, Mark Cuban and Shaquille O’Neal are just some of the famous names who own an ape. Where have they come from? What do they mean? How can we get rid of them? The Bored Ape Yacht Club sells NFTs. In essence, an NFT — which stands for 'non-fungible token' — is a unique piece of data stored on a blockchain, a digital ledger, which can be associated with a work of art, or music, or literature. Bored Ape NFTs are associated with images of, well, bored apes.

Monday

Ben Sixsmith

Tastings from an energy drink connoisseur

From our US edition

A common avenue for conservative commentators seeking an escape from politics is wine criticism. One thinks of Roger Scruton, Kingsley Amis, Roger Kimball and other such sophisticated, cultured men for whom even refreshment is a serious business. Millions of words have been spilled on wine criticism, though, and in the service of a drink a normal man only enjoys when he has finished work and has no need to drive. Who speaks for, say, the chilled caffeinated drink? “Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world,” said Hemingway. The same could not be said of energy drinks, perhaps, but then the same could not have been said of Hemingway. Our moveable feast is a varied one, and each element deserves attention.

energy

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

How is the new Gawker so dull?

From our US edition

Gawker returned in 2021 with the air of a drunk stumbling back into a party he had never been invited to. Leah Finnegan, the new editor, admitted that the brand was “toxic” but appealed to the reader to keep “an open mind and an open heart.” (What is this? Gawker or an e-celeb issuing an apology video over a sexual harassment scandal?) Me, I was biased. I hated Gawker. The original site was a hive of mean-spirited moralists. The average Gawker employee was the sort of person who would post revenge porn while lambasting people who mildly transgressed against speech codes. Their writing pioneered the sort of effortful indifference that still leads Brooklynites to claim that people are “having a normal one” and things are “like, er, yikes”.

gawker

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

Jimmy Carr’s anti-vaxxer joke isn’t funny

Jimmy Carr was once the smug face of shock comedy. As a stand-up comedian, and a host of various comedy shows, he used to joke with his trademark poker face about looks, disabilities and sexual violence. The Welsh, the Scots and obese women and children were also targets. When controversy inevitably came, Carr stood his ground. He caused uproar in 2009 by joking: 'Say what you like about those servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we're going to have a f**king good Paralympic team in 2012.' Carr said sorry for that gag, but he insisted: 'My intention was only to make people laugh.' Does Carr still hold true to that view? His new special on Netflix suggests his comedy has changed.

Wednesday

Ben Sixsmith

Party politics has no place in the Maxwell trial

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell has kicked off in New York and rich and powerful men across America and Europe are doubtless biting their nails and whispering to their lawyers. Ms. Maxwell is on trial on charges of sex trafficking of a minor and sex trafficking conspiracy, but others are being caught in the crossfire. Larry Visoski, the pilot of Epstein’s notorious private airplane, the so-called ‘Lolita Express’, told the court today that Epstein’s guests aboard the plane included Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. This is no surprise, given that it has been well established that Epstein was close to all of these men at one time or another. But such clear testimony has hit the headlines like an irate rhinoceros.

Monday

Ben Sixsmith

Kid Rock conservatism

From our US edition

Kid Rock feels like he emerged from a time capsule left for us in the Nineties, perhaps along with Dunkaroos and the decaying corpses of the Simpsons, who were replaced with inferior clones around the dawn of the millennium. In those heady days of nu-metal, Jackass and the Attitude Era, bored suburbanites and neglected “rednecks” unleashed their frustrations into jubilantly crass and confrontational entertainment that turned the raising of a middle finger into a kind of sacred ritual. Mr. Rock's breakout hit “Bawitdaba” hailed “the topless dancers” and “the...heroes at the methadone clinic,” and scorned “the crooked cops” and “all you bastards at the IRS.” Both he invited to, well, “Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy.

kid rock

Wednesday

Ben Sixsmith

The return of Thomas Pynchon?

From our US edition

The question of whether the novel is dead is one that often occupies those in the business of writing or commenting on novels, much as the question of self-driving cars doubtless occupies truckers. One’s attitude towards the question largely depends on one’s attitude towards genre fiction and Sally Rooney. Still, whatever its truth, it is inarguable that, as Joseph Bottum wrote in his 2019 book The Decline of the Novel, “art forms are not immortal or incapable of collapse when their social foundations shift.” To that end, authors have been attempting to innovate. The “alt-lit” community have been using social media for years, both as a source of thematic material and as a means of publication, and even grizzled vets are learning new tricks.

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

Down the QAnon rabbit hole

From our US edition

Lies, in many cases, are comparable to sparks. They might not be very dangerous in and of themselves but under the right conditions — or, perhaps, the wrong conditions — they can lead to spectacular fires. Consider, for example, how a chain of events that began with an anonymous message being posted on an obscure message board in October 2017 led, four years later, to hundreds of Americans gathering in Dallas, Texas, to await the return of the long dead JFK Jr. Back in October 2017, someone calling themselves “Q” began posting bizarre messages on the /pol/ board of the notorious website 4Chan.

qanon shaman jake angeli-chansley

Tuesday

Ben Sixsmith

Hillary Clinton’s new thriller is a paranoid fever dream

You already know that State of Terror, Hillary Clinton’s new novel, written in collaboration with the best-selling author Louise Penny, is going to be awful. You want to why. If the novel is a corpse then let this critic be the coroner. To be fair, State of Terror offers as much literary competence as you would expect from the sort of weighty thriller you’d pick up in a train station if you'd forgotten your charger. Penny is a pro. The pacing is respectable. The characters are numerous enough that you forget that none of them are especially well-developed. There are stylistic howlers — a Russian dictator has ‘a coldness that would have given Siberia a chill,’ which makes no sense at all — but what do you expect?

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

Dave Chappelle’s last special is no masterpiece

From our US edition

Dave Chappelle is a member of a dying breed — a remnant of an age that has been drifting into history. That’s right. Dave Chappelle is a comedian who does not have a podcast. I do not begrudge comedians their podcasts. (After all, I am a writer with a Substack.) As a comedian who has not blessed us with his every thought and memory, though, Chappelle has maintained his mystique. His specials are events, and his last special, The Closer, is doubly so. Critics and reporters have been focusing on its allegedly offensive jokes at the expense of trans people. I would like to shove these subjects to one side for a moment and ask the most vital questions. Is it funny? Yes. Is it very funny? No. Chappelle is a tremendous performer.

dave chappelle