Madeleine Kearns

Thursday

Madeleine Kearns

In search of the quintessentially British afternoon tea

It is a strange coincidence that both my sister and I, born and raised in Scotland, have married Americans. I live in New York. Lily lives in Nebraska. But we were both in our mother country over the summer visiting family and keen to make the most of our British culinary tradition. There is more to miss than you’d think. Diluting juice, which the English call “squash,” fruit flavoring added to water. A Sunday carvery, roasted meat and potatoes, with gravy and vegetables, complete with Yorkshire pudding. Fish and chips. Real chocolate. Decent Indian food. Breakfast cereal not coated in fructose. Tea worthy of the name. And above all, freshly baked scones. Americans may think they have scones rhyming with “stones.

tea

Tuesday

Madeleine Kearns

Newlywed dining around the world

Nick and I were married on February 4, 2023, and spent our first Valentine’s Day at Le Grand Colbert in Paris. There, we had oysters and Champagne, lobster, scallops with a side of mashed potatoes (naturally) and profiteroles for dessert. This year, we’ll be at a wedding on our anniversary, and Valentine’s Day coincides with Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting and abstinence from meat for us Catholics. So I’ll be attempting a romantic homemade meal to celebrate both occasions on the unremarkable second Saturday of the month. Looking through my phone, confronting my strange habit of taking pictures of memorable meals, I was reminded that our first year of marriage has involved a lot of hosting, dining out and dining in. In March, my in-laws visited us in New York City over the St.

dining

Monday

Madeleine Kearns

Elliot Page’s memoir is a tale of tragic self-destruction

In 2010, the twenty-three-year-old actress Ellen Page appeared on the British talk show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Plonking herself down on the guest couch, and noticing there was a lot of room left, she announced: “I’m petite.” The affable Ross seized on this new avenue of conversation. “Do people comment on your height when you first meet them?” “They often comment on how incredibly short I am.” “And is this something you welcome or would you rather they didn’t?” “Oh, it’s just fine. I’m used to being short. It’s been a part of my life. And it’s something that I’ve begun to accept.” Back then, Page came across as confident and resilient. But according to Page, this was an act, carefully constructed for her by homophobes.

page

Sunday

Madeleine Kearns

Italian cooking lessons in the home of a Venetian chef

My mother advised that I get a plain wedding ring. Diamonds, she said, interfere with a woman’s ability to knead dough. “But I don’t knead dough,” I protested. “You will when you’re married.” I guffawed. And yet there I was, four days into my marriage, in an Albanian chef’s Venetian home, being told in no uncertain terms that while my husband Nick could keep his ring on, mine would need to come off. We had arrived in Giudecca, an island in the Venetian lagoon, by water bus, having spent the day in Padova. There, we’d visited the Basilica di Sant’Antonio, home to first-class relics of the great saint — bones, lower jaw, incorrupt tongue and cartilage from his larynx.

Venetian

Friday

Madeleine Kearns

Will Biden’s pot pardons pay off?

From our UK edition

20 min listen

This week Freddy speaks to Madeleine Kearns, staff writer at the National Review, about President Joe Biden's decree that cannabis possession should no longer be a federal crime. Is this a vote winner or will the decision end in disaster?

Tuesday

Madeleine Kearns

Porn again

The virtue of chastity is often confused with the state of virginity, or the practice of abstinence. For the Christian man or woman, chastity is more a frame of mind, an integrated approach to love and sex. While virginity or abstinence can result from chastity, they are themselves beside the point. Naturally, these distinctions are lost on the “sex-positive” movement, which tends to reject religious views of sex out of hand as repressive and weird. In her memoir Rated X: How Porn Liberated Me from Hollywood, Maitland Ward tells the story of how she went from being a struggling, miserable actress to a successful, “happy” porn star.

porn

Monday

Madeleine Kearns

The ‘conversion therapy’ canard

In 2016, the Obama-Biden administration concluded that “the quality and strength of evidence” for medicalized gender transition was “low” and insufficient “to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria.” Six years on, such skepticism has evaporated. In June, the Biden-Harris administration issued an executive order directing the departments of health and education to “promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” What changed? Not the evidence, only the politics. At a special Pride Month ceremony for LGBT activists at the White House, the president promised to use the “full force of the federal government” in implementing their policy agenda, from education to healthcare.

conversion

Monday

Madeleine Kearns

Children’s lives depend on parents’ rights

Yaeli Galdamez was a “girly girl,” her mother Abigail Martinez said in a recent interview. As a child growing up in El Salvador and California, she dressed in princess costumes and later had crushes on boys. But after she was bullied for her appearance in middle school, Yaeli began developing symptoms of depression. In eighth grade, she attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. Her mother was desperate to get her the help she needed. So as a sophomore Yaeli began regularly seeing the psychologist at her local high school. But the family says that her counseling for depression was accompanied by a focus Abigail knew nothing about: the school psychologist spent two years encouraging Yaeli in a male identity, Andy (sometimes Andrew).

parental rights

Saturday

Madeleine Kearns

The grim reality of gender reassignment

From our UK edition

Lisa Littman, a doctor and researcher, recently surveyed ‘detransitioners’ — people who thought they were transgender then changed their minds. The majority, 55 per cent, ‘felt that they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.’ Sadly, it seems, their identity issues were more complicated than simply being trans. Many of these individuals are now living with the consequences of medical treatments that failed to help their gender issues and may have caused permanent physical and psychological damage.

Thursday

Madeleine Kearns

Baby doomers: why are couples putting the planet ahead of parenthood?

From our UK edition

38 min listen

In this week’s episode: Why are a growing number of people putting the planet before parenthood? Madeleine Kearns writes about this phenomenon in this week’s issue and thinks that some of these fears might be unfounded. Tom Woodman author of Future is one of these people that Madeleine’s piece talks about. Tom has very real worries about bringing a child into the world. It's not only the least green thing he could do but also that the standard of living for that child could be severely limited due to a climate catastrophe. (00:47)Also this week: Has Boris Johnson brought Conservatism full circle? That’s the argument Tim Stanley makes in this week’s Spectator. He joins Lara on the podcast along with one of the MPs mentioned in the piece, Steve Baker.

Madeleine Kearns

Baby doomers: why are couples putting the planet ahead of parenthood?

From our UK edition

For much of the last century, people had good reason to wonder whether it made sense to have babies. Millions of young men had died or been maimed in the trenches, and then along came the risk of being pulverised by an atom bomb. Nonetheless, men and women continued to have children and after both world wars there was a baby boom. As C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948: ‘It is perfectly ridiculous, to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances.’ Somehow, we have lost this perspective. Back then, in the 20th century, schools taught young people to keep calm and carry on. Now, we’re teaching them to panic.

Saturday

Madeleine Kearns

How the SNP wrecked Scottish education

From our UK edition

‘The politicians aren’t listening to us,’ an exasperated teacher tells me by phone. ‘There’s nothing left for us to do but get on with it.’ The despair felt by Scottish teachers is a notable shift from the anger I encountered in the staffroom when I trained among them five years ago. That was the year of the ‘PISA shock’, 2015, when Scotland performed abysmally in reading, maths, and science in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Distinguished education professors at top Scottish universities were left reeling. One such academic suggested that the Scottish government had five years to fix the problem.

Monday

Madeleine Kearns

The alarming rise of Big Dope

From our UK edition

18 min listen

Young people are now more likely to consume marijuana than smoke tobacco. Is weed just a benign stimulant, or is Big Dope pushing a drug that could lead to a schizophrenia epidemic? Freddy Gray speaks to Madeleine Kearns, staff writer at National Review and the author of the cover piece in the new US edition of The Spectator.

Wednesday

Madeleine Kearns

Big Dope

Young people are now more likely to consume marijuana than to smoke tobacco. The social acceptance of tobacco is falling, just as the popularity of weed is getting higher. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 12 percent of US adults (and 22 percent of those aged 18 to 29) said they smoke marijuana. It won’t be too long, I predict, before we look back in horror at the widespread acceptance of cannabis use. It’s easy to forget that anti-tobacco researchers had to plod on at tortoise pace for years before they were able to prove what they had long suspected to be true (and what we all now take for granted): the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Tobacco was so rich and powerful that its lobbying suppressed the true dangers.

cannabis weed

Saturday

Madeleine Kearns

Lullaby in Birdland

In the dressing room at Birdland, the ‘jazz corner of the world’, a singer plants her baby on the counter, an actor strips off his shirt, and a cellist leans in to apply her lipstick before a light-bulbed mirror. I slip out to the bar for just a shot or two of whiskey and await my turn. Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf, a cellist and fellow Scot, asked me if I might sing one of my songs at her show. It’s part of the ‘Broadway at Birdland’ series, the brainchild of Jim Caruso, the club’s host, producer and performer extraordinaire who, he says, can either be ‘credited or blamed’ for having brought every flavor of pop, folk, country, theater and comedy into a club that’s legendary for jazz.

birdland

Friday

Madeleine Kearns

Babies on demand: the nasty side of surrogacy

For the cover of its June ‘Pride’ issue, People magazine chose the image of a newborn baby being cuddled by his father. Apparently, Wyatt Morgan Cooper’s birth marks the latest celebratory milestone for LGBTQ+ liberation: the right to biological children. His father, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, told People how grateful he was for ‘all the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people who struggled for generations and have died never thinking this was a possibility’. As for raising Wyatt, Cooper is not taking paternity leave and is hiring a nanny recommended by his friend Andy Cohen, another gay dad. His ex- partner will also be on hand to help since, Cooper explained, ‘it’s good to have two parents, if you can’.

surrogacy

Tuesday

Madeleine Kearns

Keeping up with the Santorums

Great Falls, Virginia Former senator Rick Santorum is mopping the floor. Mrs Santorum is stamping wax thistles onto the backs of envelopes. Four of the six adult Santorum children (plus one spouse) are scattered about the house, ‘working from home’. Bridget, the live-in helper, is doting on the youngest, little Bella, who has the genetic condition Trisomy 18. I’m in the paradisal blue room, behind a stack of books, typing away with my usual four fingers. Before the plague, family members would introduce me to friends as ‘Elizabeth’s Scottish friend whom she met in Uganda, who writes for National Review’. But when my sister got engaged to one of Elizabeth’s brothers, I became ‘Daniel’s fiancée’s sister’.

rick santorum

Wednesday

Madeleine Kearns

Mass appeal: Stanford in Stamford

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The exterior of the basilica of St John the Evangelist in Stamford, Connecticut, looms large and gray. Built in 1875 by Irish immigrants who mined and hauled rocks from a nearby quarry, its interior bursts with greens, reds and golds. The saintly lives in its stained-glass windows are said to comprise one of the largest collections of its kind on the East Coast. I was one of 12 singers to perform here at the American premiere of the Mass in G Major by the Dublin-born composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924). Stanford’s Mass was first performed at London’s Brompton Oratory in 1893, but, like The Spectator, it took its time coming to America.

stanford

Tuesday

Madeleine Kearns

Bowl food: childhood memories have inspired a new craze for cookie dough

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. In Greenwich Village, one block south of Washington Square Park, stands the flagship store of DŌ, ‘New York City’s first ever cookie dough scoop shop’. Opened in 2017 by an American designer with fond childhood memories of baking with her mother, DŌ is now so popular that it requires a special line policy, as in: ‘SINGLE FILE so that pedestrians can still use the sidewalk.’ Often, a line of hundreds of customers can be seen snaking around the block, eagerly awaiting tubs and cones of its buttery, sugary (and uncooked) batter.

cookie dough

Thursday

Madeleine Kearns

American universities are fuelled by amphetamines – so I tried them

From our UK edition

 New York A biography of Freud to my left, a black leather lounger to my right. We were 30 minutes in. ‘Well,’ said the psychiatrist, sitting up in his chair, ‘what you’re describing sounds like ADHD.’ Oh? ‘And what we normally prescribe for that is Adderall.’ There they were. Ten blue, oblong capsules, in an orange cylinder with a white top. 20mg, extended release. To be taken once a day. They’d help me focus, sit still and finish my work. It’s odd that I didn’t come across them last year, while a student at New York University. They say Adderall, the brand name for a mix of amphetamine salts, is the most popular among the ‘study drugs’ now ubiquitous on American campuses.