John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper’s Magazine.
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New York When Will Smith strode to the stage and slapped Chris Rock, I was surprised by how many of my friends thought the violence had been staged to rescue the Academy Awards from its years-long ratings decline. I instantly recognised it as authentic rage, not because I know anything about Hollywood or Will Smith,
Biden is nothing if not spectacularly persistent in the one cause that has animated his entire career
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With Biden sliding to 38 per cent approval in the polls, it’s finally time for everyone to stop calling him ‘the new FDR’. That preposterous moniker was always misplaced. Biden’s ambition for ‘transforming’ the country has never extended beyond removing Donald Trump from the White House, inserting his patronage picks into important jobs and, most
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Like millions of other Americans I was riveted by the images of chaos and despair at the Kabul airport as US forces finally left Afghanistan, yet another sad result of a forever foreign policy driven by ignorance, overreach and hubris. But as distressed as I was by the sight of desperate Afghans clinging to the exterior
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How are China and Russia getting ahead in the great game of vaccine diplomacy? (00:50) Has the US press lost its way? (11:30) Why is Anglo-Saxon history making a comeback? (27:20) With The Spectator‘s broadcast editor Cindy Yu; journalist Owen Matthews; Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur; The Washington Post‘s media critic Erik Wemple; journalist Dan Hitchens;
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The latest absurdity in American journalism is the forced resignation of the veteran New York Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr for uttering the word ‘nigger’ in front of a group of teenage tourists on a Times-sponsored trip to Peru. It has been justly ridiculed by many sane conservatives and even some courageous liberals. Although the
I haven’t seen so many overflowing garbage cans or homeless people since the 1970s
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Just when it seemed that Donald Trump had finally committed political suicide — his notion of injecting disinfectant to cure coronavirus marking only one of his recent reckless absurdities — he says something off the cuff that makes one lament the sight of so much raw political talent going to waste in the cause of
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When Graham Greene impulsively took up film reviewing for The Spectator in 1935, he was not yet the renowned literary figure he was to become, and thus, like so many other writers in those parlous economic times, prosaically in need of cash. As it happened, the confluence of interests between a 30-year-old novelist of modest
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This is an Easter like no other – so what happens to Christianity when Christians can’t go to church (1:00)? We also hear reports from the New York frontline (12:20), and discuss just why humour is so important in dark times (19:40).
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Midway through Crisis of Conscience, the massive new compendium about US whistleblowers by the journalist Tom Mueller, I wanted to cry out for help: first in saving the country from the profound and corrosive corruption that is so well chronicled in this volume, and then finding a seasoned editor to cut the book down to
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In London to promote a book, I received an invitation to a secret screening of An Officer and a Spy, Roman Polanski’s new film about the Dreyfus affair. I boarded public transportation to a clandestine destination, somewhere in England, to view what recalled for me the samizdat literature once produced in Communist eastern Europe. I
The Massachusetts senator is a left-wing populist for people who don’t want left-wing populism
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New York For leftist anti-Trumpers like me, the Mueller report was initially a godsend, though not for the more obvious reasons. I belong to a rarified group that hates liberal moaning about Russian ‘interference’ in the 2016 election: we ridicule the claim that Vladimir Putin and his henchmen stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton because
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It is tempting to view the blow-up between Amazon’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos and David Pecker, publisher of the tabloid National Enquirer, with the peculiar glee some journalists experience when they cover a natural disaster: it can be exciting, fun even, to sit back and observe the flames. As political earthquakes go, the Bezos-Pecker face-off
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My father, an avowed liberal, taught me old-school manners: hold the door and give up your seat for ladies; stand up when anyone, male or female, enters the room or approaches you at a social gathering; extend your hand in greeting; listen politely when others speak. My mother issued similar instructions in French, and as
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While I largely agree with Coleman Hughes that racial quotas are counterproductive (‘The diversity trap’), he misuses Martin Luther King Jr to buttress his argument. King said that he hoped his descendants would ‘be judged…by the content of their character’, not by their standardised test scores. The grim pursuit of purely quantifiable ratings for intelligence
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The figure of Donald Trump looms over Sarah Churchwell’s new history of American national identity, which highlights the ugliest features of the country’s ingrained traditions of intolerance and bigotry. But it is the current president’s father, Fred, who first leaps off the page in a startling cameo appearance. On Memorial Day 1927, as Churchwell recounts,
