Barton Swaim is a writer and literary critic who was a prolific contributor to The Weekly Standard, writing extensively on books, language, politics, and culture. He contributed nearly 80 pieces to the magazine over the course of its run, with a particular focus on literary criticism and the intersections of rhetoric and public life. Swaim is also the author of 'The Speechwriter,' a memoir about working for a political figure, and has written for The Wall Street Journal and other publications.
For a full year, maybe more, Americans who follow national politics were subjected to the unabating use of a single metaphor: the “blue wave.” Would there be a blue wave? If so, how big? What would the blue wave, if it turned out to be a wave, mean for the Trump administration?
The ferocious incivility Americans have witnessed for decades has arisen largely from the left—and for good reason
For anybody who wasn’t totally committed to the proposition that Christine Blasey Ford spoke only the literal truth about Brett Kavanaugh during her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, there were long stretches during Kavanaugh’s testimony that felt like a show trial. For hours we watched…
At some point in the fall of 2017, when nearly every day brought news of another famous man disgraced as a result of allegations of sexual misconduct, I remarked flippantly to a liberal friend that the sexual revolution had not worked out the way we were told it would. “Oh, come on,” he responded.…
Barton Swaim, Luddite 2.0
The news that Pope Francis has revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church to designate the death penalty “inadmissible” was greeted in the American media as evidence that the church is at last catching up with the times. That assessment, superficial though many Catholics will consider it, isn’t…
Facebook and Twitter suffer blows while the rest of the tech market strengthens.
On June 3, at 6:13 p.m., President Trump was evidently in a bad mood. He had heard or read one too many times that he uses bad grammar and eccentric capitalization. He tweeted:
One of the last laws in Europe banning abortion, Ireland’s eighth amendment, was decisively rejected by voters on May 25. The plebiscite’s result allows the amendment to be struck from the country’s constitution. Once that happens later this year, Irish women will no longer have to smuggle in…
Every week brings news of some fresh campus absurdity—tenured professors saying and doing idiotic things, students cursing and attacking speakers while college authorities do nothing about it, schools proudly denying students due process. When news circulated recently that Penn State has forbidden…
Even the headline of the short essay in the New Yorker was meant to offend, and it did: “Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City.” The piece, by Dan Piepenbring, has been read, attacked, defended, and ridiculed by far more people than ordinarily read the New Yorker. If the editors’ goal…
The school walkout—or to speak correctly, the Enough! National School Walkout—took place on March 14. The point of the event was to call attention to the need for gun-control legislation. Students were to walk out of their classrooms at 10:00 a.m. for 17 minutes to remember the 17 people killed at…
"I don’t agree with him on that one," my stepmother said. “It was wrong, and I don’t think he should have done it.” Usually she took my father’s side in these discussions. Not this time.
We live in an era of gesture politics: walkouts, die-ins, marches, boycotts, hashtags, retweets. Our most strident political debates often aren’t debates at all but volleys of symbolic or metaphorical gestures. The point of these national pantomimes is not to make a rational case but to proclaim…
At the height of his influence in the 1960s and ’70s, Billy Graham was a man about whom nearly every adult in America had an opinion. He was everywhere—his weeklong evangelistic “crusades” packed stadiums around the globe; innumerable books and articles carried his byline; his face appeared on the…
At the height of his influence in the 1960s and ’70s, Billy Graham was a man about whom nearly every adult in America had an opinion. He was everywhere—his weeklong evangelistic “crusades” packed stadiums around the globe; innumerable books and articles carried his byline; his face appeared on the…
In this week’s magazine’s editorial, “Night Falls on Venezuela,” we took 1,200 words or so to describe the desperate state into which the country has fallen. To sum up: The people of Venezuela are starving to death. Bands of hungry looters roam the streets of its cities, the currency is worthless,…
On January 16, the New York Times ran a lovely piece on music therapy for the elderly. Kaitlyn Kelly, a music therapist at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Bronx, teaches residents, most of whom suffer from dementia, to write and sing their own songs.
Recently I visited a small university town. A friend recommended I visit a certain downtown coffee shop known for its exquisite espressos and Americanos. “It’s pretty hipster,” my friend warned, and it was. Everyone present was between the ages of, I guessed, 17 and 35. The men wore clothes that…
After the Trump administration announced it would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, almost every news report I read contained some version of the phrase “upending decades of U.S. policy.” The night before the announcement, on December 5, the AFP News Agency tweeted: “#BREAKING President…
The occasion of Murray Kempton’s centenary—he was born December 16, 1917—has attracted little attention. As a columnist for the New York Post and later Newsday he wrote more about New York than Washington or national politics, but one had a right to expect a biography or maybe a few essays or a…
In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) Daniel Bell argued that modern capitalism abetted two conflicting tendencies: It encouraged hedonistic self-gratification in the cultural sphere while needing sober hard-working adults in the economic sphere. A defect in the thesis is that there…
On October 31, exactly 500 years will have passed since a German monk named Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. That’s at least the tradition, but certainly Luther circulated his collection of brief contentions. Mainly he intended to provoke a debate…
On October 31, exactly 500 years will have passed since a German monk named Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. That’s at least the tradition, but certainly Luther circulated his collection of brief contentions. Mainly he intended to provoke a debate…
I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed reading a collection of speeches. This may be due to the fact that most or maybe all I’ve read are political, and political speeches, even those authored by literate and capable politicians, lose their significance almost immediately. But perhaps the more important…
In June 2012, when President Obama issued the executive order known as DACA—“deferred action on childhood arrivals”—he had a good moral case but a bad legal one. The order allowed illegal immigrants who had entered the country as minors—people who hadn’t come to America of their own will—to apply…
In June 2012, when President Obama issued the executive order known as DACA—“deferred action on childhood arrivals”—he had a good moral case but a bad legal one. The order allowed illegal immigrants who had entered the country as minors—people who hadn’t come to America of their own will—to apply…
For several days in mid-August, Donald Trump found himself ensnared in a bizarre controversy over the “very fine people” marching alongside neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va. It was a stupid thing to say—he said it several times, of course—and he was roundly criticized for his failure to condemn…
Most conservatives find the Trump presidency highly distressing for a variety of totally valid reasons—the ideological mishmash, the dysfunction, the lack of any political principle guiding the nation’s chief executive. But there is one part of the present era I can’t help enjoying, and that’s the…
Columbia, South Carolina, is known for its excessive heat, and that’s about it. The place has its benefits, and the weather is splendid for nine months out of the year, but like some other state capitals—Harrisburg, say—it’s not a destination. When I’m in Washington and tell someone I live in…
Last month, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled the city’s first-ever “cultural plan.” Although the details are murky, he hopes to tie funding for arts organizations to the “diversity” of their staffs and boards of directors. The city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, Tom Finkelpearl,…
Last month, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled the city’s first-ever “cultural plan.” Although the details are murky, he hopes to tie funding for arts organizations to the “diversity” of their staffs and boards of directors. The city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, Tom Finkelpearl,…
I once worked in a small state agency that, among other things, analyzed legislation. At one point the agency’s head hired three new analysts. One of them was a woman in her early thirties—call her Leena. Her job was to brief other staffers on budget-related bills. When she first took the job,…
I once worked in a small state agency that, among other things, analyzed legislation. At one point the agency’s head hired three new analysts. One of them was a woman in her early thirties—call her Leena. Her job was to brief other staffers on budget-related bills. When she first took the job,…
It's constantly surprising to me how promiscuously Americans use the term "expert." An expert is someone who has comprehensive knowledge of a subject or total mastery of a skill. We all recognize such people—the guy who repaired my roof last year is an expert, I think, because you can't perform the…
It’s a commonplace observation, and yet somehow still a shocking one: In all of human civilization, no subject has been written and talked about more than the death of Jesus Christ. A typical subject you might study in graduate school—presidential politics, say, or the poetry of William…
Occasionally a younger person will ask me for counsel on getting an essay published. Usually, I have two suggestions.
Occasionally a younger person will ask me for counsel on getting an essay published. Usually, I have two suggestions.
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Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s top political strategist during the 2012 campaign. He knows what it feels like to lose, and he can hardly talk about that loss with anyone who hasn't experienced a campaign from the inside:
There is something magical about saying a thing is something that it obviously is not. Children know this instinctively. Calling a shoebox a castle, or a pencil a scepter, can elicit momentary raptures of delight in a child: not primarily for the functional reason that it allows him to immerse…
In 2007, I went to work as a speechwriter in a political office. Although my boss didn’t care much for my writing, the rest of the staff considered me an authority on grammar and usage. I was the writer, they seemed to reason, so I must understand the deep magic of the English language. Nearly…
The great thing about this account of the artists and intellectuals in and around New Orleans’s French Quarter during the 1920s is that it upends nearly every assumption commonly made about the American South—even the true ones. The early-20th-century South may have produced the odd isolated…
Before reading it, I had already decided to dislike this book. I had assumed, incorrectly, that it must be another clever panegyric on something traditionally thought of as a vice. I’ve grown weary of volumes purporting to reveal the hidden virtues of (to recall a few works from the last decade or…
Modern academics are not celebrated for the clarity and felicity of their writing. One of the most important lessons a postgraduate student can learn—and if he doesn’t learn it soon, he’s doomed—is that academics generally do not write books and articles for the purpose of expressing their ideas as…
As recently as a century ago, Sir Walter Scott was known all over Europe and America. In life he had been the original literary celebrity, called “the Great Unknown” because his novels were published anonymously, although everybody knew their author’s identity. By the time of his death in 1832 his…
"David Brown’s multi-faceted Palmerston,” says a blurb on the back of this volume, “in its archival mastery, scope and insight, outdistances any other.” I thought I detected a note of ambiguity in that verb “outdistances,” and I was right. Brown knows everything it’s humanly possible to know about…
Absence of Mind
Recently I watched a 10-minute YouTube video purporting to be the “100 Greatest Movie Insults.” It’s a pretty diverse collection, though as you’d expect it favors American films from the 1980s and later.
Muriel Spark
Samuel Johnson
Driving home from work one night last week, I heard somebody on the radio talking about The Catcher in the Rye. I guessed—correctly as it turned out—that the author had died. What I couldn’t remember, momentarily, was whether his name was J. D. Salinger or Holden Caulfield.
Every writer, when young, expects to achieve greatness and notoriety. We hear our names taught in undergraduate classrooms and see our works--even before we've written them--bound in "classic" editions long after we're gone. The melancholy fact that success in writing is rarer than success in…
Calvin
The Pilgrim's Progress
For the liberal, using that term in the American sense, political freedom isn't freedom from governmental coercion but freedom from moral and social convention.
Kieron Smith, boy
Supreme Courtship
The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
Lectures in the History of Political Thought
George Orwell was the greatest political essayist since William Hazlitt, and like Hazlitt's, his essays delight even when they're wrong. Probably Orwell's most famous essay is "Politics and the English Language" (1946), a rambling and deliciously witty attack on writers who allow political clichés…
Browsing the children's books at Barnes & Noble the other day, I was exasperated to find so many books based on, or otherwise employing, metaphors.
Thomas Hardy
The Inner Vision
Spring and Fall
Conversation
An Introduction to English Poetry by James Fenton Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 144 pp., $20 IN 1798 A SLIM VOLUME OF POEMS appeared in Bristol, England, entitled "Lyrical Ballads," the anonymous work of two young and little-known poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It sold well,…
Newly elected presidents, their staffs flush with optimism and bursting with fresh ideas, sometimes invite a member of the opposing party, or at least an adherent of an opposing ideology, to join the administration. Maybe it’s a political gesture; maybe it's an expression of magnanimity or of…