The Scrapbook

The Scrapbook has had occasion to complain from time to time about the way in which journalists in the mainstream news media use the terms “conservatives” and “Republicans.” “Conservatives” hold this loathsome opinion, they might write, or “Republicans” are doing that bizarre thing, but when you…

New information from the Census Bureau confirms that the Swamp is still the Swamp. Between 2013 and 2017, the five wealthiest areas in America by median income were Loudoun County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; Howard County, Maryland; Falls Church City, Virginia; and Arlington County,…

New information from the Census Bureau confirms that the Swamp is still the Swamp. Between 2013 and 2017, the five wealthiest areas in America by median income were Loudoun County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; Howard County, Maryland; Falls Church City, Virginia; and Arlington County,…

The Scrapbook has a weakness for hardcover collections of essays and columns. Not many people like them, judging by how well they sell, but we boast several shelves full of collections by William F. Buckley, Joseph Epstein, George Will, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Christopher Hitchens, and many others.

For two years we’ve watched as highly educated liberals come up with one reason after another for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election. Russian trolls and hackers, James Comey’s memo, hopelessness among white opioid addicts, Donald Trump’s sophisticated use of a metaphorical “dog whistle,”…

Donald Trump is frequently faulted, and rightly so, for attempting to take credit for things he had nothing to do with. With Trump, though, you get the feeling it’s the habit of the real-estate mogul and showbiz kingpin talking. He doesn’t actually think (does he?) that the stock market goes up…

Much has already been said about Donald Trump’s rambling, semicoherent statement on the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia in light of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. We would only like to say a quick word about a single phrase in that strange document: “That being said.” It occurs at the…

We tried to look away, but it was no use once we read the headline: “Why It Matters That Alex Trebek Mispronounced The Name Of My People On ‘Jeopardy!’ ” The piece ran, fittingly, at the Huffington Post. The author, Ngozi Nwangwa—Shirley, to use her anglicized name—is a New York-based writer and “a…

The American left, as we’ve had occasion to remark in these pages before, suffers from a paucity of new ideas. Or maybe it’s truer to say it suffers from a surfeit of old ones. In any case, one old idea making the rounds among Democrats these days goes by the moniker “Medicare for All.” The…

Is anyone fit to host the Oscars?

A recent piece in New York magazine caught our eye: “Michael Avenatti’s Campaign Failed Because Democrats Don’t Want Their Own Trump.” Avenatti, as readers may wish to forget, is the trash-talking attorney and left-wing bad boy who made himself famous by representing the adult film actress Stormy…

In late September, FedEx driver Timothy Warren was driving through a neighborhood in Portland, Ore., when Joseph Magnuson shouted at him that he was going too fast. When Warren, who is black, got out of the truck, Magnuson berated him with numerous insults, including, according to witnesses, a…

Edmund Burke famously ridiculed the radicals and revolutionaries of his day for justifying violent and unjust acts by simpleminded appeals to abstract values. The abstract value he had in mind was liberty, which the mountebanks of France and their cheerleaders in England used to justify murder and…

A recent Washington Post report on the exploding market for school security equipment and services caught our attention. It’s now a $2.7 billion industry, a figure that doesn’t include the millions spent on armed campus security officers. Metal detectors, facial recognition software, pepperball…

Every year, the folks at Oxford Dictionaries announce a word of the year, and the word this year is toxic. “The Oxford Word of the Year,” the release reads, “is a word or expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a…

The Christmas season has begun, and ballet companies across North America are blessing their towns and cities with performances of The Nutcracker. For The Scrapbook, it’s the season’s highlight.

An item in the New York Times on November 19 brought our attention to the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest at Columbia University. The contest is named for the famed author of the 12-line poem “Trees,” first published in 1913: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a…

For generations, probably for centuries, Anglophone writers have struggled with the fact that our language lacks a gender-indeterminate third-person singular pronoun. In English, we have he for a man, she for a woman, and it for everything else. There is no option in the third-person for someone…

Are you running for president?” For aspiring presidents who haven’t fully committed to running, the question is almost impossible to answer in a way that sounds genuine. “I haven’t given it much thought” means “I’ve been planning to run since I was a teenager but haven’t decided if this is the…

The debate over gun control in America, if “debate” is the right word for it, has become stale and predictable to the point of parody—but a sad, bitter parody, not a funny one. That’s true largely, if we may be permitted to generalize, because the measures gun-control supporters propose after mass…

Last week, a group of anti-“fascist” or antifa thugs posted online the home address of Fox News host and former Weekly Standard writer Tucker Carlson. They then gathered outside his Washington residence and terrorized his wife, who was home alone at the time. Maybe these menacing shenanigans were…

Lots of books on politics come across The Scrapbook’s desk, and most, if we may speak with brutal honesty, aren’t to our liking. Often we can’t even make it past the titles. You know the ones we mean. Grand Theft: How a Band of Know-Nothing Media Magnates Is Stealing Your Liberties—and What You Can…

An item in the press recently caught the attention of our friend and colleague P. J. O’Rourke, who emailed to Scrapbook HQ his always amusing reaction. The offending item was this, from the Washington Post:British “MasterChef” critic and magazine editor William Sitwell is battling backlash over a…

We are pro-smoking here at The Scrapbook. We do not smoke ourselves, and to be honest the smell of stale cigarette smoke makes us gag, but we viscerally disapprove of the way in which nicotine users have been browbeaten, shamed, and hounded out of polite society over the last several decades.

The Scrapbook assumes most of our readers stay well away from the New York Times Style section. That abstention is usually a wise one, but reading the Style pages has its joys, too. We think especially of the long, glowing profiles of rich people. These pieces are satisfying, not because their…

Were admission to Harvard based solely on academic merit, Asian-Americans would comprise 43% of the freshman class, while African-Americans would make up less than 1%, according to an internal Harvard report discussed at a trial here Wednesday.” That’s the sobering lede of a Wall Street Journal…

Russian operatives may be feeding preposterous fictions to gullible Americans on Facebook, but at least our countrymen don’t believe in “statuesque superhuman blonde Baltic snipers in tight white outfits.” In his invaluable daily digest, Windows on Eurasia, the Russia scholar Paul Goble reminds…

One of the most underreported asininities of modern American politics is the existence of political “consultancies” that rake in money from candidates, fail to get those candidates into office, then go on to rake in even more money from other candidates. Consider:

Liberal politicos—as distinct from progressive ideologues—rarely express their belief that “family planning,” as it’s euphemistically known, can alleviate or even solve the problem of poverty. We recall President Bill Clinton’s first surgeon general, the logorrheic Joycelyn Elders, remarking in her…

News that P. G. Wodehouse will at last get a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey in London will warm the hearts of Wodehouse fans. For some years after the Second World War, the British government treated the writer with disdain, owing to the mistaken belief that Wodehouse had willingly…

A recent headline in the New York Times: “Democrats Want to Beat Scott Walker But the Wisconsin Economy Is a Hurdle.” The lengthy report examines the Badger State’s Democrats’ attempt to deprive Walker of a third term as governor. Their problems consist mainly of good news: The state’s unemployment…

The Washington Post ran an item recently about a private school in the greater Washington area that was hiring a director of alumni. Doesn’t sound like much of a story, except for the fact that the institution in question is Georgetown Prep, the school attended by Supreme Court justice Brett…

The Washington Post ran an item recently about a private school in the greater Washington area that was hiring a director of alumni. Doesn’t sound like much of a story, except for the fact that the institution in question is Georgetown Prep, the school attended by Supreme Court justice Brett…

PEN International, founded in London in 1921, is an organization of writers dedicated to the cause of free expression. Originally the title stood for Poets, Essayists, Novelists, but the group now includes every sort of littérateur, even humble magazine writers. We revere the organization’s…

Occasionally one reads an op-ed in one of the country’s big newspapers from an author, usually a Washington insider of some variety, who decided to get out and see the country he loves. The op-ed writer has taken a road trip across the country and wishes to tell his metropolitan readers about the…

Did you know we’re not supposed to notice the difference between male and female robots? In this month’s Wired magazine, we learn about the pressing question of whether we should assign certain gender traits to certain kinds of robots. Why do we care about this infinitesimal non-issue? Because…

Ordinarily The Scrapbook enjoys writing about the stupid things associated with modern politics and culture. It’s a touch irritating, though, to have to spend time and energy insisting that obviously true things are, in fact, true. Things like the differences between men and women.

Readers will know the background already: Elizabeth Warren claimed to be Native American while she was a law professor at Harvard despite (a) appearing about as Anglo-white as one can appear and (b) having scant evidence that her claim of Native American heritage was true. She cited family lore…

We suspect some of our readers are pretty well tired of reading about the Kavanaugh confirmation fight. So are we. Allow us to press your patience one more time. This week a friend of The Scrapbook passed along a nearly 20-year-old article from the New York Times, and we thought perhaps our readers…

The work of ruining sports continues apace. The Atlantic last week announced the hiring of Jemele Hill, a “wonderfully talented journalist who is famous for her acute commentary, fearless writing and encyclopedic knowledge of sports,” the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, said in a press…

For as long as The Scrapbook can remember, we’ve watched impressive Republicans run for the Senate in New Jersey and flop. No Republican has won a Senate seat in the Garden State since Clifford Case was re-elected in 1972.

Mormons don’t want to be called Mormons anymore. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” is a bit of a mouthful—a bit like “the United States of America,” come to think of it—but in August the president of the church, Russell M. Nelson, issued a written edict about using the church’s full…

We’ve been to some electrifying concerts in our day, but The Scrapbook is holding out little hope for a 13-city tour the entertainment firm Live Nation announced this week: “An Evening with President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

As if bureaucracies weren’t complicated enough. The New York Times reports that beginning next year, New York City will give people the option of identifying themselves on their birth certificates not only as “male” or “female,” but also as “X.” New Yorkers such as Charlie Arrowood (who, we are…

French politician Marine Le Pen is a great fan of Vladimir Putin, a social progressive, and leader of a political party that from time to time flirts with the anti-Semitic right—she’s not a woman with whom we can ordinarily sympathize. Still, she has a talent for stirring European elites in ways…

A barroom tussle? Drinking beer on a weeknight? That’s nothing. How about the time the 19-year-old wrote a theater review in which he lamented the cast of “perma-smile actresses whose only qualifications seem to be their phenomenally large breasts and tight buttocks.” What sort of vile misogynistic…

Many news organizations have disgraced themselves over these last few weeks in the unlovely quest for peccadillos in Brett Kavanaugh’s youth, but the New York Times has outshone the rest. A story on October 2 brought us finally to the point of self-parody. The lede was breathtaking in its…

Ralph Taylor, owner of the Orion Insurance Group in Lynnwood, Washington, is decidedly white. Several years ago, though, he took a DNA ancestry test that determined he was only 90 percent Caucasian. He was also, according to the ancestry test, 6 percent “indigenous American” and 4 percent…

Given our inveterate mocking of the New York Times, we’d be remiss if we didn’t draw attention to an incisive op-ed published in the paper’s September 20 edition by the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins. The headline: “The Liberalism of the Religious Right.”

Readers of The Scrapbook will remember New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, author of some of the most widely praised and dumbest columns ever written. Quindlen stepped down from the Times in 1995 in order to pursue a career as a writer of sentimental novels, and it has to be said she’s done…

Officials in Fairfax County, Va., recently wondered why so few college students take advantage of the county’s absentee ballot program, so they did what government officials normally do when they encounter a perplexing question: They convened a “focus group.” That’s a fancy-sounding way of saying:…

The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.” So thundered a Washington Post report on August 29. There’s just one problem: It isn’t…

Robert Francis O’Rourke is running against Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. You may know the challenger better by the name Beto O’Rourke. The Scrapbook is generally reluctant to bring up the names and nicknames of public figures (after what Idaho senator Mike Crapo must have endured in middle school, he’ll…

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, aka the richest guy alive, recently announced plans to donate $2 billion to create a network of preschools. “The child will be the customer,” says Bezos. Maybe we’re old-fashioned, but the idea of pupils as “customers” doesn’t lead us to believe that Bezos has a firm…

On Tuesday, September 11, as Hurricane Florence lumbered through the Atlantic toward the Carolinas, we received a text from a Weekly Standard colleague asking how long it would take for the hurricane to become political. Somebody would blame Trump or the GOP for something—it was just a matter of…

The Scrapbook has never been to South Yorkshire, England, but we are eager to go. The place is evidently so free of crime that the police have nothing to do but make sure people aren’t jerks to each other. The South Yorkshire Police recently advised residents on the subject of “hate crimes”: “In…

Last week, Barack Obama finally did what Democratic activists had been desperately hoping he would do—he reproached his successor ahead of the midterm election. It was a long, discursive oration, as Obama’s orations usually are, and it contained lots of impromptu gibes and derisive harrumphs that…

Antiquarian-minded visitors to Georgetown may have heard of the Halcyon House, a mansion on Prospect Street. The majestic Federal-style structure was built in the 1780s by Benjamin Stoddert, the first secretary of the Navy, and dramatically expanded in the 1900s by Albert Clemens, the nephew of…

Antiquarian-minded visitors to Georgetown may have heard of the Halcyon House, a mansion on Prospect Street. The majestic Federal-style structure was built in the 1780s by Benjamin Stoddert, the first secretary of the Navy, and dramatically expanded in the 1900s by Albert Clemens, the nephew of…

The spectacle of protesters jumping out of their chairs at regular intervals to shout incoherent slogans during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings did not lend itself to the view that those who oppose the judge’s confirmation are especially clearheaded in their beliefs. Their antics, if we may speak…

In our latter years The Scrapbook has become rather a sucker for books about Ronald Reagan. We own a couple of shelves of them and admit to enjoying even the mediocre ones, so highly do we esteem the modern era’s greatest president.

On August 30, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an unsigned editorial criticizing an editorial the same paper ran a century before. The offending piece: “Jass and Jassism,” a denunciation of jazz music published in 1918. “Why is the jass music, and, therefore, the jass band?” New Orleans’s paper…

We live in an age of hyper-trivial faux-controversies, almost all of them generated (if we speak just a little uncharitably) by overeducated progressives and left-wing politicos. If you follow politics on Twitter, you’ll encounter so many of these moronic spats that you may be tempted to despair of…

Virginia GOP Senate nominee Corey Stewart is one of Donald Trump’s most consistent and fervent supporters. The native Minnesotan is known for his sympathy for conspiracy theories and for his flirtations with the “alt right.” Conservatives in Virginia have watched with amazement as Stewart cheers…

Sally Rooney is a young Marxist novelist from Ireland, the author of Conversations with Friends, a celebrated debut novel. She has just published a second novel, Normal People, and already it’s a bestseller. Both are being adapted for the big screen. Rooney is among the most successful millennial…

Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, has signed a deal with Nike in which he will appear in some of the company’s “Just Do It” advertisements. Kaepernick of course pioneered the practice of protesting racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem. The…

This spring, not long after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, the Department of Education released a report showing that during the 2015-2016 school year there were an astounding 240 school shootings. The figure has been repeated endlessly by gun control activists and…

On the topic of studies and premature deaths, a new report from the British medical journal the Lancet says that no amount of alcohol is safe for your overall health. Worldwide, alcohol increases the risk of premature death for both men and women and is responsible for a full tenth of all deaths.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist neophyte who won a New York Democratic congressional primary in June, is young and attractive and has a compelling personal story. She likes to remind the public of her working-class roots, and rightly so. “The restaurant I used to work at is closing its…

Hearings on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh are set to begin in early September, so expect several rounds of breathless revelations about the man’s past. Consider an AP story this week headlined “At Yale, Kavanaugh Stayed Out of Debates at a Time of Many.” The story’s lead: “It was the 1980s…

Great news for lovers of cardboard animals. Boxes of Nabisco animal crackers will no longer feature images of cartoon animals in circus cages. Beginning this week, the animals will appear roaming free: The zebra, elephant, lion, giraffe, and gorilla have escaped their cages and are enjoying…

In the runup to the passage of last year’s tax reform bill, readers may recall, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers predicted that 10,000 people would die every year as a direct result of the bill’s passage. He had in mind the bill’s provision repealing the individual insurance mandate…

The death of Sir Vidia Naipaul on August 11 will generate plenty of retrospective monographs and essays, most of them rightly laudatory, some of them less so. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, the descendant of Indian immigrants. In his teens he won a government scholarship to study abroad, and he…

The Scrapbook picks on the New York Times quite a lot. Maybe too much. But it’s hard not to. We so often find fatuous and preposterous material that we simply cannot help passing it along to our readers. One such item appeared in the August 16 edition of the paper—or so we thought. Headlined…

The young poets who stand out have helped make race and sexuality and gender the red-hot centers of current poetry, and they push past as many boundaries as they can. They strain to think anew about selfhood and group membership. Drawing on eclectic traditions, they mine the complexity latent in…

The Scrapbook spent its August break last week tuning out the news and turning to a pile of books we’ve been meaning to read—from the old (Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South and Gringos, which we enthusiastically and unreservedly recommend) to the new, our friend Irwin Stelzer’s fascinating peek…

The French have made lots of important contributions to America. No one denies this. The Statue of Liberty. Lafayette. Tony Parker. French fries—though these were possibly ripped off from Belgium.

A July 27 game between the Houston Astros and the Texas Rangers featured a few minutes of pointless delight. Chris White, a Marine veteran, made the unusual decision to remove his trousers and shirt, brandish his Stars-and-Stripes-themed underwear—silkies is the military term—and sprint across the…

Is The Scrapbook the only one who’s grown weary of the word team used where it doesn’t belong—outside the world of sports? For a year or two after Olympic teams were called Team USA or Team France, it was cute to refer to your company or office as “team” this or that. Then politicians got in on the…

In Europe and North America, museums just can’t win. It takes wealthy people and large corporations to keep them operating, but left-wing artists and intellectuals don’t like wealthy people and large companies.

Election season is upon us, and you know what that means—idiotic trickery dreamed up by campaign hacks and political consultants.

The fact-checking industry has grown tremendously in recent years, and mostly for good reason. Half-truths, outrageous rumors, and outright fabrications are common enough without the Internet. They are ubiquitous online. When fact-checking is well done (by, for instance, Glenn Kessler at the…

Washington is full of people who make self-assured pronouncements about what will happen next week or next year. We often caution against this tendency, thinking as we do of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s argument to his aides for picking the unscrupulous Lyndon Johnson as his running…

In early July, the Nation magazine published a 14-line poem, “How-To,” by Anders Carlson-Wee. The Scrapbook holds rather old-school opinions on the matter of poetic form, and we found it hard to scan “How-To.” Still, the poem’s language is incisive, it has a distinctive rhythm, and it ends with a…

Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, now much in the news as the president’s legal counsel, recently gained attention (as if he needed more) by tweeting a single word: You

Another prolix online headline recently caught our attention, this one at the Fix, the Washington Post’s popular politics blog: “This may be the biggest shoe to drop from the Trump-Michael Cohen tape.” The piece argued that the subpoena of Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg is likely an…

The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is proving a hard thing for liberals and progressives to counter. The man’s qualifications are nearly unparalleled; he is highly regarded by judges and law professors at elite institutions; and so far the efforts to find unflattering…

What do most people do when they see a naked or nearly naked person in public? Most probably experience a moment of shock, point and laugh, call the police, or all of the above. Ask Eric Stagno. After seeing him parade around naked in a Planet Fitness gym doing “yoga-like” exercises, alarmed gym…

Rob Rogers, cartoonist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for 25 years, was recently fired. Rogers was known for drawing acerbically satirical cartoons about Donald Trump. It follows, at least in the minds of the #resistance, that he was fired because he was anti-Trump. The Scrapbook knows about this…

One of the annoyances of modern life is the way in which highly technical studies in medical journals are reported in the media as though their practical relevance were immediate. Journalists who don’t grasp the nuances of the study’s conclusions and qualifications report that white wine may cause…

The left-wing organization MoveOn subjected itself to ridicule this week by posting a message to its social media accounts: “Low wages are violence. Knowingly letting people suffer is violence. It must end.” The attached graphic had to do with the minimum wage, which the staff at MoveOn in their…

Daily Show host Trevor Noah has expressed the novel view that France’s recent victory in the World Cup is an “African victory,” since most of the players on the team are of African descent. This didn’t go over well with the French ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, who wrote a terse…

“‘Having a vagina doesn’t make a woman,’ she said in an interview. ‘Even if many people don’t want to see me as a woman . . .’ ” (“Aiming for Miss Universe, and Transgender Rights,” New York Times, July 14).

By historical standards, security and quality of life in 21st-century America are remarkably high. We may be on a slow decline, but the journey to the bottom is a very long one. And despite daily predictions of doom, Donald Trump has yet to turn the country into a hellscape where the few citizens…

For more than a year and a half now, hundreds of intellectuals and historians and commentators have written books and articles and delivered lectures on the origins and meaning of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. A foreign observer could be forgiven for thinking every writer on politics and culture in…

The Scrapbook is now at the middle station of life, and for as long as we can remember, bright people have been devising clever ways to get kids to read books. “Educational” television programs that encourage reading, ad campaigns promoting book-reading, kids’ books full of flatulent humor, book…

An op-ed in the New York Times on July 14 caught our attention: “We Pick a Party, Then a Church.” The author, Michele Margolis, an assistant professor of political science at Penn, contends that the common assumption about religious and political affiliations in America—that party affiliations are…

"How will you cover 2018 without the repeat of the 2016 errors and continue on with what I have read as really strong journalism since 2017? . . .

It’s July. The news tends to be less momentous than at other times. The Scrapbook understands that. But the media’s sudden fixation on individual acts of “protest” has us wishing for more stories about kids giving back to the community and celebrities saying dumb things.

One of the tragedies of American life, as we’ve had occasion to lament in these pages before, is the slow decline of local journalism. The Internet and social media seem to meet many people’s need to stay connected to their communities, news organizations are widely reviled by a polarized public,…

The line between politics and entertainment grows blurrier with each passing hour. Consider: As the battle over President Trump’s second Supreme Court nomination began to take shape, millions of conservatives in search of expert analysis tuned into . . . Tomi Lahren.

With the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy and nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to take his place, liberal academics and commentators are panicked, so sure are they that a more conservative Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. Believing as we do that Roe was a moral and constitutional…

In this month’s GQ magazine is a long essay we knew we shouldn’t read, but we couldn’t help ourselves: “Jimmy Carter for Higher Office in ’18,” by Michael Paterniti.

We were saddened this week to learn of the death of Donald Hall, one of the great formalist poets to arise in the second half of the 20th century. Hall wrote scores of works. He was a talented playwright, a superb memoirist, and an omnicompetent anthologist.

“And thanks to my groomer and stylist, Marvin ‘Marv the Barb’ Church, the world’s best barber, and Ms. Carolyn Brown, who squires me in a marvelous manner. I’m grateful to the remarkable group of artists and activists who sat for interviews for this book, including Harry Belafonte (thanks for the…

Sexism, however we define it, is still a problem. And we reckon it always will be, in a fallen world. Still, a great variety of metrics show that women in America are now doing better than men in an impressive range of areas, from educational achievement to career success. But we’ve tended to…

Readers of the Wall Street Journal’s Review section may remember an explosive essay that ran in its pages in 2011: “Darkness Too Visible,” by the paper’s children’s books columnist, Meghan Cox Gurdon. In that essay, Gurdon surveyed an array of popular books published in what’s called the YA…

Few heroes of the past can escape the censure of today’s bigotry police. Every week, it seems, brings news that some heretofore revered figure said or wrote something we enlightened postmoderns consider untoward, obliging us to qualify any subsequent expressions of admiration.

In April, PBS announced that it will reboot Firing Line, the long-running public affairs television program hosted by William F. Buckley. The new show will be hosted by the libertarian-conservative commentator Margaret Hoover. We wish the endeavor well, although we wonder why Firing Line with…

The World Cup is well underway in Russia, and that country’s authorities have given “assurances” to visiting nations that their fans will be safe from what in Britain are termed “football hooligans.” The Russians have a “blacklist” of known hooligans, according to the BBC, and can assure foreign…

Like hundreds of other media outlets, Vox.com sent reporters to cover President Donald Trump’s summit with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore. On June 13, Vox’s foreign editor Yochi Dreazen wrote a piece headlined, “The big winner of the Trump-Kim summit? China.” Dreazen’s analysis was…

Readers who’ve spent time before city or county councils may know how lawless these bodies can sometimes be. Many hold “public” meetings without announcing the time or place, disregard laws on raising taxes and the appropriation of public money, hide the details of procurement contracts and…

While much of America learned this week that Washington, D.C., has a professional hockey team, The Scrapbook was reminded that San Diego still has a Major League Baseball team. At the Braves-Padres game at Petco Park, caught on video that quickly became social-media famous, Braves outfielder Ender…

There was gnashing of teeth last week when it emerged that the Trump administration had seized the emails and phone records of New York Times national security reporter Ali Watkins in an investigation of former Senate Intelligence Committee aide James A. Wolfe. Wolfe had been leaking like a busted…

Far be it from The Scrapbook to judge the philanthropic impulses of the extremely wealthy, but the recent announcement of a $20 million gift to the City University of New York struck us as a bit rich. The money, which will fund the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, was the gift of Craig Newmark,…

We’ve read some dumb and substandard political pieces in our day—we may even have generated some—but a June 10 piece in the Washington Post is a strong contender for Dumbest Op-Ed Ever Written. The article, by Suzanna Danuta Walters—according to her byline a “professor of sociology and director of…

Things have gotten bad in California. So bad, in fact, as the New York Times recently reported, that some not insignificant number of San Franciscans are actually thinking of . . . voting Republican. The streets are filthy, crime is on the uptick, and government services are in decline. Add to that…

Any assessment of Anthony Bourdain’s life, his suicide notwithstanding, is likely to be tinged with jealousy. We suppose someone had to get paid to be a world traveler and bon vivant, but did Bourdain have to be so good at it? At a minimum, few people have a constitution that can alternately…

In March The Scrapbook introduced readers to the Boxer Prize—a very special literary award given to famous authors, typically celebrity or politician authors, whose fictional heroes bear a striking resemblance to their creators. We call it the Boxer Prize in recognition of former California senator…

When we saw the headline in the New York Times—“Howard Schultz to Step Down as Starbucks Executive Chairman”—we mistakenly assumed Schultz’s decision to retire had something to do with the recent ruckus over racism. In mid-April, remember, a Starbucks franchise in Philadelphia was accused of racial…

"I was assigned female at birth, but as I got older I felt less and less feminine. I am not someone who always knew I was transgender. I knew it only when the body I loved—my androgynous child’s body—turned into something unmistakably female. I got breasts. And suddenly . . . ” (“When Neither Male…

The Scrapbook has complained at least once in recent days about center-left news media using the terms “the right” and “conservatives” in highly tendentious ways.

"After Years of Belt-Tightening, Weary England Is Feeling the Pinch,” announced a front-page, above-the-fold headline in the New York Times on May 28. It’s a lengthy article—more than 3,000 words—replete with stories about declining public services and attendant growth in social ills.

Since the invention of videotape, law enforcement across the developed world has fallen prey to the same folly: If you install enough security cameras, criminals won’t do bad things because they’ll know the cops are watching. The trouble with that view is that it ain’t so, as anybody who’s spent…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who famously and without evidence claimed Native American ancestry and thus minority status in her pre-Senate days—and whom Donald Trump still calls “Pocahontas”—now wants badly to put the whole controversy to rest. Who wouldn’t? Our advice would be to ignore the past and…

Social media are full of people who, under the impression that their political fulminations are witty, spend much of their days collecting likes and retweets from the hordes of barking-seal partisans. And so it was that Yvonne Mason, a retired English teacher in South Carolina, wrote a letter…

The Scrapbook remembers the days before social media and the Internet, and they weren’t marked by civility and well-informed dialogue. Even so, when someone in the pre-Internet era responded in print to an article or essay, he or she had usually read the article. Nowadays you just read the…

Like Paul Newman’s chain gang in Cool Hand Luke, Starbucks is suffering from a failure to communicate. First, of course, was the Philadelphia branch manager who had two African-American men arrested on the grounds they were loitering (they weren’t). Then, in a burst of enthusiasm and contrition,…

Liberals and progressives sometimes complain that Republicans win more elections, and they do. But cheer up, lefties—you’ve got a lock on the nation’s elite colleges. The thought occurred to us when we read through Homogeneous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty, a new…

Hillary Clinton seems to have made her choice of post-political career: incessant unfunny whining. Consider her address to Yale University’s graduating class of 2018.

A recent New York Times piece took aim at Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (and occasional TWS contributor). A lot of Beltway policymakers are upset at Dubowitz, mainly for his scathing criticisms of the Iran nuclear deal over the last several years but also for the…

Hollywood is notorious for taking certain ideas to unpleasant extremes: CGI in Star Wars movies, saccharine romantic comedy tropes, the Fast and Furious franchise. But in our current #MeToo moment, activists intent on remaking the world in a more female-friendly image have gone beyond outing…

Longtime readers of the Washington Post, among whom The Scrapbook numbers itself, will be familiar with the Post’s quaint custom of observing anniversaries and holidays with what might be called counterintuitive stories. For example, on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (2,403…

Last month, after two men were asked to leave a Philadelphia Starbucks on the grounds that they were loitering, the Starbucks Corporation announced that it would close more than 8,000 stores for a day in order to impose “unconscious bias training” on its employees. (Readers contemplating the wisdom…

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the organization that licenses EU television broadcasts and hosts the annual Eurovision Song Contest, has terminated its contract with a Chinese broadcasting company. The company, Mango TV, cut one of the songs from the contest’s broadcast—the gay-themed…

What will Jeff Bezos do with his fortune? The Amazon chief has amassed around $130 billion, and there’s really no practical way to spend more than a fraction of it. “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” Bezos said…

This week we learned, via BuzzFeed, about a new trend in weddings: bouncy castles. A wedding company has opened an initially successful line of wedding-themed inflatable trampolines. Photos depict shoeless groomsmen and bridesmaids bouncing and giggling like first-graders at a birthday bash.

We learned this week from the Harvard Business Review of a study alleging that mild intoxication can enhance “creative thinking.” “You often hear of great writers, artists, and composers who claim that alcohol enhanced their creativity, or people who say their ideas are better after a few drinks,”…

Once Utah high-schooler Keziah Daum tweeted several charming pictures of herself on prom night, it was just a matter of time until the grievance and outrage industry found out about it. When it did find out it dealt with her in the usual way. Miss Daum’s offense? Her outfit: a high-necked,…

From the London Daily Telegraph: Schools in Britain are removing their analogue clocks from examination halls because students can’t read them. “Teachers are now installing digital devices after pupils sitting their GCSE and A-level exams complained that they were struggling to read the correct…

The New York Post reports that Rosie O’Donnell, the former actress and talk show host who’s now best known for erratic behavior, has been breaking the law. It seems that she’s given a total of $5,400 over the legal limit to five different Democratic congressional candidates. Federal Election…

Every once in a while, as you work your dreary way through the Washington Post, a strange thing happens: You notice something! It can be refreshing but also, just as often, puzzling.

A tip of The Scrapbook homburg to our friend Michael Ramirez, whose dazzling cartoons grace this section every week. Michael, a two-time Pulitzer winner, has added to his laurels by winning first place in the National Headliner Awards contest this year for editorial cartoons. We’re very proud of…

On April 26, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, threatened to organize protests against President Trump on Twitter: “If he comes to London, President Trump will experience an open and diverse city that has always chosen unity over division and hope over fear.” He’ll also see, the mayor boasted, that…

Kids used to goof off by playing video games instead of doing their homework. Today, Junior might want to hone those gaming skills—some colleges are now trying to recruit “athletes” in what are euphemistically called “e-sports.”

Big news from the publishing world. As print journals search for ways to adapt to evolving attitudes and new technologies, the New York Times Magazine has taken a bold step. The Times Magazine has been edited since 2014 by Jake Silverstein, formerly editor of the Texas Monthly, who upon joining the…

Break into journalism’s top tier with the Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowship, which provides nine months’ experience with the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section in New York, beginning this fall. Fellows receive pay of $5,000 per month through our good friends at the Fund for American Studies. To…

"Rachel Weisz is glowing. That’s not unusual. I’ve interviewed her before and seen her at movie and theater parties, and she’s always glowing. I know that if you ask the hazel-eyed, raven-haired 48-year-old how she gets more beautiful every year, defying Hollywood’s propensity to push actresses in…

The above-named Alfie Evans was the subject of a curious work of analysis in the Washington Post on April 28. The headline: “How Alfie Evans Became the Latest Weapon in the Conservative Attack on Universal Health Care.” The piece, by Ben Zdencanovic, purports to explain that conservatives have long…

It wasn’t with shock but with relief that The Scrapbook greeted the news that a Washington tradition is coming to an end: “After nearly 15 years, The Hill is bidding a beautiful bye-bye to its annual 50 Most Beautiful list.”

Journalists in the mainstream media often sound as though they have no idea why anybody would entertain skepticism about the news media. The term “media bias” is, to them, a ruse. Complaints about “fake news” are evidence of stupidity or delusion.

"When the audience of more than 300 began to clap and howl, Madeleine K. Albright entered the Georgetown University auditorium. She waved. She winked. The clapping grew louder, especially from young women in the room. They smiled giddily, checked to make sure their phones were on silent and opened…

Readers may remember Fearless Girl, the 50-inch-tall bronze statue of an intrepid young girl, placed in front of the famous Charging Bull sculpture in Lower Manhattan. The girl, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced, will be moved to a new location nearby—in front of the New York…

Most Americans can name only one local politician from Washington, D.C., and that happens to be the city’s “mayor for life” Marion Barry, famously busted in 1990 for smoking crack in an FBI sting operation (“bitch set me up!”). In March, the city unveiled a bronze statue to Barry on Pennsylvania…

The Pulitzer Prize recipients were announced on April 16, and there were few surprises. The awards for journalism were unobjectionable (although we wonder how many more Pulitzers the New York Times and Washington Post really need). It was the Pulitzer for music that grabbed the most attention: It…

It occurs to us that we don’t read much anymore about outlaw motorcycle gangs. A few decades ago, when The Scrapbook was young, movies and television and newspapers teemed with fearful reports about the Hells Angels, the Outlaws, and the Pagans. We wonder what became of the original “1 percenters.”…

"Let’s just cut to the chase: There’s not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician this year, or any year soon, than Beyoncé’s headlining set at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on Saturday night. It was rich with history,…

Since the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s and the idealization of rebellion for its own sake, it’s been awfully hard for young people to rebel. How are you supposed to be a rebel or a maverick when everybody else is one too? The Scrapbook solved this problem, as a university student on a…

If the Hells Angels have softened somewhat, others are toughening up—and we bless them for it. A school district in Erie, Pennsylvania, faced with the increasing frequency of school shootings, has passed out baseball bats to its teachers. That strikes us as a neat compromise between, on the one…

Once upon a time, before the advent of Google and WebMD, medical information was dispensed by medical professionals in doctor’s offices. These were dark times, at least if you believe fans of the infamous “women’s health bible,” Our Bodies, Ourselves.

It’s the defining mark of left-liberal crime policy: Deal mainly with the tools, not the people who use them. Hence American liberals’ obsession with gun control. Of course, there are more guns than people in the United States—upwards of 300 million, in fact—and so any attempt to regulate their…

Didn’t you hear? The libertarian billionaire Charles Koch recently declared his support for the Communist leader of China over the leader of his own country! We learned it from a tweet by Lou Dobbs: “Outrageous Oligarch: Billionaire Charles Koch Admits He’s Working for China instead of America, for…

The Scrapbook is old enough to remember when socialism was popular the first time. It went out of fashion when even liberal intellectuals noticed that it produced only misery wherever it was tried, but now it’s popular again. An avowed socialist captured the hearts of young voters in 2016 (and…

A new book recently caught our attention: It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics by David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University in Chicago. We weren't aware that Democrats needed the advice of the title, having…

On March 29, California superior court judge Elihu Berle ruled that most coffee sold in the Golden State will have to bear a warning label stating that it may increase the likelihood of cancer. Roasted coffee contains traces of the carcinogen acrylamide, and so Californians, if the ruling stands,…

To the editor:

"Long before Fun Home (2006)—perhaps the greatest, most consequential graphic memoir since Art Spiegelman's Maus—Alison Bechdel published a comic strip following the entanglements of a group of queer women living in the Midwest. The comics were funny, sexy and very frank—"half op-ed column and half…

In the era of gesture politics, when political discourse consists of an endless sequence of symbolic protests and counterprotests, there are few winners. The shouting and sign-waving protesters look bitter and sanctimonious, the objects of their disgust are obliged to defend themselves against…

On March 18, the top-ranked Amazon item was a brand-new children’s book titled A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo. The book is credited to the late-night TV host John Oliver’s show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, so we assume Oliver is the author. It’s a “children’s picture book about a Very…

Many young people in the wealthy nations of Europe and North America, having been taught by their elders to equate morality with risk-free virtue-signaling, have plenty of strong opinions about injustice and oppression, but the will to do anything about it often seems lacking.

In 2005, as readers may remember, Democratic senator Barbara Boxer published a novel, A Time to Run. The book was a flop, largely owing to its confusing plot, sick-makingly sentimental prose, and the obviously self-serving tone of the whole story. The story’s protagonist, Ellen Fischer, is an…

"While many transgender artists have achieved significant success in music, including Teddy Geiger (who has written for One Direction and James Blunt) and Sophie (a recording artist who has produced songs for Madonna and Vince Staples), Ms. Petras’s character falls closer than any before her to…

When companies change their names, it often means that the business wants to shed an old, negative image and replace it with something more in tune with modern sensibilities. Hence Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, gave itself the much less tobacco-y name Altria, and Kentucky Fried Chicken’s new,…

What is it about former Democratic presidents that they can’t leave the arena? They leave, then come back, then go quiet for a while, and just when you think you’ve gotten rid of them they spring back into the headlines again. Jimmy Carter set the example here. For nearly four decades the man’s…

New from the publishing industry: Crimson Romance, Simon & Schuster’s “diverse romance” imprint, recently announced on Twitter that it will close. The Book Riot blog reports: “The Ripped Bodice, a Los Angeles romance bookstore whose owners recently published a report on the state of diversity in…

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Temple University professor of psychology Laurence Steinberg argues that “the federal voting age in the United States should be lowered from 18 to 16.” The bulk of Steinberg’s piece is devoted to explaining why teenagers aren’t the empty-headed narcissistic…

"It's easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this…

From Bryan Curtis, editor-at-large of the sports website The Ringer, The Scrapbook learned of an unusual passage in the acknowledgments section of William Vollmann’s 2009 book Imperial. In addition to the litany of people who were helpful came this: “The San Diego County Water Authority was rudely…

The Scrapbook has plenty of prejudices but no official position, pro or con, on tattoos. We sometimes wonder if their explosive popularity over the last two decades evinces the angst of a declining middle class, but the appearance of tattoos on one’s skin doesn’t signify the quality of one’s…

The question of who deserves an obituary has long vexed editors at newspapers and magazines. Should they limit themselves to the most well-known public figures or dig deep into the less well-known but often fascinating lives of the hoi polloi? Do you cover the lives of the notoriously awful as well…

The Washington Post recently reported a “sharp reversal” in the expected graduation rates for Washington, D.C., public schools after heading upwards in recent years. Only “42 percent of seniors attending traditional public schools are on track to graduate.” What happened? Mainly, it seems,…

The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have sparked a major reconsideration of appropriate behavior between the sexes, both inside the workplace and outside of it. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before tech entrepreneurs, the geniuses who brought you Soylent food substitute and the Yelp-for-people…

It shouldn’t be either newsworthy or controversial to discover that college students are learning about the work of Aristophanes, studying the Peloponnesian War, or analyzing Aristotelian notions of happiness. But this is 2018, when college administrators often seem more focused on the subtle…

Washington, D.C., should have listened to Marion Barry. The late four-time mayor of the nation’s capital may have made problematic lifestyle choices—even if the you-know-what did set him up—but give him this: He was 100 percent correct about the city’s streetcar boondoggle.

Publishers have long supported specialty imprints that feature particular kinds of books: There are imprints that promote conservative books, such as Sentinel at Penguin Random House and Threshold at Simon & Schuster, and imprints that promote genres like romance (Flirt at Random House) and cooking…

For a few weeks now, Nashville mayor Megan Barry has been embroiled in quite the sex scandal. It seems Barry has been engaged in an affair with the police sergeant who was the head of her security detail. (Both are married.) For an added layer of unseemliness, Barry seems to have taken a lot of…

By acclamation the Art Institute of Chicago is already one of the great museums of the world, but earlier this month it laid hands on a work that its director called a “transformative acquisition.” The work is by the absurdist painter-provocateur-conman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The New York…

A few months ago in these pages, our Ethan Epstein rhapsodized about his alma mater, Reed College (“My Old School,” November 10). He praised its rigorous academics and one particular course, the decades-old mandatory freshman humanities class that covers ancient Greece, Rome, and the Bible. Because…

The Scrapbook takes a fairly dim view of the field known as “economic development.” We’re not opposed to governments facilitating economic growth when they can, but there are very few things government can do, proactively, to spur economic activity—though we can think of many, many things…

Our collective descent into ignorance is alarming enough on its own, but when you combine it with a reinvigorated sense of political correctness, the result is a level of outrage that seems to neatly correlate with general stupidity. And so it was when Jeff Sessions spoke to the National Sheriffs’…

Readers will be aware of the war on junk food. We think, for instance, of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s unsuccessful attempt to ban large soft drinks from the city, the FDA’s ban on trans fats, and the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that fast food chains prominently display…

"In this article we locate, interpret, and critique the figure of the ‘bad’ white mother, focusing on the critically acclaimed AMC drama, Mad Men. Advancing feminist and postcolonial approaches to myth, we uncover a prevailing ‘white consciousness’ that relies on racializing logics in, first of…

In between episodes of our podcasts, you will want to tune in to the latest of the Conversations with Bill Kristol (conversationswithbillkristol.org), this one featuring veteran Republican political strategist and commentator Mike Murphy. The main topic is the outlook for the midterm elections and…

The Scrapbook is pleased to announce that, after a brief hiatus, the Daily Standard Podcast has returned to the digital airwaves at WeeklyStandard.com with a new host, Charlie Sykes. A longtime journalist, author, commentator, and radio host, Charlie will bring decades of experience and insight to…

Breaking: The New York Times is now a “white supremacist paper.” That’s according to Sarah Kendzior, columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, frequent NBC News contributor, and writer for Fast Company. Talk about all the news that’s fit to print!

In 1990 the comedian George Carlin memorably mocked the tendency to replace the word man with person. “Little kids would be afraid of the ‘boogie-person,’ ” Carlin scoffed. “They’d look up in the sky and see the ‘person in the moon.’ Guys would say, ‘Come back here and fight like a person,’ and…

Pop star Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl halftime song-and-dance routine got, umm, mixed reviews. The Scrapbook, though, watched the performance with rapt attention, and we have to say that to our eyes and ears Timberlake was simply stunning.

In recent months, we’ve been wondering how journalists are getting any work done, what with all the Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs they’ve been singing. In January, workers at Slate and Vox Media—which includes the websites Curbed, Eater, Recode, SB Nation, the Verge, and, yes, Vox—announced…

Garrison Keillor is an embittered old liberal whose political pronouncements range from the unfunny to the ungenerous. But the creator and longtime host of the radio show A Prairie Home Companion is also a talented writer and bewilderingly versatile entertainer, and we took no joy in hearing that…

Since he became famous hosting his children’s TV show, Bill Nye, aka “the Science Guy,” has spent the last couple of decades being an insufferable scold on climate change and other charged political topics. Aside from appearing on TV, Nye often has no particular expertise on the topics he’s…

The Scrapbook has often touted the Conversations with Bill Kristol video series (available free at conversationswithbillkristol.org), but we are especially fond of the latest installment and suspect you will be, too. It’s an extended discussion of movies, TV, and popular culture with this…

When it comes to place names, The Scrapbook is decidedly reactionary. We finally, reluctantly, made our peace with the demise of Mukden and Peking, but until the day someone pours us a Mumbai gin martini, we’re still Bombay all the way.

If former FBI honcho James Comey’s Twitter feed is anything to judge him by, perhaps President Trump was right to can him—on the basis of his grating social media persona alone.

We’ve all seen parking places designated for the handicapped and for expectant mothers, but leave it to China to take that trend to a new and controversial level.

Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, has always had about her the air of the schoolmarm. It didn’t surprise us that she was the person who at last discovered the secret to dealing with United States senators: treat them like kindergartners. During the government shutdown last weekend,…

That government shutdown, by the way, which stretched from midnight on the night of Friday, January 19, to sometime in the late afternoon of Monday, January 22, was more talked about than real. Some federal agencies took the day off, and here in Washington the traffic on Monday morning was easier…

The online headline in the New York Times was pretty shocking: “School Shooting in Kentucky Was Nation’s 11th of Year. It Was Jan. 23.”

The Philadelphia Eagles are headed to the Super Bowl, and while the region is rejoicing, the city’s tourism board is no doubt cringing at antics of the legendary local fans, which are best summed up by the recent headline in the New York Daily News: “Another Eagles fan arrested for punching police…

It was one of the ironies of the George W. Bush presidency that a supposedly unlettered president should appoint to the federal government’s cultural endowments two chairmen who were the most accomplished men ever to hold their respective positions. To the National Endowment for the Arts, Bush…

In 1997, The Scrapbook saw a funny New York Times headline: “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.” Astonishingly, we noted, “the possibility that longer sentences and less parole might be playing a large part in that falling crime rate” had failed to penetrate the furrowed brows at…

Readers may remember Charlotte Allen’s September 12, 2016, cover story on high-speed rail in the Golden State: “Bullet Train to Nowhere: The Ultimate California Boondoggle.” Allen memorably visited “a 1,600-foot viaduct spanning the Fresno River on the rural outskirts of Madera,” which was just…

As far as lunch deals go, Subway’s $5 footlong sandwich has been a hit with consumers. The company sees the promotion as a way to revive interest in its restaurants, which have struggled to attract diners in the last few years. In January, Subway brought the deal back for a limited time and now…

The Scrapbook has deep reservations about the Trump era, but we’re only human—sometimes we indulge in a small chortle or two at the discomfiture his victory caused certain parties. For instance, we took way more pleasure than we probably should have in Politico’s interview last week with the Obama…

We will admit to still sometimes shaking our head at the realization that Donald Trump is the president of the United States, though apparently not just his ardent fans but liberal America, too, is now ready to embrace the idea that billionaire TV stars are a good recruiting pool for the Oval…

You've probably read recently about the wave of unrest in Iran that has led to at least 24 deaths and 8,000 arrests. Many of the protesters have chanted for the “death” of Iran’s leaders, President Hassan Rouhani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open,” said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg eight years ago. “A lot of times, I run a thought experiment, ‘If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?’ ”

The new tax law is prompting the usual crocodile tears from liberals, who complain (falsely) that it is a giveaway to evil multinational corporations and “the rich.”

Conservatives like to tout the benefits of federalism, and there are many. However, if states are the “laboratories of democracy,” there will always be a few mad scientists to contend with. One of the dumber things you’ll experience in driving across the country is that in Oregon you’re not allowed…

If you’ve been following British politics in recent years, you know that one of the reasons Tories have dominated in spite of less-than-stellar leadership is that the Labour party is even worse, having handed over the reins to a bunch of anti-Semitic loons. There’s been a campaign to expel the…

We all know the phrase “killing them with kindness.” But is there now such a thing as “suing them with kindness”? Yes, if you happen to be the legal team of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, arguably the most successful pop musician of the past two decades.

When a fire at an electrical substation knocked out power for half a day at the Atlanta airport recently, airlines canceled more than 1,400 flights and thousands of passengers were stranded. Some sat in the airport terminal in the dark, while others waited on planes out on the tarmac for hours.

Pope Francis has told Catholic media that his annual World Communications Day speech, watched by tens of millions around the world, will be dedicated to addressing “fake news.” Journalists are “fundamental” to democratic society, said the pope, and in doing their job “shouldn’t fall into the ‘sins…

Sometimes The Scrapbook thinks that the D.C. city government exists solely so that Congress won’t be the most incompetent political entity in Washington. We’re no strangers to writing about the effects of terrible regulations, and we really have to give D.C. credit for cooking up this one: The city…

If you’re ever looking for a hearty chuckle, the Nation never fails to deliver. It fashions itself as a “progressive” magazine—if your notion of progress is reviving Marxist nostrums of yesteryear.

If there’s one modern pricing phenomenon The Scrapbook loathes, it’s the add-on surcharge—a deceptive little proviso in the consumer/service-provider compact whereby the latter essentially says to the former, “We’re going to fleece you, but not tell you by how much until later.” There’s nothing…

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker recently announced that he would continue pushing for rules that would require individuals to complete a drug test when applying for food stamps. Instead of free groceries, able-bodied adults with no children who test positive for drugs would be pointed toward rehab,…

The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is currently engaged in a legal battle with the city’s Metro system. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has declined to run Christmas ads from the church. The ad design is fairly subtle in its suggestion of the Nativity—an outline of shepherds…

We might as well go ahead and admit it: There are moments when it seems as though The Scrapbook and the New York Times inhabit different universes. This happens with increasing frequency—and not just when we confront those blast-furnace editorials or the rank opinionizing in its news columns. The…

American progressives, we often have occasion to reflect, don’t seem altogether happy. The reasons for their unhappiness are many—they live in a center-right country that often refuses to heed their counsel—but surely the chief reason for their grief is this: that in the progressive mindset,…

It's long been publicly understood that the International Olympic Committee is a den of jobbery and payoffs. Which only raises the question, just how corrupt does an Olympic team have to be to get the IOC to sit in judgment of them?

The Scrapbook has been impressed, during the past several months, by some things President Trump has not done.

Breaking news from the international environment beat: China last month launched a new electric-powered cargo ship from the southern port city of Guangzhou, according to the international business publication Quartz.

Thanksgiving morning, owners of a hipster Colorado coffeehouse chain, ink! Coffee, awoke to find themselves at the center of public controversy. One of their advertisements, a sandwich-board positioned on the sidewalk in front of one of their Denver locations, read “Happily gentrifying the…

Using the phony claim they are fighting voter fraud, racist Republicans have contrived voter ID laws designed to make it hard for members of Democrat-friendly ethnic groups to cast their ballots. Or so the liberal narrative goes.

The Scrapbook stopped caring about the Grammys ages ago. Like all entertainment awards, they’re not much a measure of talent. Long ago they devolved into the self-satisfied celebration of a self-satisfied industry. And in no way is the music biz more pleased with itself than in its politics, which…

Actor Earle Hyman, best known, if not altogether justly, for playing Grandfather Huxtable on The Cosby Show from 1984 to 1992, died November 17 at the age of 91.

We were genuinely surprised one morning last week to open the pages of the Washington Post and find an obituary for Bobby Baker, who had just died on his 89th birthday. We were surprised that his obituary was on the obituary page and not the front page, where stories about Baker usually used to run.

The Scrapbook has long been a connoisseur of bogus quotations—homely sayings attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson that sound nothing like what these men would have said. Nowadays, thanks to the Internet and email, these misattributions are everywhere. Some historical figures seem to…

The Scrapbook knows there is little that real Americans find so tiresome as lifestyle complaints from East Coast elites who graze up and down the moneyed Acela corridor (“when the waiter finally brought the petits farcis provençaux the vegetables were criminally underdone!”). But allow us this one…

Two weeks ago in these pages we wrote about a court drama embroiling the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass. The museum is being sued to stop it from selling 40 works of art from its collection. The sale is intended to finance what the museum’s board of trustees calls its “New Vision,” a plan to…

If you've ever thought that sitting at a bar and watching sports on TV is too boring or that barroom billiards or darts lacks excitement, don’t fear—there’s a new trend popping up in cities around the country.

What won’t our loftier cultural institutions do to attract youthful patrons? In an age in which symphony pops concerts feature music from video games, it would seem not much. But the envelope was recently pushed in Pittsburgh.

Every month, we eagerly anticipate the arrival of our GQ magazine. There are few other places where The Scrapbook can glean instruction on how to wear capri-pants-for-men without our calves looking chunky. This month is no exception. For fresh out on newsstands—assuming there is still such a thing…

Since Donald Trump became president, Democrats have been engaged in an astonishing display of judicial obstruction. “Senate Democrats have indiscriminately forced the Senate to take 47 cloture votes on judicial and executive nominations since Trump took office,” notes Carrie Severino in National…

It's always a source of delight when liberal pieties collide. Which is what happened last week in Laguna Beach, California, when Art had it out with the Environment—and Art lost. What made the contretemps doubly delicious was that the art in question had been promoted as an environmental statement.

Donna Brazile's new book, Hacks, is doing boffo box office. So much so that the day after the book’s official release, Amazon was sold out of hardback copies.

The Washington Post last week featured this arresting headline: “ ‘A breach of trust’: A preschool, a church and a change in mission.”

It's possible Celino Villanueva Jaramillo is the world’s oldest man. Born in 1896, he is now 121 according to Chilean government records, making him four years older than the current Guinness World Record holder, the Guardian reports.

You might think that a meeting of junior ministers at France’s Élysée Palace is nothing to get excited about. But French president Emmanuel Macron’s black labrador-griffon, Nemo, apparently found talk of inner-city investment a little too exciting late last month.

Leave to one side for a moment the debate over whether Confederate memorials, many of them more than a century old, should be pulled down as an act of civic and moral hygiene. Nearly everyone can agree that the memorials themselves are artistically accomplished. Some of them are overwrought, some…

The day after an immigrant from Uzbekistan murdered cyclists and pedestrians in New York, running them over with a rented pickup truck, NPR did an interview to highlight how such events make life uncomfortable for Muslims. They spoke with Hussein Rashid, a professor of religion at Columbia…

Washington is nothing if not opportunistic. Take the activist group American Family Voices (please!). It is a classic D.C. sort of organization, what’s known in the trade as “astroturf,” which is to say, phony grassroots. It was among the political players this week trying to make the most of the…

As a dutiful reader of the New York Times, The Scrapbook has for several years been aware of a new trend in the culinary arts. The trend: the preparation and consumption of insects.

The Berkshire Museum, a venerable, century-old museum of art and history in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is making enormous changes to its dowdy displays. Two years of planning, 22 focus groups (uh-oh), and two multimillion-dollar fundraising drives have yielded a “New Vision,” described as a bold,…

Bisbee, Arizona, is at the center of a jurisdictional tussle with the state government, a kerfuffle that may prove whether there’s room in a conservative state for local self-determination—even liberal local self-determination.

For the vast edifice of baloney that is social psychology, there’s been good news and bad news lately. The good news is that Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize. Thaler is the foremost evangelist for behavioral economics—the parasitic discipline that uses the findings of social psychology to…

Bisbee, Arizona, is at the center of a jurisdictional tussle with the state government, a kerfuffle that may prove whether there’s room in a conservative state for local self-determination—even liberal local self-determination.

Who said there’s a free speech crisis on college campuses? As everyone knows, that’s just a figment of the right-wing imagination.

One of the more surprising revelations about Russia’s reported meddling in the 2016 election is that Moscow supported a raft of objectively anti-Trump, left-wing causes. First we learned that the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked organization, bought social media advertisements that…

The Scrapbook has a smartphone, but we are sorely tempted to go back to a flip phone. Or maybe something with a dial. Smartphones were supposed to make everything easier, but we’re not so sure.

Whenever the vanguard of the Race’n’Gender Left™ meets the avant-garde of post-postmodern art, hilarity ensues. So it is with Omer Fast’s August, a recent installation in Manhattan’s Chinatown. If you’re wondering why an art show called August opened in September and will close in October, trust…

Attention all history buffs and antiquarian booksellers: The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, a recently founded center at Arizona State University, is in the market for great books relevant to American political philosophy and civics. They’ve already acquired a first collected…

The Scrapbook has a smartphone, but we are sorely tempted to go back to a flip phone. Or maybe something with a dial. Smartphones were supposed to make everything easier, but we’re not so sure.

In August, your humble Scrapbook noted an alarming New York magazine article about how the world of teenage novels is now rife with “culture cops, monitoring their peers across multiple platforms for violations.”

Hollywood casting has been much in the news, what with the revelation that Harvey Weinstein has for decades been making the most of the old casting couch—and the fact that Weinstein is hardly the only predator demanding sexual favors for the chance at movie roles. Which made it a good time for the…

In March, a New York hedge fund installed a bronze Fearless Girl statue facing down Wall Street’s famous statue of a charging bull. It was an instant sensation.

Austria is the latest of several European countries to ban the burka, the full covering worn by some Muslim women in public. Except that Austria didn’t ban the burka per se—that would be religiously discriminatory. Instead, they simply made it against the law to wear anything in public that covers…

It was just a few weeks ago that The Scrapbook was goggling over new policies at Middlebury College regarding speakers appearing on the campus. Under the “Interim Procedures for Scheduling Events and Invited Speakers,” potentially controversial invitees have to be cleared by the school’s Threat…

The Scrapbook was dismayed but not surprised when, in the waning days of his presidency, Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning. We have been equally dismayed and unsurprised at the desire of left-leaning institutions to treat Manning as some sort of folk hero. It is cold comfort…

Say what you will about her husband the president, The Scrapbook believes that First Lady Melania Trump is just fine. Gracious, charming, conscientious, and decorative, she has carried out her public duties with conspicuous aplomb.

Say what you will about her husband the president, The Scrapbook believes that First Lady Melania Trump is just fine. Gracious, charming, conscientious, and decorative, she has carried out her public duties with conspicuous aplomb.

Eating disorders are not unknown in the land of foie gras (and we’re not talking about the force-feeding of geese), and authorities there blame the fashion industry’s unhealthy fondness for starvation-chic. Thus the French law that recently went into effect decreeing that fashion photos be honest…

In 1894 San Francisco dedicated an elaborate monument to the history of California, a vast pile of granite and bronze paid for by the estate of philanthropist James Lick. Last week San Francisco took a step toward getting rid of it.

We take a backseat to no one in deploring the effects that social media have on our culture. However, sometimes they provide people platforms to announce to the world that they possess dangerous and/or idiotic beliefs. This can be useful.

The Scrapbook enjoys opera. We admit it. And although we believe the Metropolitan Opera in New York to be grossly overpriced, it’s still the best opera house in the world, and so we make our way there at least once a year.

Eating disorders are not unknown in the land of foie gras (and we’re not talking about the force-feeding of geese), and authorities there blame the fashion industry’s unhealthy fondness for starvation-chic. Thus the French law that recently went into effect decreeing that fashion photos be honest…

In 1894 San Francisco dedicated an elaborate monument to the history of California, a vast pile of granite and bronze paid for by the estate of philanthropist James Lick. Last week San Francisco took a step toward getting rid of it.

With all the drama of medieval jousting, or a good old fashioned tractor pull, liberal champions collided last week in separate contests: Buddhism vs. the environment and animal rights vs. art.

Don’t miss the newest episode in the Internet video series Conversations with Bill Kristol. The Weekly Standard’s editor at large talks with University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor about Shakespeare’s Rome. How do politics contend with philosophy? Can a republic survive becoming an empire?…

At long last, The Scrapbook has developed proof of foreign meddling in our democracy. Justice Department documents lay the plot bare: a secret deal between a foreign power and two former administration officials at the highest echelons of the U.S. government.

The Scrapbook visited Los Angeles for the first time around 20 years ago, and it was a delightful experience in most every way. One oddity stood out, though: the sheer number of homeless people. We don’t mention this to denigrate the needy, but the experience of being approached on nearly every…

Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t known for being particularly chatty on the bench, preferring to listen to arguments at the Court rather than engaging in the noisy sparring that some of the supremes seem to think passes for being judicious. Thomas doesn’t go out of his way to draw attention to…

On September 22, ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame tweeted out a link to an Internet article written by another notorious ex-CIA agent, Philip Giraldi. The article was headlined “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” The article appeared on the Unz Review website, a dumping ground for anti-Semitic…

The Dallas Independent School District has plans to change up to 24 school names with connections to slavery or the Confederacy, according to the Dallas Morning News. The district has compiled a list of problematic names they’ve placed under review, a list that, expansive as it is, could be even…

Middlebury College wants to prevent future violence of the sort visited on professor Allison Stanger by thugs trying to keep author Charles Murray from delivering a lecture. The ever-so-brave administrators’ solution? Don’t let anyone talk who might be the target of violence.

A doctor of The Scrapbook’s acquaintance was alarmed when he heard that the American College of Physicians was revisiting its official policy on physician-assisted suicide. Alarmed, because the ACP has traditionally been a staunch opponent of having doctors prescribe death. Would the organization…

HORRIFIC DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN, CONT. EARLIER THIS YEAR, we fearlessly predicted that a new era was dawning in American life ("Horrific Days Are Here Again," by Andrew Ferguson, January 22, 2001). Since the government was no longer being presided over by a liberal Democrat, we reasoned, Democrats and…

At the United Nations, President Trump warned North Korea that its jefe “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” If need be, Trump said, the United States would “totally destroy North Korea.” For its part, North Korea has said it would deliver “the greatest pain and…

Every time The Scrapbook is cut off in traffic by a Tesla—it seems to be happening more frequently these days for some reason—we deprecate Elon Musk under our breath. It’s no doubt highly irrational on our part: Musk owns the company but he’s not driving the car. And what we mind even more than the…

By now there have been quite a few movies made about the Kennedys, and naturally we assumed that Chappaquiddick, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, would be another brazen attempt to make craven excuses and burnish the legend. However, early reviews suggest it might be…

Plenty are the benefits of new technologies, but several news items in the last week are making us yearn for the days of Rolodexes, Polaroid photos, and library card catalogs with actual paper cards.

The statue wars continue: Last week protesters at the University of Virginia draped a tarp over a bronze of Thomas Jefferson, declaring the monument “an emblem of white supremacy” and demanding that the students of Jefferson’s university be subjected to racial reeducation.

The Scrapbook will admit to a certain fascination with Bill and Hillary Clinton. We’ve read and enjoyed—if enjoyed is the right word—all their mammoth autobiographical works. The latest addition, by the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, is titled What Happened. It seeks to recount…

If you’re still wondering how Donald Trump, a man whose approval rating sits at 36 percent in a September 6 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, ever became president, well, here’s a clue: That same poll has Hillary Clinton’s approval rating at 30 percent.

So the eminent author and social scientist Charles Murray gave a speech at Harvard last week. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be terribly newsworthy—eminent authors give speeches at distinguished universities every day of the week and sometimes even on weekends.

Last week the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., removed from its website a study absolving the Obama administration of any blame for its inaction in the face of the Syrian genocide. The study had been scheduled for release amid much hoopla at a September 11 event hosted by the U.S.…

American cities are discovering a new public health threat. But don’t worry: They are passing laws against it—and will soon start collecting fines that go into city coffers.

How’s this for irony: Dawn Bennett, who used to host a radio show called “Financial Myth Busting” (italics ours), allegedly attempted to use a voodoo curse to hobble investigators who were pursuing her on allegations of running a Ponzi scheme.

Actor Ed Skrein (don’t worry if you’ve never heard of him, The Scrapbook hadn’t either) was recently hired for a supporting role in a new movie adaptation of the Hellboy comic book franchise. He was to play a military man named Major Ben Daimio. Unbeknownst to the hapless young Skrein, however, in…

One might think of Orlando as gateway to the land of amusement parks, but one would be wrong. The city’s heart beats with a more profound purpose. Its citizens yearn for Art. Their souls demand Poetry.

Hillary Clinton is hitting the road (or more likely the chartered skies) to promote her new memoir, due out September 12. It’s a book whose title might have better captured the author’s state of mind if it had included a question mark: What Happened.

For all the millennials “feeling the Bern,” Time has come to a startling realization: “Young Americans Are Actually Not Becoming More Progressive,” the magazine announced last week (with a parental sigh). Republicans, you’ll remember, were predicted to have a “young-people problem” in 2016, but 37…

The Delta Sigma Phi fraternity chapter at the University of Michigan had what it thought was a delightful theme—antiquity on the Nile—for a party kicking off the school year. They invited guests to come as a “mummy, Cleopatra, or King Tut, it doesn’t matter to us. Get your best ancient Egyptian…

When we think of trendy endeavors, it’s the fashion and entertainment industries that come to mind, not anything so serious as science. But the new issue of Scientific American is out, and it’s proving yet again that the Bunsen-burner crowd is every bit as modish as the Kardashians.

For all the millennials “feeling the Bern,” Time has come to a startling realization: “Young Americans Are Actually Not Becoming More Progressive,” the magazine announced last week (with a parental sigh). Republicans, you’ll remember, were predicted to have a “young-people problem” in 2016, but 37…

Always on the lookout for good writing with a little kick to it, The Scrapbook is pleased to announce its discovery of American Consequences, a new magazine edited by none other than our valued contributing editor P. J. O’Rourke. This is the first magazine P. J. has edited since stepping down from…

In the last issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Tony Mecia wrote about a California farmer facing fines for planting wheat in a contested wetland (“Plowed Under,” August 21/August 28). The farmer has since settled with the Justice Department: John Duarte agreed to pay $1.1 million in fines and mitigation…

A little over two years ago, The Scrapbook was pleased to welcome a new work of history from Philip F. Anschutz, chairman and CEO of The Weekly Standard’s parent company. In The Scrapbook’s words, Out Where the West Begins profiled “an astonishing variety of business entrepreneurs, visionaries,…

So ingrained are religious prejudices in societies the world over that people tend to think that atheists are more likely to be serial killers—at least, that’s the way the New York Times reported a new social-psychology study in Nature Human Behaviour.

A federal extortion trial in Boston last week showed that Teamsters members haven’t lost their knack for cooking up trouble. It all began in June 2014, when the reality TV kitchen competition Top Chef visited the city to film. Let’s just say things got a little hot in Beantown, and we’re not…

Thanks to the success of book series such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, the young adult, or YA, fiction market has become lucrative and culturally influential. With that in mind, New York magazine recently did a feature on the bevy of online critics whose opinions can make or break authors…

The Washington Post outdid itself last week in the dog-bites-man department, trumpeting one of those yawn-inducing nonevents that have come to be hyped in the age of the Trump resistance. Here’s the ballyhooed breaking news item: A long-time EPA employee is retiring. Yes, that’s the story.…

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” The opening line to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 jeremiad The Population Bomb is a sober one. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

Google Glass, the wearable robot eyeglasses rejected by consumers as a creepy invasion of personal privacy, has quietly been making a comeback, WIRED reports. Developers have made sure to keep their progress a secret this time, perhaps cowed by the proper thrashing they received from Matt Labash in…

The Scrapbook is far too jaded and worldly wise to be shocked by the article in the Washington Post headlined “Transgender man gives birth to baby boy.” But we were taken aback by one outrageous, insensitive, gender-autonomy-denying detail: The poor infant is called a “boy.” How could they possibly…

Google Glass, the wearable robot eyeglasses rejected by consumers as a creepy invasion of personal privacy, has quietly been making a comeback, WIRED reports. Developers have made sure to keep their progress a secret this time, perhaps cowed by the proper thrashing they received from Matt Labash in…

Maybe those ever-so-secretive Russian hackers aren’t nearly as clever as we, or they, thought.

Don’t miss the latest edition of “Conversations with Bill Kristol,” in which The Weekly Standard’s editor at large engages economist and TWS contributing editor Irwin Stelzer in a far-ranging discussion on politics, culture, and, as one might expect, economics.

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” The opening line to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 jeremiad The Population Bomb is a sober one. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

The Washington Post outdid itself last week in the dog-bites-man department, trumpeting one of those yawn-inducing nonevents that have come to be hyped in the age of the Trump resistance. Here’s the ballyhooed breaking news item: A long-time EPA employee is retiring. Yes, that’s the story.…

These are not the journals you’re looking for.

Is the multinational behemoth that owns Budweiser—AB InBev—a threat to American beer? Democrats seem to think so. In their populist campaign manifesto for 2018, “A Better Deal,” they warn, “In the last year, InBev which owns Anheuser-Busch and is the world’s largest beer company, struck a deal to…

Some people endeavor to live an eco-friendly life. But why should your environmental activism stop just because you die? California legislators are debating a bill that would give morticians permission to dispose of corpses in a relatively new way—one in harmony with nature—known as “water…

Is the multinational behemoth that owns Budweiser—AB InBev—a threat to American beer? Democrats seem to think so. In their populist campaign manifesto for 2018, “A Better Deal,” they warn, “In the last year, InBev which owns Anheuser-Busch and is the world’s largest beer company, struck a deal to…

Rocked by massive protests and violent skirmishes, Venezuela is on the brink of civil war and has been for some time now. It should come as no surprise, then, that the socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro is shoring up support with the country’s military in every way it can. This includes rewarding…

These are not the journals you’re looking for.

Some people endeavor to live an eco-friendly life. But why should your environmental activism stop just because you die? California legislators are debating a bill that would give morticians permission to dispose of corpses in a relatively new way—one in harmony with nature—known as “water…

Over 2,700 words would seem to be quite a superabundance of prose when you have but one point to make, especially when that point can be made in four words: Donald Trump is overweight. But the folks at Politico did just that last week, releasing a breathless piece declaring “Donald Trump is the…

Readers of The Scrapbook will recall the recent item about L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, where some locals mounted a campaign against an art gallery, claiming it represented an intrusion of gringo culture into the predominantly Hispanic community (see “White Out,” March 6, 2017). The activists…

Harvard is banishing the off-campus “final clubs” that have functioned for generations as the school’s equivalent of fraternities and sororities, as Naomi Schaefer Riley reports elsewhere in this issue. The university has its reasons, most notably a contentious claim that the clubs foster a culture…

On the morning of Monday, July 17, we opened our copy of the New York Times, as we do most weekday mornings. Now, we’re aware that Mondays aren’t the best day for newspaper reading, because rarely is Sunday a big news day. But then again, you never know what you’re going to miss, especially in the…

Readers of The Scrapbook will recall the recent item about L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, where some locals mounted a campaign against an art gallery, claiming it represented an intrusion of gringo culture into the predominantly Hispanic community (see “White Out,” March 6, 2017). The activists…

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Over 2,700 words would seem to be quite a superabundance of prose when you have but one point to make, especially when that point can be made in four words: Donald Trump is overweight. But the folks at Politico did just that last week, releasing a breathless piece declaring “Donald Trump is the…

Journalist Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza has earned a coveted place in the annals of silly lawsuits. She covers “Trump and the law” at the magazine Pacific Standard and is currently suing the president for blocking her on Twitter.

The online title of an op-ed in the New York Times recently caught our attention: “Racism Is Everywhere, So Why Not Move South?” The observation that the American South isn’t the backward place frequently portrayed by our entertainment industry is not a new one. Nor are appalling expressions of…

The latest threat to the American workforce has arrived, and it’s on four hooves.

The latest threat to the American workforce has arrived, and it’s on four hooves.

The online title of an op-ed in the New York Times recently caught our attention: “Racism Is Everywhere, So Why Not Move South?” The observation that the American South isn’t the backward place frequently portrayed by our entertainment industry is not a new one. Nor are appalling expressions of…

This year’s winners have been announced in prizes recognizing advocates who support “First Amendment rights and rational [read licentious] sex and drug policies,” the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards. That’s right, Hugh M. Hefner. Is there anyone who wouldn’t have known for whom the prize was…

The Scrapbook will leave it to others to comment on the propriety—or lack thereof—of the meeting Donald Trump Jr. arranged with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. But we will note an odd feature of the defense the president’s son made for himself last week.

Florida senator Marco Rubio is fond of tweeting out Bible verses to his followers. Lately, he’s been quoting the Book of Proverbs. Believe it or not, this is grounds for criticism—and from a Hebrew Bible professor at the Yale Divinity School no less. Prof. Joel Baden writes in Politico that…

‘You have to realize this is 2017 . . . and people will get upset about literally anything. It seems like we live in a world with smart phones and dumb people.”

Hampton, Virginia, has been promoting itself as a tourist destination with a campaign advertising the coastal region as a place to “Come Face-to-Face with Adventure.” Visitors are urged to “Discover the history, the attractions and the flavorful culture” of the city. In a display ad, the flavorful…

Donald Trump has been hoping China would pressure North Korea to behave itself, perhaps by restricting trade with the hermit kingdom. No such luck. And as the New York Times noted, “Mr. Trump vented his displeasure with China in a pair of early-morning tweets.” Being that these were tweets, and…

The Illinois legislature responded to the state’s ongoing fiscal crisis by—what else?—voting to hike the state income tax by a third, from over 3-and-a-half percent to nearly 5 percent. Republican governor Bruce Rauner fought against the budget, denouncing what he accurately described as a 32…

The Scrapbook spent a few days driving around with the station on, and if you’re looking for bizarro-world news and endless gabfests about how America is populated with imperialist running dogs, well, Sputnik Radio is for you. The station’s Moscow-mandated agenda is impossible to ignore. There’s an…

Sizzling steaks, burgers on the grill, bratwurst with a dollop of spicy mustard—what’s not to like?

When President Obama’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities finally stepped down from his post in late May—four months after President Trump took office—he explained his reasoning to the New York Times. “I think it’s getting to be a time that’s appropriate for me to step aside,”…

At Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the Army chief of staff, General Mark Milley, recently handed out for the first time certificates of graduation to recruits who completed basic training. Thankfully, they stopped short of giving recruits medals for learning to march and orienteering badges for…

Joe Scarborough isn’t just a onetime congressman turned cable-TV talker, nor even just a handsome face. No, he is a rock ’n’ roller, a singer, a guitarist, and a (more than) prolific songwriter. He is—if the publicity hoo-ha accompanying his new extended-play recording is to be believed—“this…

Sizzling steaks, burgers on the grill, bratwurst with a dollop of spicy mustard—what’s not to like?

When President Obama’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities finally stepped down from his post in late May—four months after President Trump took office—he explained his reasoning to the New York Times. “I think it’s getting to be a time that’s appropriate for me to step aside,”…

Joe Scarborough isn’t just a onetime congressman turned cable-TV talker, nor even just a handsome face. No, he is a rock ’n’ roller, a singer, a guitarist, and a (more than) prolific songwriter. He is—if the publicity hoo-ha accompanying his new extended-play recording is to be believed—“this…

At Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the Army chief of staff, General Mark Milley, recently handed out for the first time certificates of graduation to recruits who completed basic training. Thankfully, they stopped short of giving recruits medals for learning to march and orienteering badges for…

Public radio doesn't quite know what it wants us to think about the anti-addiction medicine Vivitrol.

There are many pressures in reporting a breaking news story—getting the facts and getting them out before the next guy perhaps paramount among them. But The Scrapbook thinks that those pressures notwithstanding, a fine publication such as the New York Times could find time to avoid the hoariest of…

When is the Nightly News the Nitely News? When ratings are lousy.

Free speech may have become a vanishingly rare thing on university campuses, but it turns out that at least one variety of free speech is still protected: T-shirt marijuana advocacy.

There are many pressures in reporting a breaking news story—getting the facts and getting them out before the next guy perhaps paramount among them. But The Scrapbook thinks that those pressures notwithstanding, a fine publication such as the New York Times could find time to avoid the hoariest of…

When is the Nightly News the Nitely News? When ratings are lousy.

Public radio doesn't quite know what it wants us to think about the anti-addiction medicine Vivitrol.

Best Washington Press Release Ever

Barack and Michelle Obama are setting lifestyle standards most Americans could only dream of, but there's no shortage of publications urging us to dream.

Barack and Michelle Obama are setting lifestyle standards most Americans could only dream of, but there's no shortage of publications urging us to dream.

Give National Public Radio some credit: In an All Things Considered feature, reporter Martin Kaste actually interviewed some anti-leftist protesters and did not present them as crazy people. Also to NPR's credit, the story, "Trump Supporters Accuse Liberal Communities of Hostility Toward Free…

Surveys consistently rank Scandinavian countries the happiest on earth. But now, even they are getting ticked off by the Palestinians.

Even in Texas, where everything's bigger, the little guys can still win one. In the latest case, the little guys are the nearly 40 private music museums across the Lone Star State. Their defeated foe? A plan backed by Governor Greg Abbott, Austin politicians, and the state's preservation board to…

Nancy Pelosi didn't tell us it would take this long: Congress passed Obamacare in 2010 and we're still finding out what's in it.

Long before he was a senator, comedian Al Franken made his entry into politics with a couple of bestsellers, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Franken found a ready audience for his political…

The New York Times really, really wants you to behave yourself environmentally on your travels this summer. In March the paper published "How to Have a Green Vacation." Come May (for those who may not have been paying sufficient attention in March) the Times published "Greening Your Summer…

Last week the government of Lebanon announced that it was banning Wonder Woman, the latest cinematic treatment of a comic-book superhero, a film that's likely to be one of the summer's big blockbusters. Is it because the Amazonian princess's costume is a little too revealing for a Muslim-majority…

"Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (Knopf) conveys the shock and dismay many esteemed poets—like many Americans—have felt since the presidential . . ."

For nearly 40 years, the federal government has enforced the "Common Rule." The rule required researchers in the social and medical sciences to get the approval of an independent review board, or IRB, for their federally funded experiments. The purpose of the boards, which are usually set up by the…

The Prince of Wales did not mince words in warning about the ravages of global warming. No piddling nonsense about a few inches of sea-rise; nothing so trivial as coastal erosion; no focus on the plight of the polar bear. No, the prince had a louder alarm he was sounding, one about the Future of…

Some of the entertainment coming out of California these days is simply outstanding.

The Prince of Wales did not mince words in warning about the ravages of global warming. No piddling nonsense about a few inches of sea-rise; nothing so trivial as coastal erosion; no focus on the plight of the polar bear. No, the prince had a louder alarm he was sounding, one about the Future of…

With all due respect to the Marine Corps, "The Few, The Proud, The Gender-Neutral" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Yet there is now a movement in the corps—even backed by some female jarheads—to require women to meet the same physical fitness standards as the men. In some respects, this is…

For nearly 40 years, the federal government has enforced the "Common Rule." The rule required researchers in the social and medical sciences to get the approval of an independent review board, or IRB, for their federally funded experiments. The purpose of the boards, which are usually set up by the…

How did Venezuela go from Latin America's richest economy to an impoverished basket case where food is so hard to come by that the average citizen has lost some 20 pounds? The answer would seem to be obvious—so obvious that it could be captured in a single word. But The Scrapbook gets ahead of…

Leave it to the nanny state to put the "block" in "sunblock." Multiple state governments are pursuing bills to let schoolkids apply their SPF-50 without first asking for permission or acquiring a doctor's note. According to the Wall Street Journal, California, New York, Oregon, and Texas have…

Rare is the reporter, it seems, who lets go by an opportunity to praise Britain's system of socialized medicine. And a perfect opportunity presented itself this month when the "WannaCry" computer virus seized networks worldwide.

Rare is the reporter, it seems, who lets go by an opportunity to praise Britain's system of socialized medicine. And a perfect opportunity presented itself this month when the "WannaCry" computer virus seized networks worldwide.

Here's the latest academic news: It turns out that letting left-wing protesters run roughshod over your campus is bad for business.

Leave it to the nanny state to put the "block" in "sunblock." Multiple state governments are pursuing bills to let schoolkids apply their SPF-50 without first asking for permission or acquiring a doctor's note. According to the Wall Street Journal, California, New York, Oregon, and Texas have…

How did Venezuela go from Latin America's richest economy to an impoverished basket case where food is so hard to come by that the average citizen has lost some 20 pounds? The answer would seem to be obvious—so obvious that it could be captured in a single word. But The Scrapbook gets ahead of…

Have you ever sat in Starbucks and thought you might enjoy your latte more if you were surrounded by cats? Dozens of them? No?

The U.S. dollar is strong and the British pound is weak these days, meaning that now is an advantageous time for Americans to visit the United Kingdom—rarely has the country been cheaper for us Yanks.

For decades, universities have meas­ured the performance of instructors in part by asking students to grade their professors. This has created a Yelp-y tyranny where teachers live in constant fear that their "clients" might torpedo them with one-star reviews. But not being dummies—at least for the…

Barack Obama took a break from his packed schedule of playdates with billionaires last week to go to Boston, where the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation presented him with its ever-so-prestig­ious "Profile in Courage AwardTM." Yes, the JFK folks have trademarked "Profile in Courage."…

Barack Obama took a break from his packed schedule of playdates with billionaires last week to go to Boston, where the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation presented him with its ever-so-prestig­ious "Profile in Courage AwardTM." Yes, the JFK folks have trademarked "Profile in Courage."…

Barack Obama took a break from his packed schedule of playdates with billionaires last week to go to Boston, where the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation presented him with its ever-so-prestig­ious "Profile in Courage AwardTM." Yes, the JFK folks have trademarked "Profile in Courage."…

The Scrapbook likes to think it's open to new experiences. For instance, we have concluded that the designated hitter rule won't destroy the institution of baseball. The Scrapbook is worldly.

Have you ever sat in Starbucks and thought you might enjoy your latte more if you were surrounded by cats? Dozens of them? No?

The U.S. dollar is strong and the British pound is weak these days, meaning that now is an advantageous time for Americans to visit the United Kingdom—rarely has the country been cheaper for us Yanks.

For decades, universities have meas­ured the performance of instructors in part by asking students to grade their professors. This has created a Yelp-y tyranny where teachers live in constant fear that their "clients" might torpedo them with one-star reviews. But not being dummies—at least for the…

It's been a tough time for ESPN. The network is losing money and viewers, and just laid off more than a hundred employees, including some of its best-known faces. It's committed unforced errors: To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Worldwide Leader in Sports published a poem in praise of a woman…

We suspect we are not the only ones amused by the New York Times editorial board's anguish upon hearing that former president Barack Obama will be pocketing $400,000 from investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald to speak at a health care conference in September.

The Scrapbook is especially pleased to note that our friends at Encounter Books have just published a collection of 20 recent essays by Gertrude Himmelfarb—Past and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Postmodernists. Of those 20 pieces, 11 first appeared in the…

It's been a tough time for ESPN. The network is losing money and viewers, and just laid off more than a hundred employees, including some of its best-known faces. It's committed unforced errors: To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Worldwide Leader in Sports published a poem in praise of a woman…

We suspect we are not the only ones amused by the New York Times editorial board's anguish upon hearing that former president Barack Obama will be pocketing $400,000 from investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald to speak at a health care conference in September.

It's getting harder and harder to be politically correct, no matter how assiduously one may try. Consider the tale of the poor feminist philosopher who has gotten herself sideways with the prickly Jacobins of her profession.

The Washington Post started the month with another in what seems to be a series of stories proclaiming electoral doom for Republicans. This was the front-page headline: "Kansas's blue hope: In a deep-red state ruled by Koch money, buoyed Democrats toil to flip seats one yard sale at a time." Let's…

Just whose side is the Washington Post on: that of the little guy or the small plate? The paper approvingly cited an economic study last week that found minimum wage hikes in the San Francisco Bay area were more likely to shutter average restaurants than those favored by foodies. Eateries with…

Ever since Donald Trump was elected, we've been in the middle of a dystopian fiction craze. The anti-Trumpers have sought to understand (and indulge in self-satisfied frissons of terror at) the rise of the Donald by imagining that the current moment is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or…

California’s quest to tax itself into oblivion looks to be taking another great leap forward, with the state legislature approving a plan that will hike gas taxes by 12 cents a gallon. That will solidify the state's standing as one of the highest gas-taxers in the nation. Add requirements for…

Ever since Donald Trump was elected, we’ve been in the middle of a dystopian fiction craze. The anti-Trumpers have sought to understand (and indulge in self-satisfied frissons of terror at) the rise of the Donald by imagining that the current moment is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or…

Just whose side is the Washington Post on: that of the little guy or the small plate? The paper approvingly cited an economic study last week that found minimum wage hikes in the San Francisco Bay area were more likely to shutter average restaurants than those favored by foodies. Eateries with…

The September 2016 article in Politico championing Hillary Clinton’s use of "data analytics" now looks—how shall we put it?—rather premature.

The September 2016 article in Politico championing Hillary Clinton’s use of "data analytics" now looks—how shall we put it?—rather premature.

It is the inarguable scientific consensus that early humans began developing stone tools between two and three million years ago, when the climate was undergoing a period of rapid change. African forests in the area we now know as Kenya were transforming into grasslands: The only way our ancestors…

Previous American generations might have taken their literary touchstones from writers such as Hemingway, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, London, Twain, and Dickens—or even Shakespeare and Sophocles—but pity the poor millennials, who have nothing to help them understand life's challenges but what Harold Bloom…

"Three days after the 2016 election, I sat at my writing desk overwhelmed by grief. I was not alone. Like many people (like you, perhaps), I’d had trouble sleeping, and had already engaged in many conversations—with friends and family, students and colleagues, in person and on social media—about…

"Massive Eisenhower Memorial Could Break Ground as Early as September.” This alarming headline appeared the other day in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. The news is alarming because after years, and many, many millions of dollars, spent tinkering with "starchitect" Frank Gehry's ludicrous…

These are fraught days for the superhero business. Consider the rebooted Wonder Woman franchise. Feminists saw the movie trailer and promptly decried not the sexist notion that a Hun-killing demigoddess would cavort in a strapless bustier but that the actress playing the Amazonian princess had…

It might come as news to the millions of pink-hatted anti-Trump marchers, the marauding rioters at Berkeley and Middlebury, and the anti-pipeline hippies in North Dakota, but apparently Americans’ right to protest is under threat. We know that because two "special rapporteurs on freedom of…

The left has had a narrative, going back to the beginning of Donald Trump’s campaign, that has only intensified in the months since his election. The theory goes like this: The current president is a force so pestilential that he brings out the hate in otherwise decent people. And now they claim to…

The Weekly Standard has two full-time positions available: online editor and social media director. The online editor will be a senior position for a talented individual with proven experience, reporting to the editor in chief. The duties of the social media director will include maximizing the…

The left's favorite scribbler on spiritual subjects, Reza Aslan, caused a small fuss recently with the first episode of his new CNN religion series: He participated in a little ritual cannibalism. But eating human brains isn't the only zombie-like behavior by the Iranian-American author: There is…

There once was an informal editorial motto that guided the selection of topics in Style, the Washington Post lifestyle section: "If a story is worth doing, it's worth doing every year." But in the age of Trump, that schedule has become rather compressed: The Post is now doing the same article about…

There once was an informal editorial motto that guided the selection of topics in Style, the Washington Post lifestyle section: “If a story is worth doing, it's worth doing every year." But in the age of Trump, that schedule has become rather compressed: The Post is now doing the same article about…

We opened the New York Times last week, and were sadly unsurprised to read an article that began thusly:

"The flower crown, a go-to accessory for Coachella fashionistas, has its share of critics. Flower crowns are basic, they’ve been done, but hey, at least they're not Native American headdresses.

The left’s favorite scribbler on spiritual subjects, Reza Aslan, caused a small fuss recently with the first episode of his new CNN religion series: He participated in a little ritual cannibalism. But eating human brains isn't the only zombie-like behavior by the Iranian-American author: There is…

April 4 rapidly approaches, the day that Winston Smith begins his illicit diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is thus the day that indie theaters across the country have chosen for a protest-screening of the 1984 movie version of George Orwell's dystopian tale. The movie houses are calling out, of…

Who knew criminal justice reform would come with iPad knockoffs? The Hoosier state's department of corrections has proposed putting computer tablets "in every Indiana inmate's hands," the Indianapolis Star reports. The electronic devices will come with the potential to access self-help materials,…

Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis is no right-winger. A self-described feminist who has written extensively for such publications as Harper's, Slate, Vox, and the New York Times Book Review, her leftist bona fides would not seem to be in question. At least, that was until two years…

April 4 rapidly approaches, the day that Winston Smith begins his illicit diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is thus the day that indie theaters across the country have chosen for a protest-screening of the 1984 movie version of George Orwell's dystopian tale. The movie houses are calling out, of…

First lady Melania Trump, looking for a suitable role in her husband’s administration, has declared she will be an advocate for bullied youth.

Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis is no right-winger. A self-described feminist who has written extensively for such publications as Harper’s, Slate, Vox, and the New York Times Book Review, her leftist bona fides would not seem to be in question. At least, that was until two years…

Who knew criminal justice reform would come with iPad knockoffs? The Hoosier state’s department of corrections has proposed putting computer tablets "in every Indiana inmate's hands," the Indianapolis Star reports. The electronic devices will come with the potential to access self-help materials,…

"The US Public Broadcasting Service is one of the country’s most-trusted national institutions. From dogged reporting on everything from the election to antics in the White House, its flagship news programme is a beacon .  .  . "

"It was a half-hour before one of the sparsely attended committee hearings that take place almost every day on Capitol Hill—in this case, a session on energy infrastructure so dry it would not merit even the presence of a C-SPAN camera. But in Al Franken's suite of offices .  .  . "

Barnard College in New York City isn't a religious school—unless you count the usual genuflections at the altars of diversity, feminism, environmentalism, and the like. Nonetheless, The Scrapbook is proud to bestow upon Barnard—with all due fanfare—the first-ever Weekly Standard St. Augustine Award…

Princeton economics professor emeritus and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton has been running around making an extraordinary claim: “Being really poor in America is in some ways worse than being really poor in India or Africa," he recently told the National Association for Business Economics. Asked about…

Who doesn’t like a story with a happy ending? In The Weekly Standard last week, in "Berkeley Goes Offline," Andrew Ferguson told the sad tale of disability-rights activists who had filed a complaint against the University of California, Berkeley, claiming that the thousands of hours of classroom…

Barnard College in New York City isn’t a religious school—unless you count the usual genuflections at the altars of diversity, feminism, environmentalism, and the like. Nonetheless, The Scrapbook is proud to bestow upon Barnard—with all due fanfare—the first-ever Weekly Standard St. Augustine Award…

Who doesn’t like a story with a happy ending? In The Weekly Standard last week, in "Berkeley Goes Offline," Andrew Ferguson told the sad tale of disability-rights activists who had filed a complaint against the University of California, Berkeley, claiming that the thousands of hours of classroom…

Newspapers aren’t just throwing Trumpoplectic fits, they're monetizing them. The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times have all rolled out clothing lines tweaking the new president. The most comic is found at the Post website, which features a T-shirt in rock-concert black…

Princeton economics professor emeritus and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton has been running around making an extraordinary claim: “Being really poor in America is in some ways worse than being really poor in India or Africa," he recently told the National Association for Business Economics. Asked about…

Politico reports that funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be eliminated in the Trump administration's proposed budget:

Newspapers aren't just throwing Trumpoplectic fits, they're monetizing them. The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times have all rolled out clothing lines tweaking the new president. The most comic is found at the Post website, which features a T-shirt in rock-concert black…

As noted recently in these pages (“Nullifying Calhoun," Feb. 27), Yale University has decided to remove the name of alumnus John C. Calhoun from the "residential college"—Ivy-speak for "dormitory"—it has graced since the dorm was built in the 1930s. Calhoun, class of 1804, senator, vice president,…

The ironists among us—or maybe wiseacres would be a better term—have always taken macabre note of the premature deaths of health and fitness gurus. One such was Jim Fixx, author of The Complete Book of Running (1977), who suffered a fatal coronary at the appallingly young age of 52—while jogging,…

"Could Joe Biden have been the next Abraham Lincoln? That thought came to mind recently .  .  . "

Once it was thought to be a meas­ure of an actor's skill that he or she might play roles at odds with his or her actual circumstances, race, or even gender (Shakespeare's women, after all, were once played by male youths). But the trend—disguised as a moral imperative—has been to demand that…

It’s tough to be a globalist these days. President Trump and his chief strategist denounce you. Alt-right websites ridicule you. The Brexit vote leaves your European plans in limbo.

Non-Californians need not apply. That’s the message the University of California system sent last week, when it proposed to limit out-of-state residents to just 20 percent of student slots at its flagship schools. At UC campuses with higher rates of out-of-state students—at Berkeley, for example,…

Villanova University in Radnor Township, Pennsylvania, is a Roman Catholic institution. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But for some residents of Radnor, Villanova is kind of overdoing this whole Catholic thing.

Say this about the Trump presidency: It befuddles Democrats, who are racing to adjust their political positions to appease their angry constituents' anti-Trump mood. Their latest contortion on immigration is leaving some in the party of resistance sounding like Rush Limbaugh.

What's the sound a bottle of soda makes when opened? If you're the government in Berkeley or Philadelphia, it's not ssfzzzt but cha-ching. These two towns—bedrocks of meddlesome nanny-state liberalism—now collect steep taxes on soft drinks and other sweetened beverages. The Philly soda-tariff took…

SeaWorld is drowning—in red ink. "As they reported continued declines in revenue and attendance," the Orlando Sentinel writes, "SeaWorld Entertainment executives vowed to push for improved financial performance through a combination of new attractions, cost cuts and pricing strategies."

What’s the sound a bottle of soda makes when opened? If you're the government in Berkeley or Philadelphia, it's not ssfzzzt but cha-ching. These two towns—bedrocks of meddlesome nanny-state liberalism—now collect steep taxes on soft drinks and other sweetened beverages. The Philly soda-tariff took…

THE NEW YORK TIMES’S FAIRY TALE SLURS INVOLVING PEOPLE’S SEXUAL ORIENTATION are strictly off-limits at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. So THE SCRAPBOOK wants it clearly understood that nothing pejorative is intended by the headline on this item. Perish the thought. The phrase "fairy tale" refers, instead, to…

Villanova University in Radnor Township, Pennsylvania, is a Roman Catholic institution. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But for some residents of Radnor, Villanova is kind of overdoing this whole Catholic thing.

The craft beer market continues to surge, and this being America, that means a burgeoning market for litigation. Among the lawsuits that have been brewing is a case filed last month accusing Walmart of peddling as “craft" beer the product of an industrial-scale brewer. Now comes another…

Say this about the Trump presidency: It befuddles Democrats, who are racing to adjust their political positions to appease their angry constituents’ anti-Trump mood. Their latest contortion on immigration is leaving some in the party of resistance sounding like Rush Limbaugh.

Who knew that in the age of America First, the greatest threat to Hispanic communities in the United States wasn't marauding bands of ICE agents wielding mass deportation orders or the construction of a border wall? No, the scourge is Art.

Is there nothing so louche that Trump supporters won't indulge in it? According to the Washington Post, apparently not. So low have we been brought, the Post suggests, that in Donald Trump's capital there is a fad for that odious cinnamon-flavored sugar gargle that masquerades as whiskey,…

Last week, the Washington Post unveiled a new slogan displayed just below the paper’s masthead: "Democracy dies in darkness." As Count Floyd might say, "Scary stuff, huh, kids?"

Is there nothing so louche that Trump supporters won’t indulge in it? According to the Washington Post, apparently not. So low have we been brought, the Post suggests, that in Donald Trump's capital there is a fad for that odious cinnamon-flavored sugar gargle that masquerades as whiskey,…

A leading case in constitutional law it ain’t. But we now have a ruling: The Snuggie—"The Blanket That Has Sleeves!"—is indeed a blanket, the sleeves notwithstanding. So says Judge Mark A. Barnett of the United States Court of International Trade. And rightly so, as far as The Scrapbook can tell.

Who knew that in the age of America First, the greatest threat to Hispanic communities in the United States wasn’t marauding bands of ICE agents wielding mass deportation orders or the construction of a border wall? No, the scourge is Art.

Up to now, The Scrapbook has looked skeptically at rankings of presidents by historians. They tend to be biased, trendy, superficial, and based on no little myth. The only thing worse than getting historians—liberals, for the most part—to do the ordering would be to ask sociologists. Yet we…

Berets—it's been some time since they were just for baguette-toting Frenchmen and elite members of the Army's Special Forces. In the summer of 2001, the Army changed longstanding policy and began to put berets on every head. The logic was simple—everyone should be made to feel special, not just…

Washington Post “media columnist" Margaret Sullivan has lately discovered that when political types respond to media inquiries, they "answer" only those questions they choose to answer and smother the rest with verbiage. Being rather new to the capital city, she seems to believe this is a uniquely…

Up to now, The Scrapbook has looked skeptically at rankings of presidents by historians. They tend to be biased, trendy, superficial, and based on no little myth. The only thing worse than getting historians—liberals, for the most part—to do the ordering would be to ask sociologists. Yet we…

Let's celebrate a small victory for economic freedom, which, as the great Milton Friedman was wont to point out, is essential to political freedom. It is now legal in Arizona to get paid to give a horse a massage without having, first, acquired a license to practice veterinary medicine.

After masked marauders invaded the campus breaking and burning things, rioting to shut down a speech by alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a question for the University of California, Berkeley, was whether the miscreants were students or (in the immortal words of The Graduate's Berkeley…

The Scrapbook is always flattered when the conventional wisdom catches up with our own prejudices. Case in point: There seems to be a gathering consensus that the White House Correspondents' Association dinner—that annual televised schmoozefest where journalists and politicians mix in ways that…

We regret to inform you that Katie Couric has a new documentary.

After masked marauders invaded the campus breaking and burning things, rioting to shut down a speech by alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a question for the University of California, Berkeley, was whether the miscreants were students or (in the immortal words of The Graduate’s Berkeley…

Let’s celebrate a small victory for economic freedom, which, as the great Milton Friedman was wont to point out, is essential to political freedom. It is now legal in Arizona to get paid to give a horse a massage without having, first, acquired a license to practice veterinary medicine.

The Scrapbook is always flattered when the conventional wisdom catches up with our own prejudices. Case in point: There seems to be a gathering consensus that the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—that annual televised schmoozefest where journalists and politicians mix in ways that…

Those looking to study Korean in its native land suffer from no dearth of options: Seoul is chock-full of fine universities offering to teach the notoriously difficult tongue to foreigners. But for those seeking an experience a little more, well, what's the word—Stalinist?—there is Tongil Tours.…

The Ahabs at the Washington Post continue their obsessive pursuit of the Great Orange Whale. And if that means harpooning the inoffensive spouse of their prey, so be it. Witness an extended Post article last week, "The AWOL first lady," which takes Melania Trump to task for being "barely visible."…

The Wall Street Journal last week ran a piece on an interior design trend not for the faint of heart—maximalism: "The Lush New Décor Look That's Vanquishing Minimalism."

Those looking to study Korean in its native land suffer from no dearth of options: Seoul is chock-full of fine universities offering to teach the notoriously difficult tongue to foreigners. But for those seeking an experience a little more, well, what’s the word—Stalinist?—there is Tongil Tours.…

The Ahabs at the Washington Post continue their obsessive pursuit of the Great Orange Whale. And if that means harpooning the inoffensive spouse of their prey, so be it. Witness an extended Post article last week, “The AWOL first lady," which takes Melania Trump to task for being "barely visible."…

Should you find yourself strolling along Colorado’s Boulder Creek, be careful where you step. It seems that no small number of homeless have taken up residence there, and not only are they are in the habit of leaving trash hither and yon, so too waste of a more personal nature. "The…

The work of THE WEEKLY STANDARD was briefly interrupted when a handful of Greenpeace stuntivists mounted a crane on a neighboring construction site, unfurled a banner, and then dangled in the air for several hours. Our office window had a perfect view of the pranksters as their banner folded in on…

Oh, no! Only 150 seconds to go. The lugubrious blowhards at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists couldn't let all of the exciting anti-Trump activities of the president's first week go by without getting in on the act. As they like to do whenever they've been out of the news for too long, the…

The work of THE WEEKLY STANDARD was briefly interrupted last week when a handful of Greenpeace stuntivists mounted a crane on a neighboring construction site, unfurled a banner, and then dangled in the air for several hours. Our office window had a perfect view of the pranksters as their banner…

Kim Jong-un’s nicotine habit may yet be his undoing. That was the lesson from the defection, announced this week, of senior North Korean diplomat Thae Yong-ho.

Should you find yourself strolling along Colorado’s Boulder Creek, be careful where you step. It seems that no small number of homeless have taken up residence there, and not only are they are in the habit of leaving trash hither and yon, so too waste of a more personal nature. "The…

Oh, no! Only 150 seconds to go. The lugubrious blowhards at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists couldn’t let all of the exciting anti-Trump activities of the president's first week go by without getting in on the act. As they like to do whenever they've been out of the news for too long, the…

Don’t miss the new episode of "Conversations with Bill Kristol," the video series in which The Weekly Standard's editor at large talks philosophy, politics, and culture with big thinkers. A case in point is the most recent program, which features that most worthy of worthies, Scrapbook colleague…

If you hadn’t noticed, the election of Donald Trump has led to some, well, tension in social settings. Weeks after the vote, families gathered for Thanksgiving and the college kids were just too, too appalled by their parents' deplorable Trumpism to even talk about it. Come Christmas the snowflakes…

Even with a packed schedule of farewell speeches and his final presidential press conference, Barack Obama managed to find time for exit interviews in his last few White House weeks: There was the 60 Minutes sit-down, the Lester Holt love-fest, an NPR snoozer, David Axelrod’s "Axe Files" podcast,…

Kids at Barack Obama Elementary have known only one president. Many fear the next.

Whether Barack Obama returns to the craft of short stories or makes with the memoirs, chances are he will be doing much of his writing not in Chicago, but in Washington, where he and his family have chosen to reside.

Cory Booker's toothless testimony last week at the confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions failed to derail the nomination of the next attorney general. But The Scrapbook suspects that was never the New Jersey Democrat's intent when he announced he would defy an unwritten rule of Senate decorum and…

In the middle of a 3,500-word Newsweek profile of Betsy DeVos—the philanthropist and education reform crusader Donald Trump has nominated for education secretary—The Scrapbook spotted this trenchant observation:

The Scrapbook finds itself so very, very disappointed in the media for their coverage of the recent salacious assertions about the president-elect.

The Scrapbook finds itself so very, very disappointed in the media for their coverage of the recent salacious assertions about the president-elect.

Readers may recall the evening, in 1973, when Marlon Brando declined to accept, in person, his Oscar for The Godfather and sent instead a winsome half-Native-American woman (stage name: Sacheen Littlefeather), who proceeded to deliver a Brando-certified speech about the film industry’s…

In the middle of a 3,500-word Newsweek profile of Betsy DeVos—the philanthropist and education reform crusader Donald Trump has nominated for education secretary—The Scrapbook spotted this trenchant observation:

Cory Booker’s toothless testimony last week at the confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions failed to derail the nomination of the next attorney general. But The Scrapbook suspects that was never the New Jersey Democrat's intent when he announced he would defy an unwritten rule of Senate decorum and…

The Nation is publishing its gala hagiographic Obama send-off issue—"The Obama Years: 2008-2016"—and does so perhaps more in sadness than in celebration. The articles are full of complaint and recriminations—but not, for the most part, aimed at the Dear Leader.

Secretary of State John Kerry recently gave a speech highly critical of the Israeli government. Supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were outraged; critics, on the other hand, were gratified. And then, just about everyone picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and turned their…

Great Britain has a new tool for combating the very real threat of terrorism—an app.

The Nation is publishing its gala hagiographic Obama send-off issue—"The Obama Years: 2008-2016"—and does so perhaps more in sadness than in celebration. The articles are full of complaint and recriminations—but not, for the most part, aimed at the Dear Leader.

For those who will miss the fawning tone and tenor of presidential news coverage to which we have grown accustomed in the age of Obama, there’s always Chinese media and its coverage of the Communist party and its leaders.

As you may have noticed from the date on the cover of this issue, all of us at The Weekly Standard will be taking a week off (though the digital galley slaves at weeklystandard.com—visit early and often!—are going to power through the holiday season). The Scrapbook is self-indulgently ecumenical…

As Orwell memorably put it, sometimes the "restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." In that spirit, The Scrapbook will reiterate to our liberal friends: Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States. We don't have high hopes that they're listening to us,…

As readers know, The Scrapbook is a longtime connoisseur of the Law of Unintended Consequences. And this election year has furnished more than a few examples.

As you may have noticed from the date on the cover of this issue, all of us at The Weekly Standard will be taking a week off (though the digital galley slaves at weeklystandard.com—visit early and often!—are going to power through the holiday season). The Scrapbook is self-indulgently ecumenical…

As readers know, The Scrapbook is a longtime connoisseur of the Law of Unintended Consequences. And this election year has furnished more than a few examples.

As Orwell memorably put it, sometimes the “restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." In that spirit, The Scrapbook will reiterate to our liberal friends: Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States. We don't have high hopes that they're listening to us,…

To be honest, The Scrapbook is nowhere near as exercised as it might be about the removal, by a gaggle of undergraduates, of William Shakespeare's portrait from its prominent position on the wall of an English department staircase at the University of Pennsylvania. The department had already…

Last week saw a delightfully breathless editorial in the Washington Post, followed by an even more preposterous companion piece at Politico, claiming that legislation changing how the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other U.S. government-sponsored broadcasters are organized…

Congressional Republicans agree with Democrats that Russia's hacking of Democratic emails merits investigation. But however troubling Moscow's election-season mischief-making might have been, there's no reason to assume the results of the presidential vote itself were in any way unfair. The real…

To be honest, The Scrapbook is nowhere near as exercised as it might be about the removal, by a gaggle of undergraduates, of William Shakespeare’s portrait from its prominent position on the wall of an English department staircase at the University of Pennsylvania. The department had already…

Last week saw a delightfully breathless editorial in the Washington Post, followed by an even more preposterous companion piece at Politico, claiming that legislation changing how the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other U.S. government-sponsored broadcasters are organized…

Congressional Republicans agree with Democrats that Russia’s hacking of Democratic emails merits investigation. But however troubling Moscow's election-season mischief-making might have been, there's no reason to assume the results of the presidential vote itself were in any way unfair. The real…

Don't mistake The Scrapbook's recent silence on the subject of the mainstream media's meretricious "fact-checking" enterprise for a sign that things have improved on that front. They haven't. The "fact checks" are as biased and misleading as ever, it's just that The Scrapbook got tired of spitting…

Ever on the lookout for irony, The Scrapbook's attention was drawn the other day to two stories—conven-iently situated next to one another—on the front page of the Washington Post Metro section. The first, entitled "D.C. readies for horde of inaugural protesters" (December 4), explained that…

Don’t mistake The Scrapbook's recent silence on the subject of the mainstream media's meretricious "fact-checking" enterprise for a sign that things have improved on that front. They haven't. The "fact checks" are as biased and misleading as ever, it's just that The Scrapbook got tired of spitting…

Speaking of media credibility, The Scrapbook itself has screwed up, for which we are very sorry. But we are grateful to Theresa M. Towner, professor of literary studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, for her gracious letter of reproval. She noted that “Knock, Knock, Knocking," an item in our…

Ever on the lookout for irony, The Scrapbook’s attention was drawn the other day to two stories—conven-iently situated next to one another—on the front page of the Washington Post Metro section. The first, entitled "D.C. readies for horde of inaugural protesters" (December 4), explained that…

It was not a great year for McDonald's in 2004. The company was still recovering from a sales slump and management crisis when a comedian/political activist named Morgan Spurlock released a documentary (Super Size Me) in which he filmed himself consuming three McDonald's meals a day for one month,…

The Scrapbook has slowly begun to grow accustomed to the idea that Donald Trump—Donald Trump!—is going to be sworn in next month as president of the United States. What we continue to be shocked by is how out of touch the entire Democratic party appears to be. Had we understood just how clueless…

Chip and Joanna Gaines are at the height of their popularity. They host the well-liked remodeling show Fixer Upper on HGTV, have a bestselling book, and recently appeared on the cover of People. They are also devout Christians from Waco, Texas, so it was probably just a matter of time before the…

Chip and Joanna Gaines are at the height of their popularity. They host the well-liked remodeling show Fixer Upper on HGTV, have a bestselling book, and recently appeared on the cover of People. They are also devout Christians from Waco, Texas, so it was probably just a matter of time before the…

It was not a great year for McDonald’s in 2004. The company was still recovering from a sales slump and management crisis when a comedian/political activist named Morgan Spurlock released a documentary (Super Size Me) in which he filmed himself consuming three McDonald's meals a day for one month,…

A crime report in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week caught The Scrapbook’s eye:

The Scrapbook has slowly begun to grow accustomed to the idea that Donald Trump—Donald Trump!—is going to be sworn in next month as president of the United States. What we continue to be shocked by is how out of touch the entire Democratic party appears to be. Had we understood just how clueless…

The Scrapbook has been experiencing déjà vu recently. Our memories of the vast left-wing paranoia during the Bush years had become hazy, but this week they all came flooding back. The left was already displaying unusual difficulty in coming to terms with Donald Trump's election victory, but then…

Last week was the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which the Washington Post observed by inviting the ubiquitous novelist Joyce Carol Oates to review a memoir by the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the man whose 8mm movie of Kennedy's shooting by Lee Harvey Oswald may well be the…

In the annals of academic condescension, there can be few equivalents in modern times to the letter, signed by 110 (and counting) college presidents, addressed to President-elect Donald Trump. “In light of your pledge to be 'President for all Americans,' " it declares, "we urge you to condemn and…

The Scrapbook has long suspected that the first rash of antipathy toward Sarah Palin—the immediate, vituperative, sputtering hatred that was manifested within hours of her announcement as John McCain's vice presidential pick—was triggered not by her politics but by her family. Palin has a gaggle of…

The Scrapbook has been experiencing déjà vu recently. Our memories of the vast left-wing paranoia during the Bush years had become hazy, but this week they all came flooding back. The left was already displaying unusual difficulty in coming to terms with Donald Trump's election victory, but then…

Baby boomers had reason to feel slightly more decrepit than usual last week when it was learned that Robert Vaughn, the veteran character actor who played the debonair secret agent Napoleon Solo on the popular television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68), had died at the age of 83.

Readers who regularly partake of our abundant offerings at weeklystandard.com will have to forgive us for shamelessly ripping off what follows from our colleague Jonathan V. Last’s online update last week of the latest p.c. doings at the Lego Group, which we thought was too piquant not to share…

Baby boomers had reason to feel slightly more decrepit than usual last week when it was learned that Robert Vaughn, the veteran character actor who played the debonair secret agent Napoleon Solo on the popular television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68), had died at the age of 83.

Tucked among the anguished headlines in last week's editions of the Washington Post was this poignant update: "In election's wake, D.C. statehood becomes a dream deferred." The quotation from Langston Hughes was no accident, of course: "Dream deferred" makes it clear that the Post regards statehood…

After all of the dark speculation in the media over whether Donald Trump and his supporters would gracefully accept losing to Hillary Clinton, the reaction of her supporters to the sudden reversal of fortune inflicted by voters has been something to behold. To summarize: The world is literally…

After all of the dark speculation in the media over whether Donald Trump and his supporters would gracefully accept losing to Hillary Clinton, the reaction of her supporters to the sudden reversal of fortune inflicted by voters has been something to behold. To summarize: The world is literally…

One more unforeseen consequence of Donald Trump’s election victory: College students who have been spending too much time binge drinking or binge watching now have a handy excuse for not turning in that required paper on time or for being unprepared for that exam. They can blame it on the election.…

Tucked among the anguished headlines in last week’s editions of the Washington Post was this poignant update: "In election's wake, D.C. statehood becomes a dream deferred." The quotation from Langston Hughes was no accident, of course: "Dream deferred" makes it clear that the Post regards statehood…

"This could blow up in her face! Hillary Clinton may have lit the fuse for her victory celebration a little too soon—by planning an Election Night explosion of fireworks over the Hudson River, The Post has learned.

It's not clear which was more laughable, the cluelessness on display or the hapless effort to hide the cluelessness on display. The Scrapbook is referring to the embarrassing story that went up on the snarky Mediaite website (sort of a cross between the Huffington Post and Gawker) during game seven…

A Washington Post writer observed last week that while the presidential election campaign "has been a late-night host's dream come true," that does not necessarily mean it has been everyone else's dream come true. The late-night TV hosts—Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah,…

"These are banner times for -penises onscreen. In the last 18 months or so, I’ve seen casually naked men in .  .  ." ("Last Taboo: Why American pop culture just can't deal with black male sexuality," Wesley Morris, New York Times Magazine, October 30).

Throughout the 2016 campaign, it seemed to be the consensus view in the media that Donald Trump is a uniquely dishonest creature, obliging the selfsame media to take extraordinary steps, such as explicitly calling him a liar in news stories. The Scrapbook has no problem with calling liars liars,…

"To discuss issues of political and artistic import, forums will run in the gallery’s open-floor space. Artists, historians, philosophers, activists and community members will speak on pressing social issues facing the United States: violence in the media; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender…

It's not clear which was more laughable, the cluelessness on display or the hapless effort to hide the cluelessness on display. The Scrapbook is referring to the embarrassing story that went up on the snarky Mediaite website (sort of a cross between the Huffington Post and Gawker) during game seven…

When Obamacare was first passed, Vice President Joe Biden famously said it was a "big f—ing deal." Now, though, there's a surprising level of bipartisan agreement that it's a big honking disaster. There had been many warning signs, but last week it became official: Obamacare premiums are going up…

Bob Dylan, as everyone knows, was awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Everyone, that is, with the possible exception of .  .  . Bob Dylan. Several days after the award was announced, the committee that makes the decision still had not been able to contact Dylan. So either he didn't know…

The press has a weakness for perennial stories, but while some are benign—presidential pardon for Thanksgiving turkey, overdue medal for wartime hero—others are not so benign and deeply irritating as well. One instructive example is when a well-known media property changes hands: There is always…

Bob Dylan, as everyone knows, was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Everyone, that is, with the possible exception of .  .  . Bob Dylan. Several days after the award was announced, the committee that makes the decision still had not been able to contact Dylan. So either he didn't know…

When Obamacare was first passed, Vice President Joe Biden famously said it was a “big f—ing deal." Now, though, there's a surprising level of bipartisan agreement that it's a big honking disaster. There had been many warning signs, but last week it became official: Obamacare premiums are going up…

The press has a weakness for perennial stories, but while some are benign—presidential pardon for Thanksgiving turkey, overdue medal for wartime hero—others are not so benign and deeply irritating as well. One instructive example is when a well-known media property changes hands: There is always…

One last story from the trove of Democratic insider emails released by WikiLeaks. This one comes courtesy of our friends at the Washington Free Beacon, whose headline we just ripped off: "Emails: Liberal Think Tank Freaked Out at SNL's Criticism of Donors."

Hillary Clinton’s " 'choice of a white suit for Wednesday's -debate harkened back to the not-so-distant past, when suffragists wore white to promote their struggle to gain the right to vote,' Booth Moore, a senior fashion editor for The Hollywood Reporter and Pret-a-Reporter, told ABC News .  .  .…

Elsewhere in this issue, our colleague Mark Hemingway surveys the revelations contained in the WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from Clintonista John Podesta. Without giving too much away (see "Scandal? What Scandal?"), it will not surprise you to learn that the emails confirm two obvious points:…

Liberal pundit Jonathan Chait has a new book coming out in a few months titled Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Transformed America. The Scrapbook doesn’t necessarily intend to plug the book, but if he's reading this, you're welcome. Anyway, galleys are now being sent out to…

One last story from the trove of Democratic insider emails released by WikiLeaks. This one comes courtesy of our friends at the Washington Free Beacon, whose headline we just ripped off: “Emails: Liberal Think Tank Freaked Out at SNL's Criticism of Donors."

Hillary Clinton’s " 'choice of a white suit for Wednesday's -debate harkened back to the not-so-distant past, when suffragists wore white to promote their struggle to gain the right to vote,' Booth Moore, a senior fashion editor for The Hollywood Reporter and Pret-a-Reporter, told ABC News .  .  .…

Elsewhere in this issue, our colleague Mark Hemingway surveys the revelations contained in the WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from Clintonista John Podesta. Without giving too much away (see “Scandal? What Scandal?" on page 28), it will not surprise you to learn that the emails confirm two…

The saga of Jaber al-Bakr, the 22-year-old Syrian migrant and terror suspect who hanged himself in a Leipzig jail cell last week, is more or less over. But his story does illustrate the complexities, the dangers and ­dilemmas, of immigration policy here and in Europe. Bakr, who was from Damascus,…

Wesley College has been practicing Queen of Hearts justice: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards."Such is the finding of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which announced this week that the Dover, Delaware, school has been rather jumping the gun when it comes to punishing those…

This past week we got a master class in how to deploy opposition research in a presidential campaign. During the second debate, a question from CNN's Anderson Cooper led Donald Trump to assert that he "did not kiss women without consent or grope women without consent." At that point, the floodgates…

The saga of Jaber al-Bakr, the 22-year-old Syrian migrant and terror suspect who hanged himself in a Leipzig jail cell last week, is more or less over. But his story does illustrate the complexities, the dangers and ­dilemmas, of immigration policy here and in Europe. Bakr, who was from Damascus,…

This past week we got a master class in how to deploy opposition research in a presidential campaign. During the second debate, a question from CNN’s Anderson Cooper led Donald Trump to assert that he "did not kiss women without consent or grope women without consent." At that point, the floodgates…

"Things taste better when you make them yourself, and they taste doubly better when you’ve hunted the animal yourself. Whether you're fishing for the salmon, or going hunting for a boar, that's a big part of it. You feel more connected to what you're doing, to what you're eating, you cook it…

Wesley College has been practicing Queen of Hearts justice: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards."Such is the finding of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which announced this week that the Dover, Delaware, school has been rather jumping the gun when it comes to punishing those…

FIREWORKS FOR THE FEW IN THE SPRING OF 1993, President Clinton stalled runway traffic at the Los Angeles airport so he could receive a $200 haircut aboard Air Force One at the hands of the gifted Christophe. Or maybe he didn’t—the facts of the case have never been established to The Scrapbook’s…

Obamacare's days are really and truly numbered. Problems with the law are reaching critical mass. So the Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to prop up the system—and by "extraordinary," we mean illegal.

Scrapbook friend Mike Murphy, the political consultant extraordinaire whose travails at the end of the Jeb Bush campaign were memorably chronicled in these pages by Matt Labash ("Debriefing Mike Murphy," March 28 / April 4, 2016), has of late been hosting a wildly popular podcast called Radio Free…

Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD have been treated over the years to countless examples of malpractice from so-called media fact checkers. Some of those fact checkers are worse than others. It's an open secret, and one the media don't want to acknowledge, that PolitiFact in particular is horribly…

The award for the week's most depressing opening sentence in a news story goes to this gem by T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post:

Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD have been treated over the years to countless examples of malpractice from so-called media fact checkers. Some of those fact checkers are worse than others. It's an open secret, and one the media don't want to acknowledge, that PolitiFact in particular is horribly…

Obamacare’s days are really and truly numbered. Problems with the law are reaching critical mass. So the Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to prop up the system—and by "extraordinary," we mean illegal.

The award for the week’s most depressing opening sentence in a news story goes to this gem by T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post:

Scrapbook friend Mike Murphy, the political consultant extraordinaire whose travails at the end of the Jeb Bush campaign were memorably chronicled in these pages by Matt Labash (“Debriefing Mike Murphy," March 28 / April 4, 2016), has of late been hosting a wildly popular podcast called Radio Free…

An old friend of The Scrapbook's posted on Facebook the other day an oblique commentary on this year's campaign: "I used to like the word 'tremendous' and not know the word 'bigly.' Those were happy days."

Last week in Miami baseball laid one of its youngest stars to rest. Jose Fernandez was a 24-year-old righthanded starter for the Miami Marlins with less than four complete major league seasons to his record. From 2013-2016, he compiled 38 wins and an earned run average of 2.58, while striking out…

This summer, The Scrapbook was visiting family at a Fourth of July celebration in downtown Denver. We were settling in and getting ready to watch the fireworks when we were accosted by petitioners. The fact that there is seemingly no time or place in this country where politics is considered an…

An old friend of The Scrapbook’s posted on Facebook the other day an oblique commentary on this year's campaign: "I used to like the word 'tremendous' and not know the word 'bigly.' Those were happy days."

Last week in Miami baseball laid one of its youngest stars to rest. Jose Fernandez was a 24-year-old righthanded starter for the Miami Marlins with less than four complete major league seasons to his record. From 2013-2016, he compiled 38 wins and an earned run average of 2.58, while striking out…

This summer, The Scrapbook was visiting family at a Fourth of July celebration in downtown Denver. We were settling in and getting ready to watch the fireworks when we were accosted by petitioners. The fact that there is seemingly no time or place in this country where politics is considered an…

A new movie on the subject from Oliver Stone and the imminent retirement of President Obama seem to have concentrated minds on the left: There is a burgeoning movement—confined, for the most part, to journalists—for Obama to pardon Edward Snowden, the fugitive national-security leaker now resident…

In Federalist 10, James Madison argued that the soon-to-be-ratified Constitution would serve as an effective bulwark against what John Adams, amongst others, called "the tyranny of the majority." The Founders believed this danger arose chiefly through democratic government. But John Stuart Mill…

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last week wrote an extremely controversial column about a topic that wouldn't seem so controversial on the face of it: late-night comedians. The peg was Donald Trump's recent appearance on The Tonight Show. Host Jimmy Fallon had a good-natured chat with the man…

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last week wrote an extremely controversial column about a topic that wouldn’t seem so controversial on the face of it: late-night comedians. The peg was Donald Trump's recent appearance on The Tonight Show. Host Jimmy Fallon had a good-natured chat with the man…

In Federalist 10, James Madison argued that the soon-to-be--ratified Constitution would serve as an effective bulwark against what John Adams, amongst others, called "the tyranny of the majority." The Founders believed this danger arose chiefly through democratic government. But John Stuart Mill…

A new movie on the subject from Oliver Stone and the imminent retirement of President Obama seem to have concentrated minds on the left: There is a burgeoning movement—confined, for the most part, to journalists—for Obama to pardon Edward Snowden, the fugitive national-security leaker now resident…

The latest of the Conversations with Bill Kristol series, a wide-ranging discussion between our boss and Charles Murray, is particularly fascinating. (You can find it, along with all the earlier conversations, at the website sponsored by the Foundation for Constitutional Government:…

The latest of the Conversations with Bill Kristol series, a wide-ranging discussion between our boss and Charles Murray, is particularly fascinating. (You can find it, along with all the earlier conversations, at the website sponsored by the Foundation for Constitutional Government:…

In last week’s issue, Mark Hemingway highlighted the efforts of a few brave college administrators who are attempting to push back against the demands of petulant college student protests that roiled campuses last year. In particular, the University of Chicago and Purdue—where the university…

We have sung its praises before, but The Scrapbook would like to commend to you again the weekly email newsletter from our colleague Jonathan V. Last. It’s great, and it's free (you can sign up at newsletters.weeklystandard.com; look for "From the Desk of JVL"). Here's a taste of this week's…

A tip of The Scrapbook homburg to our friends at the New Criterion, which embarks on its 35th year with a special issue this month.

On September 7, NBC hosted a presidential forum on issues related to national security. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were interviewed back to back and took selected questions from military personnel in attendance. It was moderated by NBC’s Matt Lauer.

If you’re a denizen of D.C. (or visiting here) looking for something smart to distract you from the presidential race—and who isn't?—you're in luck. Not only has Satchmo at the Waldorf, a play by longtime Scrapbook friend and TWS contributor Terry Teachout, opened in Washington; less than two weeks…

A tip of The Scrapbook homburg to our friends at the New Criterion, which embarks on its 35th year with a special issue this month.

On September 7, NBC hosted a presidential forum on issues related to national security. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were interviewed back to back and took selected questions from military personnel in attendance. It was moderated by NBC’s Matt Lauer.

If you’re a denizen of D.C. (or visiting here) looking for something smart to distract you from the presidential race—and who isn't?—you're in luck. Not only has Satchmo at the Waldorf, a play by longtime Scrapbook friend and TWS contributor Terry Teachout, opened in Washington; less than two weeks…

Not to be outdone by the Beijing-friendly Clinton State Department, Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California now weighs in with a true masterpiece of China-related moral equivalence. According to a short item in the February 5 Los Angeles Times, Sen. Feinstein recently gave a speech at the…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD is soliciting applications from college seniors or recent graduates for a one-year paid fellowship as an editorial assistant, beginning in mid-July. Responsibilities include editorial research and some writing. The deadline for applications is April 1, and preference will be…

Newt Gingrich has bigger problems than being attacked by Republicans like Bill Bennett who don't like his coziness with Jesse Jackson.

And speaking of Jackson, Gingrich didn't help himself with Republicans by his comment to the Los Angeles Times. Defending his invitation to Jackson to sit in his box during the State of the Union address, the speaker said: " I'm courting every American of any background." Implicit was the notion…

The antennae of the sexism police should have tingled last week when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was describing a chat between the president and the new secretary of state. Referring to the recently unearthed information about Madeleine Albright's Jewish grandparents who were killed in…

"From our respective positions of rabbi-counselor and former Playboy model and actress, we have often warned about pornography’s corrosive effects .  .  . " ("Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn," by Shmuley Boteach and Pamela Anderson, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31).

Everybody’s pretty excited about the resumption of commercial air travel between the United States and Cuba. Well, everybody in the media, that is: The Associated Press heralds "a new era of U.S.-Cuba travel," and the New York Times tagged along for the maiden voyage, taking note of one passenger…

The terrible and terrifying news of impending climate-change doom continues to roll in. This week it was a study led by researchers at Britain’s University of East Anglia: "Climate Change and Future Pollen Allergy in Europe." The scientists project that, because of rising temperatures and increased…

Well, the third sexting scandal was the charm. Anthony Weiner’s wife, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, announced she was leaving him last week after the New York Post splashed a front-page photo of the former congressman sending provocative shots of himself to an Internet stranger. This time…

Well, the third sexting scandal was the charm. Anthony Weiner’s wife, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, announced she was leaving him last week after the New York Post splashed a front-page photo of the former congressman sending provocative shots of himself to an Internet stranger. This time…

Everybody’s pretty excited about the resumption of commercial air travel between the United States and Cuba. Well, everybody in the media, that is: The Associated Press heralds "a new era of U.S.-Cuba travel," and the New York Times tagged along for the maiden voyage, taking note of one passenger…

"From our respective positions of rabbi-counselor and former Playboy model and actress, we have often warned about pornography’s corrosive effects .  .  . " ("Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn," by Shmuley Boteach and Pamela Anderson, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31).

The terrible and terrifying news of impending climate-change doom continues to roll in. This week it was a study led by researchers at Britain’s University of East Anglia: "Climate Change and Future Pollen Allergy in Europe." The scientists project that, because of rising temperatures and increased…

You probably saw the big scoop last week from the Associated Press (Stephen Hayes writes about it elsewhere in this issue). As the AP reported, “At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with [Hillary] Clinton while she led the State Department…

Just as Americans are sometimes mystified by European enthusiasm for certain of our countrymen—Jerry Lewis/France, David Hasselhoff/Germany, etc.—the reverse can be true as well. Case in point: the immense popularity in America of the BBC television series Yes Minister (1980-84) and Yes, Prime…

A tip of The Scrapbook homburg to the University of Chicago, which has let its incoming freshmen know that they should expect an intellectual climate as bracing and exhilarating as the local winters. No special-snowflake treatment. The letter from the dean of students (John Ellison) to the Class of…

Throughout this tortuous presidential campaign, ­Donald Trump has regularly embarrassed ­Republicans with his inability to articulate routine conservative ­positions on a wide variety of public policies. His most enthusiastic supporters have zealously defended him regardless. The reason can be…

In case you haven’t already noticed the double-date at the bottom of the page, just a heads-up that this is a combined issue of The Weekly Standard. We'll be off next week to take the waters. But many of our colleagues will be hard at work as usual. We're referring in part to our indefatigable team…

The boss has added some great new attractions at conversations­withbillkristol.org (hosted by the Foundation for Constitutional Government). There's a new conversation with Spencer Abraham (former U.S. senator from Michigan, secretary of ­energy) and our very own Jay Cost on the state of the 2016…

The Weekly Standard is hiring an assistant literary editor. This is a full-time clerical/administrative post with editorial and production duties and the opportunity to ­assist in the composition of the Books & Arts section. The ideal applicant will be interested in promotion and social media.…

When it comes to irresponsible rhetoric, the media have long adhered to an unbelievable political double standard. We didn’t think it was possible, but Donald Trump has managed to heighten the contradiction with his ill-considered comment last week about "Second Amendment people." To review, while…

People are living longer than they used to, as any reader of the obituary page can attest. But pushing the threshold of old age ever higher, or surviving to some unprecedented milestone, has problems of its own—as people at the top of the pyramid can attest.

The Weekly Standard lost a member of its extended family on July 27, when Jack Davis, one of the great comic illustrators of 20th century America, died in Georgia at age 91.

The Scrapbook knew it was inevitable—no phenomenon can command headlines the way the Pokémon Go craze has in recent weeks without someone coming up with a social justice angle of attack. And last week, the Washington Post found it.

The erosion of America’s public square continues at an alarming rate. This week brings news that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is seriously entertaining a claim that a man wearing a hat with the image of a Gadsden flag on it—that's the famous coiled snake emblazoned with the…

Donald Trump is guilty of a lot of reckless and irresponsible rhetoric. Most of this can be chalked up to his nature, but it doesn’t help that the media tend to reward him with excitable coverage, further encouraging him. Indeed, their selective outrage over Trump's remarks often seems to give him…

The Weekly Standard has a full-time senior position available for a talented individual with digital media, social media, and editorial expertise. This individual will be a key contributor to all of The Weekly Standard’s online efforts. Duties will include maximizing the reach and influence of…

Excluding the foundations laid in Jerusalem and Athens, we’d hazard that no country's contribution to the causes of liberty and justice for all has been greater than England's. It was English barons at Runnymede who demanded their rights be protected from royal usurpation in the Magna Carta. It was…

Per a settlement to a discrimination lawsuit approved by a California judge in late June, the dating website ChristianMingle.com is now adjusting its service to accommodate gay couples. The lawsuit claimed a violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on…

The New York Times published a useful update last week on the horrific scale of the purges undertaken by Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the aftermath of the coup attempt against him ("Failed Turkish Coup Accelerated a Purge Years in the Making," July 22).

There was a remarkable moment on CNN July 21, the morning after Senator Ted Cruz’s speech to the Republican National Convention. Representative Peter King, a Trump enthusiast, had called Cruz an "a—hole," and when CNN hosts asked Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer about King's…

Donald Trump has been nominated and, who knows, may even be elected. Leaving us a last, forlorn hope that—following General Sherman's immortal formulation—he might choose not to serve. So we might as well get started with the recriminations and guilt. Whose fault is it?

Last week’s big stories tended to drown out another big story that should not go unnoticed. For the third time in eight months, a Baltimore police officer who had been tried in the death of Freddie Gray was acquitted of all charges. (A fourth policeman's case ended last December in a hung jury,…

The main tropes and mechanisms of “reality" television lend themselves awfully well to the world of politics. Just take Survivor (the groundbreaking series produced by Mark Burnett, who, tired of living in jungles while filming, would go on to create a New York-based show called The Apprentice).…

THE CHATTERING ASSES Four-fifths of the British public support a war against global terrorism. Three-quarters approve of George W. Bush’s leadership. But don’t tell the chattering classes. The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal paper and house organ of the intellectual class, has become a hotbed…

The Scrapbook was amused to see a poll this week from the digital marketing firm Fluent, reporting that 46 percent of voters say they’ve seen a "Trump for President" TV ad—despite the fact that no such ads have run. In fact, Trump's imaginary ads have been seen by nearly as many voters as have seen…

The Weekly Standard has a full-time senior position available for a talented individual with digital media, social media, and editorial expertise. This individual will be a key contributor to all of The Weekly Standard’s online efforts. Duties will include maximizing the reach and influence of…

"Advocates for poor people and progressive causes say they still plan to make a stink—literally—during Hillary Clinton's big night accepting the Democratic presidential nomination this month.

One of the stranger incidents in the modern history of the Supreme Court unfolded this past week when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a New York Times reporter, “I can't imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president," and was accelerated with a further dose of acid about…

Even when the New York Times is in a rare, truth-telling mode, it can’t help but fudge the discussion of terrorism, draping ugly reality in gauzy euphemism.

A transgender advocacy group known as the “Movement Advancement Project"—a name redundant on so many levels it's distracting—is paying to run an ad on Fox News during the Republican national convention. The ad features a transgender narrator being denied the use of a ladies' room and explaining…

China has a well-known problem with cyber-theft and with taking five-finger discounts on other peoples’ intellectual property. Their new fighter jet is our new fighter jet, the design and technical details of which they stole. Their new predator drone is our predator drone, which they stole. Their…

Owing to an editing error, in “Jesus' Wife? The final debunking" (July 4, 2016), we mistakenly reported of the writer Ariel Sabar, "By this time, he was already in possession of copies [Karen] King had given him .  .  . of her email correspondence with Fritz (along with the purported provenance…

The Scrapbook was on vacation when Elie Wiesel passed away, and we would be remiss if we failed to say something. Wiesel died at the age of 87, and as a Holocaust survivor, he knew more than anyone that he had been blessed with a full life. Indeed, his life will continue to reverberate.

The Weekly Standard has a full-time senior position available for a talented individual with digital media, social media, and editorial expertise. This individual will be a key contributor to all of The Weekly Standard’s online efforts. Duties will include maximizing the reach and influence of…

There has been much slackjawed amazement about the FBI’s decision to recommend that Hillary Clinton not be charged over her cavalier treatment of classified material on her private email server while secretary of state. FBI director James Comey, both in his initial statement and in a congressional…

Readers of Jonathan Last’s email newsletter (you can sign up for it at newsletters.weeklystandard.com!) are already familiar with last week's amazing exploits at the bottom of the world. It's winter in Antarctica, which means constant darkness (the next time the sun rises there will be in…

After the Republican House majority declined to schedule a vote on gun control legislation last week, Democrats sprang into action. Well, the minority staged a “sit-in," so technically we should probably say "shrank into inaction." Either way, it was a cheap political stunt. And we fear that, given…

Scrapbook friend Daniel Gelernter, an occasional contributor to these pages and an NRA-certified firearms instructor in his spare time, emailed us last week with some reflections we thought worthy of reprinting here:

As The Scrapbook briefly noted in February, the new offices of The Weekly Standard have afforded us a front-row seat to the ongoing demolition of the Washington Post building. The old Post building site, we should report, is now a mere hole in the ground—the Post itself moved a few blocks away—and…

Washington wants more ex-cons—oops, we're not supposed to use that term anymore—to go to college. Schools as varied as Columbia University, Arizona State, and Nyack College are among dozens of institutions that have signed on to the White House's "Fair Chance Higher Education Pledge." The idea is…

After decades of decline in the rate of violent crime, last year saw it spike and then some. In big cities across the country, murders were up 17 percent. And that masks how bad it is in some particularly traumatized urban areas—parts of Chicago, for instance, have become killing fields. Scholar…

One of the big arguments for Donald Trump’s prospects as the GOP nominee is that he would "redraw the map." Trump's appeal with blue-collar voters is allegedly such that he could ensure victories in rustbelt states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania that have eluded Republican candidates in recent…

"Omar Mateen shattered the tenuous, hard-fought sense of personal safety that many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans have begun to feel as the movement for equality has made significant gains in recent years. His bullets and the blood he left behind that early morning were a reminder…

Exceedingly popular these days in the social “sciences" are studies purporting to show that conservatives are a deranged bunch, full of outré psychological traits that make them vulnerable to authoritarian come-ons. Many have been the social-psychologists and behavioral and political scientists who…

Hillary Clinton last week secured the number of delegates necessary to win the Democratic presidential nomination, and then she gave a speech. Did you know that she is the first woman to win the nomination of a major American party for president, and that this is a historic occasion? Fortunately,…

Sometimes even The Scrapbook is mystified by certain rituals of modern American politics. Take celebrity congressional testimony, for example. Here is a photograph of Dame Helen Mirren, the British actress, taken in Washington last week. She is taking an oath not because she was being sworn into…

If conservatives have been feeling a bit discouraged about politics lately, we should cheer up: There is good news from Tehran. For, according to the New York Times (May 31), the Iranian parliament has just affirmed its support for one of our own: “Iran Lawmakers Re-elect Their Conservative…

A tip of The Scrapbook homburg to Michael Ramirez, whose cartoons have graced these pages for many years now. Last week, he was awarded the most prestigous honor in cartooning, the Reuben Award. As Michael explained in a Facebook post, "The Reuben is the equivalent to the Oscar for Best Picture in…

Plato, Plato, Plato—Zeena Rivera is sick of Plato. It seems that she's been asked to read Plato in four—four!—courses during her two years at Seattle University's Matteo Ricci College, a small humanities program within the Jesuit-founded school. And no, it's not that she's upset that the Platonic…

The Scrapbook doesn’t fault our peers in the business for looking for creative ways to make a buck in a challenging media landscape. Then again, it's almost always easy to find fault with the New York Times. For a few years now, the media behemoth has been organizing trips to exotic locales with…

The Scrapbook swears it is doing its best not to turn this venerable magazine into Identity Politics Weekly. However, the gender-related absurdities have quickly escalated from man-bites-dog to dog-bites-man to man-identifies-as-dog—and we find it impossible to avert our gaze.

While The Scrapbook toils away to bring readers the print version of the magazine each week, our colleagues are diligently working on The Weekly Standard’s digital products, such as blog posts, podcasts, and newsletters.

In the annals of great American press crusades, the Washington Post’s relentless campaign to force the Washington Redskins to change their name surely deserves a footnote.

Bill Lee is running for governor of Vermont. Even if this weren’t the year of politics outside the normal, news of the former big-league pitcher's candidacy would hardly come as a surprise. You see, The Scrapbook has followed the career of the star-child popularly known as "Spaceman" for some 40…

Although Thomas Jefferson was famous for his bright red hair, most presidents have been brunets, who rapidly begin to gray at the temples as the stresses of the job take their toll. That seems poised to change. Despite their policy differences, even a cursory look at this year’s presumptive…

The Scrapbook is well aware that politics sometimes informs consumer choices. Good progressives used to avoid Welch’s candies because its owner was the founder of the John Birch Society. And The Scrapbook admits to resisting the temptation of Ben & Jerry's ice cream when it thinks of Ben and Jerry…

‘There are no two words in the English language more harmful than 'good job.' " So said Terence Fletcher, the terrifying jazz conductor played by J. K. Simmons in Whiplash. Sure, Fletcher mentally and physically abused his students—and the drummer protagonist in particular—but what he said is…

The Scrapbook fondly remembers the birth of this magazine in the long ago summer of 1995. We had previously worked at four small magazines and considered it something of a vocation. Those who share the vocation, or who know something of the magazine business, will understand our smirk when a…

‘Yes, the thought of male genitalia in girls' locker rooms—and vice versa—might be distressing to some. But the battle for equality has always been in part about overcoming discomfort.  .  ." ("Taking the fear out of bathrooms," an editorial in the Charlotte Observer, May 13, 2016).

"When he had his period, he wondered if he should revert to the girls’ bathroom, because there was no place to throw away his used tampons. But he had started feeling like an intruder .  .  ." ("Transgender Bathroom Debate Turns Personal at a Vermont High School," New York Times, May 17, 2016).

Since the GOP primary has already produced a harrowing result, The Scrapbook has turned its attention to the ongoing Democratic primary and begun rooting for chaos. Despite the fact that Bernie Sanders has approximately zero chance of winning, he persists in staying in the race both to call…

"Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about a theological battle being fought by Muslim imams and scholars in the West against the Islamic State misstated the Snapchat handle used by Suhaib Webb, one of the Muslim leaders speaking out. It is imamsuhaibwebb, not Pimpin4Paradise786” (New…

Herewith The Scrapbook takes note of the troubling alignment of two separate stories.

Since the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof has been the butt of Scrapbook humor on -occasion—indeed, was once the subject of a Parody—it's only fair that we give Mr. Kristof credit when credit is due. We're referring, in this instance, to his recent Sunday Times column entitled "A…

Contributing editor Yuval Levin published a new book last week: The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism. It couldn't have come out at a better time.

For nearly two decades now, conservatives have been scoffing at Hillary Clinton's suggestion that there is a "vast right-wing conspiracy," let alone that it is responsible for the fact that her husband can't keep it in his pants. However, the statement has also always had a sinister undercurrent,…

THE ALL-NEWS-IS-BAD-NEWS LEFT The Scrapbook may have given the impression in recent weeks with our Surprisingly Good Guys List that the Left was defecting from its traditional anti-Americanism almost as quickly as brighter-than-average Pashtun soldiers are deserting the Taliban. Not so; the world…

The child-free are getting uppity again. Last week USA Today reported on a minor trend in Britain, where a few companies are now offering employees paid leave upon the occasion of the worker getting a pet. It is called "paw-ternity" leave.

When it comes to Hollywood, The Scrapbook is grateful for small favors. And last week we got a very small favor from Hollywood, for which we are suitably grateful.

The Scrapbook would like to take a break from chronicling transgender idiocy week in and week out. But the Obama administration’s latest threat to North Carolina simply can't go unmentioned. "The federal government took on North Carolina's controversial 'bathroom bill' Wednesday, giving the…

The Scrapbook has always had great admiration for scientific achievement. However, in recent years we’ve been repeatedly hectored about whether we are sufficiently reverential towards "Science," which has become a term of art on the left and is less about empirical discovery for the betterment of…

"I'll do everything I can to get disenfranchised voters entrenched," says Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who promised when he ran for the office, he now says, to be "a brick wall" to protect their rights.

If we may quote ourselves, "Movies have the Oscars. TV has the Emmys, Broadway the Tonys. And the conservative movement has the Bradley Prizes." Last week, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation announced the first two recipients in its annual celebration of individual achievement in the cause of…

It wasn't just predictable, it was inevitable: The ritual calumniation of the late Antonin Scalia has begun. A noisy scrum of faculty and students are protesting the naming of George Mason University's law school after the recently deceased Supreme Court justice.

One of the best lines attributed to, though not actually said by, Winston Churchill is, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." The line sprang to mind when The Scrapbook read of the plight of the U.K.'s new polar research vessel (presently…

‘I'd long been told that there's no finer book editor in all of publishing than Bob Weil, and what amazing fortune to learn up-close exactly how true that is. Bob's passion for this project has been its soul from the very beginning. His careful and attentive edits turned court transcripts and…

Donald Trump would come to the defense of Andrew Jackson, wouldn’t he? One blustery populist looking out for another. When it was announced last week that Harriet Tubman will replace Old Hickory on the $20 bill, Trump allowed that "Tubman is fantastic," then denigrated her choice as "pure political…

Nearly a decade ago The Weekly Standard’s own Philip Terzian, who had been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and served as a Pulitzer juror, wrote in the pages of this magazine, "The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the…

The highly religious, on average, get together with extended family more regularly than the non-highly religious, according to the Pew Research Center’s third "U.S. Religious Landscape Study." The highly religious are more satisfied with family life and just plain happier in general.

For generations, the IRS has held the distinction of being America’s most hated government agency. Its title is now in jeopardy.

To spread awareness of the putative wage gap between men and women, members of the Democratic National Committee had a plan. On the occasion of the fatuous "Equal Pay Day" (April 12), they would open a lemonade stand at a Metro stop in Washington and charge two prices: 79 cents for women, a dollar…

Way back in 1989, John O’Sullivan, the former Thatcher aide and National Review editor, coined what's known as O'Sullivan's First Law: "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing." (This is sometimes confused with an overlapping law formulated by the late…

If you're not a fan of watching legends fall, it's been a tough couple of weeks. First, the great novelist, poet, fisherman, and gourmand Jim Harrison (he who wrote Legends of the Fall) cacked in his writing chair. And now comes word that Merle Haggard, "the poet of the common man," after suffering…

With the Republican National Convention in Cleveland rapidly approaching, local officials are taking advantage of a $50 million federal security grant to stock up for the coming protests.

Pointing out that a good school and a good education do not necessarily go hand in hand may amount to beating a dead horse these days. Still, The Scrapbook was taken aback by the uproar last week at -Indiana University (our alma mater), which may have achieved a new low in ungrounded social panic.

Slate’s legal correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick, has had it up to here with Senate Republicans, who are refusing to hold hearings on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, with the presidential election so soon. Something must be done, she claims, and, well, here's something:

Just three years ago, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that, by the end of this century, sea-levels will rise somewhere between 1.7 and 3.22 feet. A new report has found, however, that prediction may be off by some 3 feet. "Study jolts sea-rise predictions" the…

Over the years The Scrapbook has learned how to read President Obama. In a word, carefully. Consider, for example, a statement he made in the course of nominating Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court:

In the good old days, Democrats would complain about the invasion of Madison Avenue into the sacred precincts of politics (see The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss). But those days are long gone; and, in fact, our Democratic friends have long since mastered the techniques of…

THE SURPRISINGLY GOOD GUYS LIST, II Last week on this page, we launched The Surprisingly Good Guys List--as a way to recognize people we assumed would be chattering asses but who have turned out not to be. The response to our invitation for nominations from readers was overwhelming. Every single…

With progressive education’s long march to undo America's consensus on Judeo-Christian values nearly complete, kids trapped in public schools are routinely exposed to only two forms of moral exhortation: being scolded over global warming and subjected to a torrent of anti-bullying messages. Concern…

His politics usually ranged from the reprehensible to the inane, and almost always out on the far fringes of the left. His mind was an endlessly changeable place—and whatever the certainty and panache with which he announced a new intellectual position, he would dismiss it a few years later as…

Anticipating edicts from trans-friendly bureaucrats, some states are trying to deal preemptively with the understandable discomfort felt by young women when their public school rest-rooms are opened to young men who “identify" as women. Tennessee legislators are working up a law that would require…

In early March, a story made its way into the national media that could have come out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus or some other absurdist British comedy revue of the mid-20th century. A group of Bowdoin College students were invited to a "tequila party" on February 20. Someone handed out…

If there is a more awkward position in American public life than first lady, The Scrapbook is unaware of it. The president’s spouse—and of course, thus far, they've all been women—is elected by no one and enjoys a certain status undefined by any statute. But she is front and center in the press,…

Another day in L.A., another celebrity suspected of going on a killing spree. The celebrity suspect in this case goes by the name of P-22 (and no, he isn’t a rapper). P-22 is the designation conservationists have given a young mountain lion living in Griffith Park, near Hollywood. P-22 was recently…

THE SURPRISINGLY GOOD GUYS LIST The novelist Dan Jenkins once joked, "They should publish a list every year of who's not dead yet." In a similar spirit, The Scrapbook has decided to start a list of people we assumed were chattering asses but have turned out not to be. Call it the surprisingly good…

The cockles of The Scrapbook’s reactionary heart were warmed this past week by some news from England. On second thought, make that our "traditional" heart; but the news was still good.

It's now illegal to buy cigarettes in San Francisco unless you’re at least 21 years old, thanks to a new ordinance approved unanimously by the city's Board of Supervisors. San Francisco is, of course, legendary as a city open to any number of alternative lifestyle choices and feel-good…

The Scrapbook is time and again reminded that one of the occupational hazards of covering politics is schadenfreude. As unsympathetic as political creatures are, it’s always better for your soul to derive satisfaction from watching someone succeed than to take delight in their failure.

The Scrapbook begs to be forgiven for its belly laugh at Time’s new list of the 100 most popular female authors on college campuses. Not because Time is now reduced to promoting listicles on its website, but because Time's popular female author No. 97 is none other than Evelyn Waugh. Waugh…

The Scrapbook is old enough to remember without fondness the astounding spectacle of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1987 leading Stanford University students chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Western culture's got to go!" The witless infantilism of the chant perfectly encapsulated its substantive content:…

Ithaca, N.Y.—an Ivy League town that proudly styles itself America's "most enlightened city"—provides a home for plenty of unusual ideas from the political left. The most recent among them is a publicly financed "shooting gallery" .  .  . for heroin users.

Every once in a while—in a long, long while—justice is served. Even at the university. Late last week the University of Missouri Board of Curators announced that, after a month of investigation, it was terminating the employment of Professor Melissa Click.

Much ink has been spilled over the rising oceans, the warming globe, and the imminent demise of Arctic and Antarctic creatures. The ice is melting, the penguins are sweating, and the sky is falling, all at once. At least, that is how the story usually goes.

In California news, activists are angling for a new “wildlife overpass" to allow mountain lions to cross L.A.'s busy 101 Freeway. This would help boost the population and health of the big cats by making them more mobile and thus diversifying the leonine gene pool. The cost is estimated to be $38…

If politics is the art of the possible, as Bismarck once said, then The Scrapbook’s corollary is especially germane these days: Politics is the art of getting away with as much hypocrisy as possible. Both parties are prone to this annoying habit, of course; but in the week since the sudden death of…

A quartet of Illinois lawmakers have put forward a bill to amend the State Commemorative Dates Act and declare President Barack Obama’s birthday a legal holiday. Under the legislation, August 4 would not only be a day off for Illinois state employees, it would be an occasion "to hold appropriate…

In January, The Scrapbook was privileged to be in attendance at a speech Antonin Scalia gave to a small audience at Catholic University. We can’t claim to have known the man or even to have met him for more than a handshake, but Scalia was such a presence that even being in the same room with him…

"The presidency is not some Jet Ski that you ride over the waves of partisanship." (Linda Overby, Hillary Clinton supporter, to the Washington Post, February 15, 2016.)

On January 29 — not coincidentally, the anniversary of President Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009 — the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced it was proposing new regulations. The EEOC wants to amend its mandatory EEO-1 report so that employers with 100 or…

Not that readers should notice— unless they are old-fashioned enough to send their fan mail to The Scrapbook via the Postal Service—but The Weekly Standard moved its offices last week. This was not a protracted journey: Our new address is just a couple of blocks east of our old address in downtown…

Washington mayor Muriel Bowser has presented plans to open new homeless shelters across the District of Columbia, including along the U Street corridor (a newly hip area of restaurants and bars) and in swanky neighborhoods such as Wisconsin Avenue, blocks from the National Cathedral, where a…

The Scrapbook was distressed to read last week that the French education ministry is planning to “simplify" the language, primarily by getting rid of the circumflex. (Hey, we sweated for hours in the college language lab memorizing all those complexities they now want to bulldoze.) So we were…

Perhaps The Scrapbook is getting old—or, more likely, regards the subject matter as uncomfortably close to home. But we were alternately amused and horrified last week by a front-page photo in the New York Post depicting Mattel's new Curvy Barbie doll: "Meet new 'Fat Barbie,' " read the headline.

A memorable bit of health advice appeared in the February 3 New York Times: “Sexually active women who are not using birth control should refrain from alcohol to avoid the risk of giving birth to babies with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, even if those women are not yet known to be pregnant, the…

There has been a pretty consistent pattern to the Hillary Clinton email scandal. Every time the former secretary of state insists that the truth is all out, and it’s no big deal, yet more damaging information emerges. Recently she and her surrogates have been dissembling so much they've barely had…

In his weekly newsletter “Kristol Clear," The Scrapbook's boss alerts readers to "a two-part essay by Harvey Mansfield in the fine magazine City Journal. Mansfield's topic is 'Our Parties,' with Part I on 'The Democrats: how progress became drift,' and Part II on 'The Republicans: party of virtue.'…

"In a speech, Barack Obama, our most erudite president since Lincoln, inveighed against .  .  .  " (Gene Weingarten, Washington Post, January 28, 2016).

The Scrapbook’s commute is probably no worse than that of many of our readers who live in urban areas, which is to say that it's almost never pleasant and is also highly unpredictable. President Obama's appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 4, for example, added a good 30 minutes…

While things on college campuses are less chaotic and violent than they were a few months ago, make no mistake—sanity has not been restored. We got fresh evidence of that when the University of Oregon, in the middle of renovating their student center, debated removing a quotation from Martin Luther…

Well, it’s about time. Trustees of Amherst College have banished the school's unofficial mascot, "Lord Jeff," a buffoonish, big-headed representation of the school's namesake, Lord Jeffery Amherst. A British general, during the French and Indian War Amherst signed off on a rudimentary sort of…

Generally speaking, The Scrapbook adheres to the old Latin aphorism De mortuis nil nisi bonum (roughtly translated: Don’t speak ill of the dead). Our practice is to offer a fond farewell to people we admire and a dignified silence for those we don't. Which puts us in a quandary, of sorts, about an…

Meanwhile, at Harvard .  .  . We note that a frequent and valued contributor to these pages, Harvey C. Mansfield, has weighed in on the controversy there over the renaming of the House Masters (overseers, if you can forgive that word, of the college's undergraduate residences). Mansfield offered…

The Scrapbook has been secretly rooting for Bernie Sanders for a while now, because, well, he’s not Hillary Clinton. However, we are not without serious reservations about his candidacy. Many of his policy proposals reveal the rich fantasy life of the left, and not even the New York Times can…

Since the arrival of Christmas break and J-Term, the screaming campus hordes of November have largely gone the way of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. The dropping temperatures transform outdoor protests into events suitable only for those of the most iron resolve. Still, there are…

Mike Pitts, a Republican state legislator in South Carolina, last week proposed a law that would require journalists in the state to sign on to a “responsible journalism registry." For anyone who understands the issues at the heart of recent gun control debates, it was obvious the law was more of a…

Readers are well aware of The Scrapbook’s attitude toward PolitiFact, the much-admired "fact-checking" watchdog of American politics run by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida. Under the guise of a journalistic enterprise, PolitiFact is, in truth, a partisan rapid-reaction squad,…

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer is out with a new book, Dark Money, purporting to unmask those dastardly Koch brothers and their infamous habit of spending money to support libertarian and conservative causes. Her 2010 New Yorker article "Covert Operations" succeeded in vilifying the Kochs among…

We should all be active participants in a good and decent public life, President Barack Obama lectured in his final State of the Union address. But then he issued this important caveat: “It is not easy." And how! But we should be grateful for small mercies: At least he didn't say "and it won't be…

The Weekly Standard has a full-time, entry-level position available for a talented individual with reporting and writing experience. Duties will include reporting, writing, and assisting the online staff with editorial and production tasks across a variety of digital platforms. Candidates should…

A loyal reader brought to our attention the death last week at age 103 of a western Michigan philanthropist, Ralph Hauenstein. Our scribe writes that Hauenstein was “a real American hero" and encouraged us to read about him, since "we have so few chances left to say thank you to this generation."

Like many prizes offered by The Scrapbook, the Antonio de Spinola Award is not bestowed on a regular basis. This is not because The Scrapbook is instinctively ungenerous or reluctant to cheapen a distinct honor. It is because of the nature of the award itself.

When word got out that Rep. Jim McDermott will be packing it in at the end of the year, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was quick to plump the blustery leftist who has represented Seattle since 1989. He “has been a tenacious champion of hard-working Americans," he "has shown the strength of…

Until very recently, The Scrapbook had not thought of any particular connection between Bill Cosby and Hillary Clinton. Of course, both are well known to the public—he as an entertainer, she as a politician—and they share a longtime interest in certain social issues and Democratic politics. You can…

If there were any remaining doubts that a grudge is motivating Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’s policies dictating gender integration in the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps Times has dispelled them, revealing that Mabus sent the Marines a memo on New Year's Day ordering them to make their famously…

On January 5, President Obama announced various executive actions to tighten gun control measures. Most of the news led with the fact that Obama cried during the press conference. The Scrapbook takes no stand on whether the tears were sincere. We believe the president cares about victims of gun…

‘Qatar-based Al Jazeera—a quite credible and respected international news organization (contrary to [Mike] Ditka's assertion), the CNN of the Middle East .  .  ." (Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King, on the allegations of HGH use by Peyton Manning, Dec. 28, 2015).

In early December, Wired magazine published an interesting feature headlined “Mozilla Is Flailing When the Internet Needs It the Most." It seems that Mozilla, which makes the popular Internet browser Firefox, has seen its share of the market decrease "from 21.3 percent of browser usage in November…

‘I am a poetry lover. My knowledge of American poetry is fairly vast. And yet, I always find myself coming back to the beautiful simple elegance of 'Caged Bird,' by Maya Angelou. It's .  .  ." (Shonda Rhimes, New York Times Book Review, Dec. 22, 2015).

In recent weeks, The Scrapbook has not been unique in coming to three related conclusions about the Hillary Clinton machine. One, she’s already doubling down on running a "War on Women," identity-politics-driven campaign. Two, Hillary Clinton is such a terrible candidate and this female-centric…

With a little more than a year left in his presidency, Barack Obama has lately been in an elegiac mood, projecting a certain nervous confidence—"I've got 12 months left to squeeze every ounce of change I can while I'm still in office"—as well as reflecting on the lessons of experience. Most of his…

'Twas the night before Christmas, when out on the stump

Recently, the Atlantic magazine held a summit in Washington on gay rights. Describing what took place as a "summit," however, might be generous. As far as civil discourse goes, what took place was more of a nadir. And it is a worrying sign that the antidemocratic mania we've seen on college…

The self-regard of journalists, the plain old-fashioned infatuation they feel for themselves and for their jobs, is familiar to readers. But this past week, even by the onanistic standards of the trade, the Washington Post set a new high-water mark for professional narcissism.

On December 2, George T. "Joe" Sakato died at the age of 94. Enlisting in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sakato was assigned to the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a fighting force consisting of second-generation Japanese Americans that saw heavy action in Europe. The 442nd…

President Obama spent the weeks leading up to the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks talking about how ISIS was contained and shaming those who think the government won't do a good job screening the thousands of Syrian refugees he insists on America taking in. When reality suddenly eviscerated…

Contrary to popular belief, The Scrapbook is not interested just in affairs of state or in cultural controversies. The Scrapbook takes a healthy interest in trivial matters as well. Consider, for example, the new speaker of the House, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, whose boyish demeanor has caused a…

In naming German chancellor Angela Merkel its "person of the year," Time has made a bold departure from tradition. Often as not, the magazine gives the honor to a vague collectivity: "the Peacemakers," "the Whistleblowers," "The American Soldier," "the Good Samaritans," the "Ebola fighters," "the…

Scrapbook friend and frequent Weekly Standard contributor Ike Brannon, a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute, emailed us last week upon hearing of the death of a legendary economist: 

A reader writes: “I just finished reading Aaron MacLean’s article ‘A Family Affair,’ in your November 9 issue, reporting the recent retirement of General John F. Kelly from the Marine Corps. I am deeply grateful for the supremely moving description of General Kelly’s life and in particular…

Oh, holy Moses. It’s probably the headline of the year, and possibly even of the millennium. From Haaretz, November 23: “Jewish Law Was Never Meant to Be Set in Stone.”

Last week, CNN global affairs correspondent Elise Labott—who according to her Twitter bio is also a self-appraised “truth seeker”—was suspended from the network for two weeks for editorializing on social media. The offending tweet was this: “House passes bill that could limit Syrian refugees.…

Does the American left collectively share responsibility for the Islamic terrorist shooting in San Bernardino? The Scrapbook doesn't believe in such a sweeping judgment, but if one were consistently to apply the left's own logic, they end up indicting themselves.

Back in October, the Council of the District of Columbia made news when a majority of its members pushed for the most generous paid-family-leave program in the country: a whopping 16 weeks. And we do mean whopping. Sixteen weeks is longer than the 12 weeks supported by Hillary Clinton and the 14…

When a flying wedge of Black Lives Matter activists called the Black Justice League invaded and occupied the president's office at Princeton University in late November, they issued the standard list of nonnegotiable demands. And as might be expected, Princeton's president Christopher L. Eisgruber…

No round-up of campus lunacy this week would be complete without a mention of the farcical incident at Vanderbilt University. It was described so well by our colleague Michael Warren at weeklystandard.com (which you should visit often!) that The Scrapook is simply going to reprint his account.

Readers are no doubt aware of the spreading contagion of public demonstrations—largely under the rubric of “Black Lives Matter”—that has agitated campuses from coast to coast. Thanks to modern electronic technology, the spectacle of a Yale college master being cursed to his face (“Who the f— hired…

Finally there’s a protest by campus radicals The Scrapbook can sympathize with. Students at Princeton want to remove the name of the school’s most famous alumnus, President Woodrow Wilson, most notably from the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs. Students…

It will come as no surprise to readers who are also sports fans that Cleveland has lost again—this time, at the Supreme Court. 

On the death of the former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt last week, The Scrapbook has two observations.

For three decades now, liberals, er, progressives have been trying to explain why the Reagan recovery—​that explosion of economic growth that lasted two decades—​actually happened. It followed the down economy of the 1970s, when both unemployment and inflation soared in tandem. This wasn’t supposed…

Roxanne Gay, the author of the essay collection Bad Feminist, was the recent winner of PEN Center USA’s Freedom to Write award, given to writers who have “demonstrated exceptional courage in the defense of free expression.” Gay was an unusual choice because the award usually goes to people who…

Readers are no doubt aware of the spreading contagion of public demonstrations—largely under the rubric of “Black Lives Matter”—that has agitated campuses from coast to coast. Thanks to modern electronic technology, the spectacle of a Yale college master being cursed to his face (“Who the f— hired…

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the French and Indian War had just ended, and Britain’s Parliament was determined to find some way to maintain a standing army, to avoid putting 1,500 socially well-connected officers out of work. Their solution was to keep the Army in North America stationed as a…

The fallout from CNBC’s Republican debate continues, and it’s confounding the journalistic establishment. At first, it was easy for the media to acknowledge the obvious. Even ThinkProgress, the house organ for the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, published an article calling the…

There used to be a theory in the newspaper business, to which The Scrapbook wholeheartedly subscribes, that when two publications merged—say an afternoon daily with a weekday tabloid—the new hybrid publication would veer toward the lowest common denominator. That is to say, the new paper would more…

In a recent interview with Politico, Al Gore made a pretty remarkable claim about climate change: “All the predictions of the scientists have come true in spades, except it’s now abundantly obvious that they erred on the conservative side.” Whatever side you come down on in the climate change…

The World Health Organization’s announcement last week that bacon and processed meats cause cancer may well cause an untold number of premature deaths, and The Scrapbook has a sneaking suspicion that the political overseers at the WHO would be fine with that outcome. 

Last week, while Americans were watching the World Series and John Harwood’s presidential debate buffoonery, the Chinese government did something interesting: It killed the one-child policy. 

The latest issue of National Affairs, The Scrapbook’s favorite quarterly magazine, has arrived, and it’s another winner. Among the highlights: Frederick M. Hess on Obama’s (lamentable) education record, our colleague Irwin M. Stelzer on antitrust concerns raised by hospital mergers, and Tevi Troy…

In the last 20 years, America’s political, media, and business establishments have done their best to rehabilitate the image of China’s Communist government. After all, there’s a lot of money to be made by playing nice with China and looking the other way when Beijing continues to routinely commit…

The Scrapbook’s expectations of student journalists are not super high (we were one once ourselves, and we had a lot to learn). So we’re always pleased when they rise to the occasion. One who did was Bryan Stascavage, a staff writer for the Wesleyan Argus, who published a column last month mildly…

Way back in the beginning of September, the media, and in particular STEM-obsessed, politically correct digital outlets, were abuzz with the story of a young Muslim “inventor” falling afoul of school authorities in the suburbs of Dallas, possibly owing to a zero-tolerance policy run amok, possibly…

The news is so bad these days, we could all benefit from journalists taking the time to report more inspirational tales. Thankfully, Time magazine is here to help, as evidenced by this uplifting headline: “How Che Guevara Didn’t Let Asthma Affect His Ambitions.” Wait .  .  . what?

Bill Kristol’s latest conversation with University of Virginia literature professor—and TWS contributor—Paul Cantor is now available for your viewing pleasure at conversationswithbillkristol.org, and it’s vastly enjoyable. We hope we can get away with saying that he educates the boss (as he will…

The Scrapbook’s colleague Fred Barnes took time out from his book tour last week to email us an exclusive addendum to his new biography of Jack Kemp, coauthored with Mort Kondracke. 

If one good thing comes out of the Bill Cosby Crisis, The Scrapbook is fairly certain what it will be. For as the New York Times reported in a recent story, the 60 or so institutions of higher learning in America that have, during the past few decades, conferred honorary degrees on Bill Cosby are…

China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country “citizenship scores.” According to the ACLU, “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of…

At this point The Scrapbook has become somewhat inured to tales of woe regarding the American educational system. Generally such wails are merely preludes to a call to arms on the part of teachers’ unions and bureaucrats who want to expand government control over local schools and throw more money…

Because The Scrapbook believes so strongly in gun safety, and teaching children about the importance of gun safety, we were surprised by a recent story in the Washington Post. It seems that a firearms shop in McLean, Virginia—forced recently to relocate to seek more retail space—has found a new…

If readers weren’t made aware already by the wall-to-wall coverage, Pope Francis was recently in Washington, D.C., where he met with the president, addressed Congress, and canonized a saint (Junípero Serra) at a mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. While local…

One of the advantages of progressive government in New York City these days is that the occasional actions and pronouncements of the city council provide a certain entertainment value to outsiders. Of course, this is easy for The Scrapbook to say, since we are located 225 miles from Gotham and can…

Perhaps it has a low bar to clear, but The Scrapbook still believes that the Washington Post is one of the country’s better daily papers. However, the professionalism that once was a point of pride for high-profile news organizations is vanishing, and the Post is no exception. There were two…

Just after Scott Walker bowed out of the presidential race, the New York Times headlined “Scott Walker’s Dismal Finish Is a Fitting Result, Old Foes Say”:

All of us at The Weekly Standard were shocked and deeply saddened by the terrible news last week of the death in a cycling accident of our friend Jake Brewer, at age 34. The husband of contributing editor Mary Katharine Ham, Jake was not only a person of great achievement and remarkable promise,…

On a recent Saturday afternoon in Washington, several hundred children with cancer and their families filled Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. They came from all over the country, and from Canada, to participate in a two-day program called CureFest for Childhood Cancer.…

‘Trigger warnings are nothing new. The practice originated in Internet communities, primarily for .  .  .” (“Why I Use Trigger Warnings,” by Kate Manne, assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell, New York Times, September 20).

In his weekly address on September 12, President Obama touted the Department of Education’s new “College Scorecard,” the latest, greatest tool to help high school students and their families make informed (dare we say educated?) decisions when picking a college. The website offers students a means…

There’s little doubt that Yogi Berra, the legendary New York Yankees catcher who died at age 90 on September 22, was one of the greats. Before he ever suited up for the Yankees, he was at Omaha Beach on D-Day, not quite a month after his 19th birthday. And once he did step onto a major league…

The Weekly Standard has a full-time position available for a talented individual with reporting and writing experience. Duties will include writing, reporting, and assisting the online staff with editorial and production tasks across a variety of digital platforms. Candidates should send a cover…

Readers of The Scrapbook may have noticed that a “controversial” American political figure gave a much-publicized speech on a well-known college campus last week. And that while his views were not likely to find favor at that particular institution—indeed, are regarded as anathema by faculty and…

The Weekly Standard has a full-time position available for a talented individual with editorial skills, reporting and writing experience, and social media expertise. Duties will include assisting the online staff with editorial and production tasks across a variety of digital platforms. Candidates…

Sticklers will be relieved to know that the New York Times wasted no time in repudiating a gross error that appeared in its pages on September 12. A reporter described the “gaudy décor” at the Beverly Hills Diner, a restaurant in Moscow, as including “human-size figures of Porky the Pig and Marilyn…

The Scrapbook is delighted to commend to readers a wonderful new book by our friend and contributing editor Tod Lindberg. The Heroic Heart: Greatness Ancient and Modern explores a topic, Tod writes, that “I have been working on all my life, though not until recently with a view that the problems I…

According to the New York Times, rocks now throw themselves. Or at least that’s what The Scrapbook was forced to conclude upon reading the paper’s curious headline: “Jewish Man Dies as Rocks Pelt His Car in West Bank.” The Times eventually “corrected” this headline, but only after it appeared in…

‘Rob: We talked politics, which we both saw fairly eye to eye on.

"The following is a string of subtle and routine occurrences that make me feel less human and should take their rightful place among the larger narrative of sexism in contemporary America. .  .  . ” (“The Struggle To Be Taken Seriously in the Age of Subtle Sexism,” the Charlotte News and Observer,…

"When I make a mistake,” said Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York, “it’s a beaut.”

Hillary Clinton is slipping in the polls and at the mercy of her growing email scandal. Fortunately for her, the Clintons’ ever-loyal squadron of flying monkeys is spoiling to fight anyone who dares to criticize her. Politico last week revealed that David Brock has written a book attacking the New…

Readers we hope will be pleased to learn that the Foundation for Constitutional Government—which produces the Conversations with Bill Kristol that The Scrapbook has been touting for a couple of years—has just launched a series of websites called Contemporary Thinkers. The aim is to make more easily…

Have you ever wondered what happened to cloning? Twenty years ago, when Dolly the sheep was still bleating, cloning was seen as the most important topic in bioethics. But over the last few years it dropped off the radar. One of our favorite journals, the New Atlantis (which is published by the…

Americans always profess to be shocked that our fellow Americans—well, many of them, anyway—seem to take an inordinate interest in the comings and goings of the British royal family. When, for example, Prince Harry or the Duchess of Cambridge, or any one of their better-known relatives sets foot on…

Longtime readers may recall The Scrapbook’s fixation on red-light cameras, which represent a perfect case of nanny-statedom. They are a technological innovation designed to create government revenue under the rubric of “safety.” Yet they fail at every level: Across the country, they have been…

Fast-food chain Chipotle finds itself being sued for advertising that its food is “GMO-free.” The lawsuit is still nascent but may attain class-action status and already threatens to be a PR nightmare for the burrito joint. For those following the debate over genetically modified foods—and we use…

There was a memorable instance of multiculturalism last week that The Scrapbook heartily commends to readers. Google for the touching video of the ceremony at the Elysée Palace in which the president of France, François Hollande, pins the Legion of Honor ribbons on Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler,…

The Scrapbook is revising its opinion of “word clouds,” which we have heretofore mocked. That’s because we were so entertained by the ones produced in Quinnipiac University’s latest national poll. Besides the usual questions about preferences for the 2016 candidates, voting intentions, and so…

Duke University has managed to court controversy before the school year even begins. Over the summer, the school assigned all incoming freshmen to read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. (Note: “Graphic novel” is the preferred descriptor for upscale comic books.)…

The Scrapbook can’t pretend to have had a misspent youth. But we did occasionally wallow in the spectacle of pro wrestling. And it’s pretty obviously the case, as a handful of astute observers have pointed out, that Donald Trump is a close student of, and has been deeply influenced by, the dramatic…

The latest star of the online “Conversations with Bill Kristol” (a growing series of over 30 talks, at conversationswithbillkristol.org) is Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute already famous for her Factual Feminist videos. Almost overnight, her interview became a…

Needless to say, The Scrapbook is strictly neutral on the results of last week’s Republican presidential debate on Fox News. So neutral, in fact, that we won’t even mention any of the highlights—or lowlights, if you prefer—and certainly won’t weigh in on who swept the floor with whom, who…

The New York Times may still be known as the “paper of ­record,” but the paper’s unresponsiveness in correcting the record is not something that is going to burnish its reputation. On July 20, the Times published a story about the first of a ­recent spate of undercover videos showing ­affiliates of…

One can’t do justice in a short space to the late Robert ­Conquest’s gifts as a poet. But The Scrapbook can offer Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz’s assessment, which was no exaggeration: 

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has long lived as a literary recluse, famously dodging publicity associated with her classic work. After Mockingbird’s publication, she never wrote another novel. The author’s decades of silence (she famously turned her back if anyone mentioned her work…

One of the more puzzling manifestations of the conflict ­between radical Islam and the West is the presence of Islamist communities in places like Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France: They are unwelcome in their Muslim homelands—indeed, they are in exile from them​—​and yet they harbor an…

"As the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act’s signing approaches Thursday, Marione Ingram says we’re backtracking as a country. ‘They’re disenfranchising the poor, the elderly, blacks, Latinos, students,’ she says of voter identification laws and the Supreme Court’s continued refusal to hear…

Chaka Fattah (né Arthur Davenport), the Democratic congressman who represents part of Philadelphia and its environs, has never been challenged in a primary election. Since he joined the House in 1995, he has never garnered less than 86 percent of the vote in his impregnable district.

Fresh off the triumph of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, there was more big space news this week. And it may turn out to be much bigger than our first look at Pluto—a veritable revolution in physics and space travel.

A reader writes to ask about the photo we’ve been using in our subscription ads (see the back cover of this week’s edition, or last week’s, for that matter). Is it real, he wonders, or Photoshopped to show the three men together? “If it is an actual photo, it certainly is very interesting: three…

It’s too soon to tell whether the world will be able to recover from its grief, but we suppose civilization must go on, if for no other reason than to preserve the memory of the deceased. We speak, of course, of the tragic killing of Cecil the Lion—the beloved symbol of Zimbabwe’s wildlife. To be…

We’ve previously touted the Conversations with Bill Kristol videos in this space. But the Foundation for Constitutional Government’s latest production is one you truly won’t want to miss. 

Over the weekend, the New York Times weighed in on an important issue facing the city of New York. It seems that the fairer sex, despite making up about half the city’s population, constitutes merely a third of the users of the city’s bikeshare system.

Speaking of New York, The Scrapbook was walking through Central Park the other day when a police car came cruising down one of the interior roads. As it rolled by, almost as an afterthought, its loudspeakers blared “The sign says don’t walk!” and the car leisurely disappeared around the next…

Truth be told, The Scrapbook leans toward agnosticism on the question of diplomatic relations with Cuba, which were broken off in 1961 and restored last week, with much fanfare, by the Obama administration. Since 1977, the United States has had an “interests section” in Havana that is larger than…

The Weekly Standard is hiring an assistant to the literary editor. This is an entry-level clerical/administrative post with editorial duties and the opportunity to assist in the composition of the Books & Arts section. The ideal applicant will be interested in promotion and social media. Knowledge…

Well, looks like the terrorists finally have won. The satirical French paper Charlie Hebdo announced it would no longer draw pictures of Muhammad, just six months after Islamic terrorists stormed their Paris offices and massacred the staff. They are far from alone in backing down in the face of…

When Jenny McCarthy was fired from The View last year, The Scrapbook let out a sigh of relief. Her position on the ABC gabfest meant the former Playboy model could preach her antivaccination gospel to an audience of millions, five days a week. Now we fear deadly but preventable diseases like…

A happy sestercentennial (250th anniversary) to the publication by Sir William Blackstone of the first volume of his legal treatise, Commentaries on the Laws of England. He aimed to benefit his students most immediately, but his four-volume work would soon become the most influential legal treatise…

On July 16, we saw the definitive end to one of the greatest abuses of power in recent memory. After five years, the Wisconsin ­supreme court finally halted the Milwaukee district attorney’s notorious “John Doe” investigation that targeted Governor Scott Walker and political allies trying to reform…

The Scrapbook is delighted by the success of NASA’s New Horizons project to send a spacecraft all the way to the edge of the solar system—-indeed, just a few thousand miles from the surface of Pluto, which we now see with astonishing clarity. 

In all the hubbub around the Supreme Court’s big end-of-session rulings on same-sex marriage and Obamacare, some high-level banana-republicanism was overlooked. The FDA has given American food manufacturers three years to get the “trans fat” out of their food. Trans fat, as you may know, is a type…

If you were on social media last week, you no doubt heard about the new contract being promoted to college students by the activists at the Affirmative Consent Project in their effort to beat back the supposed “rape culture” on U.S. campuses. The group suggested that amorous couples, after signing…

The old New Yorker used to have a contributor named “Mr. Arbuthnot the Cliché Expert”—actually writer Frank Sullivan (1892-1976)—who, between 1935 and 1952, specialized in identifying and analyzing the puerile thoughts and hackneyed phrases of American politics and journalism. The Scrapbook has…

Thirty-seven years later, it is difficult to describe the impact of Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case on the America of 1978. Weinstein died last week at the age of 77, but his most famous work has long since been enshrined in the historical canon. Here’s why.

Did the clock just strike 13, or are we now in the middle of some interminable national conversation about all the things we’d like to ban? It started with the Confederate flag, a controversial emblem to be sure. The Scrapbook is not opposed to removing the flag as an official state symbol. But…

Needless to say, The Scrapbook was horrified last week to learn that Sean (Diddy) Combs had been arrested in Los Angeles and charged with assault with a deadly weapon, making terrorist threats, and battery. All of this took place on the UCLA campus, where Combs’s son Justin is a member of the…

The Scrapbook’s faith in the younger generation has just spiked upwards. A reader emails us an editorial from the Zephyr, student paper of the Brearley School, the very liberal prep school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. A tip of The Scrapbook’s homburg to author and editor in chief Claire Kozak…

The Scrapbook confesses that its one big surprise, thus far, in the 2016 presidential campaign has been Donald Trump’s announcement of his candidacy. We are not surprised that he is running for the Republican nomination—although it can be difficult, at times, to tell which party would be most…

Walter Jones of North Carolina is among the House members that Republicans are most eager to defeat. But there’s a twist in his case. Jones is a Republican. His critics have their reasons—plenty of good ones, as it turns out. Jones, 72, was a strong backer of the Iraq war until he had a sudden…

Africa’s black rhinos are on their last legs; there were seven subspecies, and three are already extinct. In the ’70s, there were only 65,000 black rhinos left. As Asian economies boomed, demand there for traditional, rhino-horn-based “medicine” paid for a corresponding boom in rhino poaching. Now…

Congratulations to our friend, onetime colleague, and TWS contributing editor Mary Katharine Ham, who has just released End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun). It’s published by Crown Forum, it’s a bargain at…

"In the style of a lot of current shows, Deutschland 83 mixes real historical events into its made-up story. Ronald Reagan and other leaders of the period turn up in video clips spouting their Cold War bombast, verbiage that today feels both scary and ridiculously simplistic. The show has the feel…

Earlier this month, the G7 met in Bavaria; its seven members are the major European and North American economies, plus Japan. The G7 is the successor to the G8—Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been suspended, having invaded and annexed parts of Ukraine, and now actively making mischief on NATO’s Baltic…

Walter Jones of North Carolina is among the House members that Republicans are most eager to defeat. But there’s a twist in his case. Jones is a Republican. His critics have their reasons—plenty of good ones, as it turns out. Jones, 72, was a strong backer of the Iraq war until he had a sudden…

Off hours, The Scrapbook has been dealing, like many everyday Americans, with the sort of problem that admits of no governmental solution: namely, a leaky basement. But just because government has nothing to offer by way of solutions (at least not yet!) doesn’t mean that it’s ignoring what we’re up…

"I think about how decades ago, across America, white men sat in their white-men rooms deciding what kind of country they wanted to live in. They put blacks under a kind of dome and .  .  . ” (Lonnae O’Neal, Washington Post, June 8).

It’s far too early to pick a front-runner for the Republican nomination, but we already have a pretty good idea which candidate is doing the best job of scaring both the media and the Democratic establishment (but we repeat ourselves).

Our attention was drawn last week to the presidential campaign of Lindsey Graham. The Scrapbook likes and admires Graham, the veteran Republican senator from South Carolina, but concedes that he is probably not the likely nominee. Graham’s specialty is foreign relations, which never plays a…

The Washington Post has never paid much attention to nearby Baltimore. Which is no great shock, of course: Downtown Baltimore is 40 miles from the Post newsroom, which tends to ignore the immediate Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Washington as well. The Scrapbook has always found this regrettable,…

Back in February, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., wrote menacing letters to various universities, wanting all sorts of details about the funding received by professors who are allegedly out of step with the prevailing opinions on climate change, as well as demanding copies of official communications…

The media have no problem concocting scandals almost out of thin air when it comes to GOP candidates, so The Scrapbook continues to be agape at the journalistic treatment of this season’s Democratic field. When the media aren’t ignoring questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s billion-dollar slush…

The Scrapbook is willing to wager that, until last week, the vast majority of Americans had never heard of FIFA, the governing body of association football (soccer), headquartered in Zurich. Among other things, FIFA runs the popular World Cup tournament every four years; perhaps more important,…

The Scrapbook is generally pleased that Bernie Sanders has decided to enter the presidential race. Where Democrats laughably insist that they are mere pragmatists free from ideological cant, the senator from Vermont is refreshingly honest about his desire to impose socialism on America. However,…

On May 22, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage through popular referendum, with 62 percent of the electorate supporting the constitutional change. The reported reactions, as you might expect, were overwhelmingly positive. Prime Minister Enda Kenny proclaimed,…

"One of the Obama administration’s underrated virtues is its intellectual honesty. Yes, Republicans see deception and sinister ulterior motives everywhere, but they’re just projecting. The truth is that .  .  .” (Paul Krugman, New York Times, May 22, 2015).

In his Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery, President Obama seems to have taken it upon himself to update the greatest achievement in the history of the English language—the King James Bible. He was reaching for John 15:13, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his…

Between the early 1950s and mid-1990s, crime rates rose steadily across the United States. Crime destroyed neighborhoods, ruined lives, and topped public opinion polls of the issues Americans cared about most.

In the release last week of a few more documents from the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, the director of national intelligence included a list of the English-language books that were found in bin Laden’s possession. Among them, The Scrapbook was pleased to see, was one by our…

Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, seems to be a victim of the law of unintended consequences. His book lays out, in lurid detail, what it claims in its subtitle: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. And it must be said,…

"Alexandra Svokos was six years old, growing up in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, when she became a Hillary Clinton fan” (“Not What You’d Expect: What Young Feminists Think of Hillary Clinton,” National Journal, May 16, 2015).

For a fuller account of the surprise Tory victory in Britain’s general election last week, you’ll want to read Ted Bromund’s piece elsewhere in this issue. The Scrapbook, for its part, chooses to believe, eccentrically, that the polls were basically correct until a massive last-minute swing against…

‘Skip the Bag, Save the River.” No, it’s not a line from The Godfather (that would be “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”). Rather, it was the District of Columbia’s motto for a 2009 initiative to clean up the Anacostia River by charging five cents for every plastic bag used by consumers in D.C.…

Father’s Day is still a few weeks away, but it’s not too soon to order the perfect gift for the fathers in your life. We’re referring to the fabulous new book edited by our colleague Jonathan V. Last, The Dadly Virtues: Adventures from the Worst Job You’ll Ever Love (Templeton Press). Not since the…

No phrase in modern journalism is more suspicious than “studies show,” unless it’s “research reveals.” Mention “science” and the average scribbler’s eyes grow gauzy as his brain shuts down, and too many readers have the same reaction. This is especially true when the science involved is of the…

The Weekly Standard has a full-time position available for a web producer with editorial skills and -social media expertise. Duties will include assisting the online staff with editorial and production tasks across a variety of digital and social media platforms.

Last week, Pope Francis hosted a Vatican summit on global warming where one of his cardinals called for a “full conversion of hearts and minds” to the fight against the “almost unfathomable” effects of fossil fuels on the environment. The pope will soon issue an encyclical on the subject,…

"For months I’d been seeking a way into my first book, a memoir about returning to New York City after a six-month stay alone in a cabin in the woods of Canada. And there .  .  .  ” (Charles Siebert, New York Times Magazine, May 13).

It's been a full week since The Scrapbook inveighed against the assault on free speech, so we have a new parade of horribles to shake our head at. The precipitating event this time was the killing of two armed assailants at an event in Garland, Texas, that was displaying Muhammad cartoons. It…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for a web producer with editorial skills and social media expertise. Duties will include assisting the online staff with editorial and production tasks across a variety of digital and social media platforms.

In high courts across America, judges are rendering their spring-term decisions. And in Ohio, the City of Cleveland has tacked another loss onto its growing pile of collective losses.

A bit more on the PEN/Charlie Hebdo backlash before we call it a day. Whenever a handful of writers are unhappy, a manifesto can’t be far behind. And sure enough, the withdrawal of a few worthies as hosts of the PEN dinner honoring Charlie Hebdo quickly led to a sententious “statement,” circulated…

Don’t laugh. The news we are about to report is real, and it’s a tragedy: “Tattooed wrists can prevent the Apple Watch’s heart rate sensor from functioning properly, according to some customers. Since the Apple Watch uses your heart rate to determine whether you’re wearing it, you might not be able…

A few weeks ago, The Scrapbook took note of cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s excoriation of the eight Charlie Hebdo journalists shot and killed in Paris last January by Islamist fanatics. The satirist Trudeau, of Doonesbury fame, had just been handed the George Polk Award for “career achievement” and…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for a web producer with editorial skills and social media expertise. Duties will include assisting the online staff with editorial and production tasks across a variety of digital and social media platforms.

Now that the presidential race is heating up, we’re getting our quadrennial lesson in the hopeless and perennial nature of media bias. Hillary Clinton is proving to be the most obviously corrupt major presidential candidate since her husband, and before that, you’d probably have to go back to Nixon…

No one really knows why, in 1928, Andrew Jackson supplanted Grover Cleveland on the $20 bill. It may be because that year was the centennial of Jackson’s election as president. Or perhaps it was because Congress, very much controlled by Republicans at the time, thought that honoring Old Hickory…

Police and city officials in the District of Columbia must be downright giddy these days. Over the past year, D.C. drivers exceeded the speed limit on fewer occasions than the year before, meaning they were less likely to get into serious accidents. At least this is what we can extrapolate from the…

We are the friends of liberty everywhere, the guardians only of our own: John Quincy Adams’s famous aphorism comes to mind as we observe the cruel realities of international affairs. It is a happy day in Kabylie—the large mountainous region east of Algiers that is home to Algeria’s biggest Berber…

The Scrapbook is not in the habit of closely following show biz gossip—well, not too closely. Still, we couldn’t help but notice that the Manhattan media world is abuzz about the return of Andrew Lack, after several years’ absence, as chief of NBC News. This, in itself, is of no particular…

The New York Times recently declared, citing the release of a University of California study, that companies with employees earning an annual wage so low as to qualify them for government aid of some sort are effectively being subsidized by the federal government and implied that this is an odious…

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau accepted the Career Achievement Award last week at the allegedly prestigious George Polk journalism awards. But in his acceptance speech, he raised more than a few eyebrows by attacking the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo—the ones who were murdered earlier this year when…

The Scrapbook has previously touted the Conversations with Bill Kristol video series, but we suspect readers will be particularly drawn by the latest in the series—an extended discussion between our editor and one of our renowned contributing editors, Charles Krauthammer.

Last week, Edward Snowden came out (or was let out) of his home in liberty-loving Russia to grant an interview to John Oliver, erstwhile Comedy Central Daily Show correspondent and current host of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. A few seconds in, the ever-so-earnest Snowden began to realize…

Over the past decade, huge improvements in hydraulic fracturing techniques used to unlock natural gas deposits have lowered energy prices and boosted the economy. They’ve been great for the environment, too. While it’s not pollution-free, gas produces almost none of the particulates and much less…

The hot new word on campuses is “triggering.” The current generation of special snowflakes wants to be excused from discussing violence and other terrible facts of life, lest such discussions “trigger” a recollection of their own personal traumas (real or imagined is anyone’s guess).

Readers are no doubt aware of the details of the gang rape that didn’t take place at a University of Virginia fraternity house in 2012. It was the subject of a shocking account in Rolling Stone that dominated national discussion of the “rape culture” that permeates America’s universities. The UVA…

Less than two months ago, Google launched YouTube Kids, a new app for tablets and smartphones aimed at providing child-friendly video content. Unlike Netflix, the service is free. Since YouTube Kids is not an act of charity, however, it does have commercials. And this is apparently not just…

Normally The Scrapbook is pleased to learn of advances in technology allowing greater numbers of people access to the news. Ceteris paribus, these innovations help cultivate an informed public and, we like to hope, keep our journalistic colleagues from the economic chopping block just a little…

By happy accident, the city of Philadelphia has been blessed over the years with a number of sports stars who embody the city’s general temperament: pugnacious, diligent, and impolitic. The town has little love for professional athletes in the movie star or gentleman mode. Instead, Philadelphians…

Readers with sharp memories will recall that, a little over two years ago, The Scrapbook was pleased to report the results of a forensic DNA test: The skeleton that had been unearthed in 2012 in a Leicester, England, parking lot, and which had been thought to be the remains of Richard III, was…

Whn shopping for eggs, you’ll notice the cartons often tout being cage-free, free-range, or pasture-raised. The move -towards giving hens more space has been gaining ground for some time. -According to the Wall Street Journal, 17 million hens (6 percent of the U.S. egg-laying flock) now roam free.…

The chapter of the Young America’s Foundation at George Washington University is currently threatened with a loss of funding for refusing to attend mandatory LGBT sensitivity training. The student government at GWU recently made this a requirement for all student leaders, and YAF is being called…

The remains of Miguel de Cervantes were discovered this past week, having reposed under the crypt of the Convent for the Barefoot Trinitarians since 1616. While The Scrapbook is inclined to celebrate—if that is the word—the identification of literary remains, our excitement was tempered when we…

If you harbor any doubts that “conservative” is an all-purpose epithet in the press, then Simon Denyer, the Washington Post’s China bureau chief, will happily erase those doubts. Writing last week about threats to freedom of speech and scholarly inquiry in the former British colony of Hong Kong…

"Why Are So Many Seattle Restaurants Closing Lately?” asks a recent Seattle magazine headline. The Scrapbook is no restaurateur, let alone knowledgeable about the local economy, but we’ll guess it has something to do with the fact that Seattle’s new $15 minimum wage starts phasing in on April 1.…

Readers are no doubt aware that, on the Sunday after the 50th anniversary reenactment of the march on Selma, Alabama, the New York Times published a front-page photograph of the marchers. There’s President Obama, front and center in shirtsleeves, alongside his wife and two daughters; and there’s…

Liberals have a favorite new legal doctrine. The Logan Act is a federal law enacted in 1799 that, in theory, penalizes American citizens who try to influence foreign governments “without authority of the United States.” Even though the law is still on the books, The Scrapbook describes the Logan…

On March 10, Senator Ted Cruz said the following: “On tax -reform, we, right now, have more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible—not a one of them as good.” It’s no surprise that Republicans in Congress tend to hate taxes and love the Bible, and as Republican rhetoric goes, this is…

Not only has the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee backed away from its decades-long warning about cholesterol (see Geoffrey Norman elsewhere in this issue), but it has also finally spoken out on a subject of vital importance to The Scrapbook: coffee consumption.

There’s a thick vein of subversion in any good conservative journalist, and in M. Stanton Evans, who died last week, the vein ran wide and deep. Always, though, it was tempered by good humor, a sly appreciation for human absurdity, and an implacable love for his country and for what his friend…

The Scrapbook was delighted a few weeks ago when The Weekly Standard published Gordon S. Wood’s review of a new collection of essays by Bernard Bailyn (“History in Context: The American vision of Bernard Bailyn,” Books & Arts, February 23). To use a sports metaphor, this was a two-run homer:…

Speaking of global warming, The Scrapbook could have used a little more of it this winter. Meanwhile we’ve been bundling up against the cold and curling up next to the fireplace with our favorite new book, Jay Cost’s A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.…

Last week National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson were left to sort out one of the most inane and idiotic media “fact checker” efforts The Scrapbook has ever seen. And when you consider what has appeared in these pages regarding PolitiFact, that’s saying something (see, among other…

Roger Pielke Jr., a respected climate scientist at the University of Colorado, announced recently on his blog that he is being investigated by congressional Democrats. Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, sent a letter to the university demanding to…

In an earlier life, The Scrapbook worked at the Washington Times under the storied foreign correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave, whose long career at Newsweek was already the stuff of legend when he became editor in chief of the Times in 1985. As an underdog, upstart, scrappy competitor of the…

Every now and then a minor news story manages to capture, in its details, some particle of truth about contemporary history and the state of the culture. Case in point: a story in last week’s Washington Post entitled “Lyndon Johnson’s letter to MLK’s widow heads to auction after big fight.” Our…

Singer-songwriter Steve Earle was recently asked by the Texas Standard if he would ever move back to his home state, and he had a rather revealing answer: 

Failing upwards is a Washington tradition, but even The Scrapbook was taken aback by the promotion of Jennifer Psaki from State Department spokesperson to White House director of communications. Psaki, along with her State Department colleague Marie Harf, had acquired quite the reputation for…

In malls today it is inhuman

If the truth be told, The Scrapbook has been relatively unengaged by the Brian Williams crisis. Yes, the revelation that Williams is a serial fabricator​—​inventing details about wartime exploits and brushes with death​—​is a problem for his employer, NBC News. Its earnest, upright corporate face…

The Supreme Court won’t hear arguments in King v. Burwell, a lawsuit challenging the legality of subsidies in the federal Obamacare exchange, until early March, but The Scrapbook is already eagerly anticipating the suit for no other reason than that it is shaping up as a case study in the lawyerly…

What is it about airlines that we find so aggravating? Let us count the ways: There’s the baggage fee, the too-small seats, the $8 sandwich, that special dirty-red carpet at the gate that only elite fliers get to walk on. And then there’s the waiting list for seat upgrades. As noted in the Wall…

After years of claiming to have come under fire while helicoptering into Iraq in 2003, Brian Williams, the top NBC news reader, admitted to Stars and Stripes last week that the attack had happened to a different helicopter, not the one he was in. In what was perhaps the most gnomic utterance…

A poignant notice from the website of Borderland Books, an independent bookstore in San Francisco’s Mission District:

The Scrapbook was saddened to learn last week of the death, after a long illness, of Sir Martin Gilbert, the British historian. He was 78 years old. Sir Martin, whose grandparents had fled to England from czarist Russia after a pogrom, was an Oxford-educated scholar and writer of exceptional…

There were two seemingly unrelated news stories last week that The Scrapbook has been pondering. The first is about another high-profile campus rape story that seems to be falling apart. A student named Emma Sulkowicz turned her alleged rape in August 2012 into an art project, carrying a mattress…

Reader Roger H. Madon writes to The Scrapbook:

Does anyone in the policy world still give credence to the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column? We’ve sounded this note before but are driven to reiterate: This ostensibly impartial referee is in fact a liberal column that operates under the guise of being above mere partisanship. 

The Scrapbook is pleased to note that Philip Anschutz, chairman and CEO of The Weekly Standard’s parent company, has just written a book that not only adds some authorial luster to our own ranks but makes a genuine contribution to our understanding of America. Out Where the West Begins: Profiles,…

"More than 13 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in a world still menaced by terrorists and in a city at risk of attack as few others, how is it possible that basic radio communications used by the District’s first responders could fail in an emergency?” asked the Washington Post editorial…

Last October, The Scrapbook took note of Politico’s curious decision to hire Mike Elk as one of the publication’s labor reporters. Aside from the fact that Elk has a long history of questionable labor activism that makes impartiality impossible, he also has a history of erratic behavior and has on…

The film Selma, which chronicles the pivotal battle in the civil rights movement, is currently in theaters and has even garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. The film has an unlikely critic, however—PBS host and former White House aide to Lyndon Johnson Bill Moyers. Moyers accuses…

"North Korea and the Berlin Film Festival have resolved their ‘misunderstanding’ over ‘The Interview.’ The North Korean government had issued a statement Wednesday alleging that screening the film at the festival would encourage ‘terrorism,’ but the festival said no such screening had been planned.

The death of Sir Winston Churchill, 50 years ago last week, reminds The Scrapbook that, while a half-century is a very long time, Churchill’s lifetime is closer to us than we suspect. Indeed, in the words William Faulkner gave to Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t…

"I've never been a fan of global conferences to solve problems, but .  .  .” (Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, January 20). 

All these years later, the New York Times accepts the Laffer Curve: “But other parts of [Greek opposition leader Alexis Tsipras’s] agenda aim to roll back many cost-cutting measures, gradually restoring salaries and pensions and lowering the tax on heating oil to make it more affordable (which…

"Some have questioned why we preachers have not used our pulpits to condemn terrorism as strongly as we do gun violence or racial profiling in our own land. .  .  . Why do preachers persist in talking about violence on American streets and cities rather than about ISIS beheadings or the Charlie…

"On January 6, the [University of Chicago] Committee on Free Expression released a report addressing the issue of freedom of expression on campus. The committee consists of seven professors at the University who were appointed in July to draft a statement that articulates the University’s…

The Scrapbook was recently witness to a harmonic convergence. It began the other evening as we set out, on foot, from The Weekly Standard offices to dinner at a restaurant two blocks east of the White House. It was a cold night and, wrapped securely against the wind in overcoat, scarf, gloves, and…

Given the general debasement of Western culture it seems that nothing in the 21st century is sacred—nothing, that is, except what might potentially incite violent Muslims. As we are learning after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the intellectual cowardice on this matter is immeasurable. The latest news…

Martin Anderson, the economist and adviser to Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan foremost among them, died this past week. The Scrapbook remembered with a pang being hosted by him one pleasant afternoon more than a decade ago at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he was for many…

Last week was not a great week for Princeton. 

"Poetry is a window into the soul. And one lesson to me from the reaction to my ‘When Whites Just Don’t Get It’ series is that we need soul-searching about race in America. So I invited readers this month to submit poems about race. Thanks to everyone for sending in more than 300 poems, and I’m…

There are 6,100 streets in Paris. If you made a point of walking a different one each day, it would take you more than 16 years to see them all. That’s just meant to be illustrative​—​you can cover many more of them than that in a day, as The Scrapbook often made a point of doing in its student…

Philip Larkin began one of his better-known poems with the arresting observation that Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me)— / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP. Larkin was born in 1922, and so would have been in the…

An article in last Sunday’s New York Times, “Raising Ambitions: The Challenge in Teaching at Community Colleges,” caught The Scrapbook’s eye. At a time when higher education is prohibitively expensive and more than a little dysfunctional, community colleges are often underappreciated. However, the…

From time to time, our contributor Wesley J. Smith has warned in these pages that many animal rights activists are after something more than improving animal welfare​—​a worthy cause, to be sure. They seek, rather, to elevate animals to equal moral and legal status with humans. See, for example,…

The Scrapbook has never expected the Obama administration to be on the right side of history when it comes to free trade. However, when the administration quietly announced the week before Christmas that it was imposing massive new tariffs on certain Chinese goods, we admit to being astonished,…

The Washington Post carried a horrific front-page story last week. Horrific, that is, for anyone who has ever been denied admission to the college of his or her choice—which, The Scrapbook guesses, might include a handful of readers.

"This is my last column for this newspaper. I am joining Jason Whitlock’s new Web site at ESPN intersecting sports, culture and race, to be launched sometime next year. I plan to continue the work my editors at The Post have generously supported, especially now that many of society’s most…

"Ted Cruz, by the way, is not a Harvard man. He’s Princeton,” [Prof. Harvey] Mansfield said. “Just going to Harvard Law School does not make you a Harvard Man. [Tom] Cotton is a Harvard man. [Ben] Sasse is, too. Elise Stefanik is a Harvard woman. The others are mere alumni.” (“Harvard’s…

Does the New York Times have a Rolling Stone problem? The author of a celebrated op-ed, who confessed to having “tortured” while serving at Abu Ghraib, had previously said he played no role in prisoner abuse at the infamous Iraqi prison.

The Scrapbook was thrilled to learn that the U.S. Navy finally has a fully operational laser—and, no, not the kind we’ve been using for years with guidance systems, but rather an actual laser weapon.

"In the last several years, allegations that college administrators mishandled complaints, or even discouraged victims from filing complaints, have cropped up at Columbia, Yale, Amherst and Vanderbilt, among dozens of other universities. The exact scope of the problem, though, remains muddy.…

When last we wrote about the womyn at Smith College, they were protesting the invitation of Christine Lagarde, a French leftist in good standing and the first woman to head the International Monetary Fund, to be the commencement speaker at the school’s 2014 graduation. The Smithies—both students…

There are many signs that our politics are broken; one of them is the constant need to create new words to more exactly describe the terrible state of affairs. Most recently, we’ve been saddled with “cromnibus,” which is a portmanteau of “continuing resolution or CR” and “omnibus.” A continuing…

Many Brits are known to enjoy a pint a day. Winston Churchill certainly did—though his daily ration was a pint of champagne, not ale. So it was fitting that the wartime prime minister was toasted last week in Washington with clinking glasses of bubbly. House speaker John Boehner invited a small…

It's heartening these days to see an outbreak of bipartisan seriousness, given how rare those instances have become. Herewith some excerpts from a statement delivered by Bob Menendez, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at the committee’s December 3 hearing on…

Once upon a time, secretary of defense was something of a prestigious title. But if recent news is any indication, in the twilight of the Obama administration the gig is about as desirable as “chicken sexer” or “sewer inspector.” First, there is the ongoing fallout from former senator Chuck Hagel’s…

The death of Marion Barry last week inspired all the usual observations: that he was the son of a Mississippi sharecropper; that he was a veteran, albeit a minor one, of the civil rights movement; that he was better known for his scandals, as mayor of the District of Columbia, than for his…

"The St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict the white police officer who in August shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, would have generated widespread anger and disappointment in any case. But the county prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, who is widely viewed in the…

On Friday, November 21, the Republican-majority House Intelligence Committee released a report about the CIA and the intelligence community’s conduct in the terror attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. The report uncritically accepted the CIA’s defense of its conduct, and so reporters…

The Obama administration’s recently announced Clean Air Act power-plant rules, advertised as helping to control the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, have almost nothing to recommend them. Complex, clunky, and burdensome, they’re likely to spike energy bills while doing almost nothing to…

It was obvious earlier this year that something odd was happening with Obamacare’s enrollment numbers. In May, the White House claimed that over 8 million people had signed up for insurance through Obamacare exchanges after an unexpected and much-hyped “last minute surge” in enrollment​—​but this…

Christopher DeMuth writes:

"Brain drain” is a phrase that first appeared in the 1950s, when London’s Royal Society expressed concern about the number of British scientists, engineers, and physicians being lured to the United States. Its concern was not misplaced: The Second World War had essentially bankrupted Britain, and…

If you’re not already keeping score at home, star CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria has been embroiled for months in a widening plagiarism scandal. The Week provides a useful summary. Zakaria’s “many ethical lapses have been chronicled by the pseudonymous bloggers @crushingbort and @blippoblappo,”…

The Weekly Standard has a full-time position available for an editorial assistant. Duties will include fact-checking, research, and proofreading.

The Weekly Standard has a full-time position available for an editorial assistant. Duties will include fact-checking, research, and proofreading.

The Scrapbook, ever mindful of the passage of time, couldn’t help but notice the obituary for John Doar in a recent edition of the Washington Post. Doar, who died last week at the age of 92, had been one of Bobby Kennedy’s associates at the Justice Department, serving for seven years in its civil…

The late William F. Buckley famously observed that he “would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.” Not only does this remain a sage observation, The Scrapbook would suggest extending…

For years the “Innocence Project” at Northwestern University’s -Medill School of Journalism was “the most celebrated university program in America,” as the Chicago Reader put it. It’s also one of the most emulated, spawning imitators at law and journalism schools from Maine to Maui. And who could…

Our colleague Jonathan V. Last has assembled an all-star cast of contributors for his dazzling new collection, The Seven Deadly Virtues: 18 Conservative Writers on Why the Virtuous Life is Funny as Hell. Among them are many who will be familiar to you—Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash, P. J. O’Rourke,…

There are many reasons to celebrate the thumping Democrats took in the midterm elections, but near the top of the list is the fact that the phony “war on women” has become a losing ploy for Democrats. With a lot of help from the media, Democrats in 2012 managed to tar every Republican candidate in…

With the Republicans winning control of the Senate last week, The Scrapbook is hopeful that the country might be protected from the Obama administration’s worst foreign policy instincts, especially regarding Iran. At the end of this month, the interim agreement with Tehran over its nuclear program…

You never know where discord might emerge in political Washington, but even The Scrapbook was surprised​—​and disheartened, really​—​to learn about the bruised feelings at the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee of the U.S. Postal Service.

The Scrapbook’s eyes fell recently on a piece in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson, which quantifies what The Scrapbook has sensed for some time. Drawing on the work of Jed Kolko, chief economist for Trulia, the real estate website, and UCLA’s Matthew Kahn, it draws a clear connection between…

Fifty years ago, almost to the day, a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, demanded that school administrators recognize their right to freedom of speech and allow political activity on campus. Students swarmed a police car holding a comrade, Joan Baez sang “We Shall…

It turns out Elizabeth Warren, favorite senator of the left, is not only a self-described Cherokee without evidence of Cherokee ancestry, but a self-described consumer -finance expert without evidence of any financial savvy. Joining two of her favorite themes, women’s oppression and the cruel…

"An nvitation to [Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn’s] historic Georgetown home was one of the most coveted status symbols in the nation’s capital, an entry to an elite salon of the powerful, talented .  .  . ” (Washington Post, October 29).

A recent Time magazine cover story has touched off quite a controversy. More than 70,000 people signed an online petition decrying the magazine’s affront. The offending article is headlined “Rotten Apples: It’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires may have found a way to…

Frank Bruni, the restaurant critic-turned-op-ed columnist for the New York Times, traveled to Texas recently to attend the Austin City Limits Music Festival—and did he have a miserable time! The music seems to have been enjoyable enough, but Bruni’s own pleasure was seriously diminished by…

The Scrapbook is sorry to hear that Andrew Marshall is retiring from the Pentagon, where he has led the Department of Defense’s internal think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, since 1973. Frankly, The Scrapbook is also a bit surprised. Marshall’s popular nickname, Yoda—taken from the sage of the…

The Scrapbook has no particular investment in Sarah Palin’s career at this date. She no longer holds public office and seems content with her speaking and TV gigs. Certainly, she is still a politically outspoken public figure, but this in no way justifies the media obsession with her.

Since the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago, the left in general, and the media in particular, have tended to regard it as a kind of cosmic joke: hysterical American reaction—indeed, overreaction—to the peaceful postwar existence of the Soviet Union and other Communist states, including China.…

The Ebola outbreak understandably has Americans on edge. How the Obama administration has redefined the expectations of government competency for even the most cynical among us has a lot to do with it. Rather than stepping up to meet a potential health crisis, the government is instead deflecting…

Baseball heals. That’s the only way The Scrapbook can explain Keith Olbermann’s transformation. How else did Bush Derangement Syndrome’s patient zero wind up complimenting the 43rd president? After nearly a decade of insulting George W. Bush, Olbermann now says he’s a fan. Actually his praise was…

Apart from the death of a journalist, no more poignant event is ever recorded in the media than the demise of a onetime “antiwar activist.” This was confirmed in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post last week, where the passing in Budapest of Fred Branfman, 72, was duly noted. 

Last week Reuters ran a story about the movement to do away with the ban on blood donation from gay men in America. In 1983, with the AIDS epidemic raging, the FDA prohibited gay men from giving blood because of fears of increasing transmission of the virus. But the American Medical Association and…

You’ve probably seen it before—text on a city’s welcome sign that boasts a sister-city relationship, with somewhere you likely haven’t heard of. For example, in The Scrapbook’s backyard, Rockville, Md., has a sibling relationship with Pinneburg, Germany, and Arlington, Va., with San Miguel, El…

The Scrapbook gets a lot of attention-grabbing emails, plaintive appeals from Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Gabby Giffords warning that civilization as we know it is going to end RIGHT NOW (unless we pledge $5 or more to fight Republican extremism before the midnight fundraising deadline). We…

Many youngsters dream of an NBA career, despite warnings from parents and coaches about the meager odds. 

In 2011, James Ceaser reviewed in these pages a posthumous collection of Irving Kristol’s essays, The Neoconservative Persuasion. Ceaser was particularly struck by how interested Irving Kristol had been in religion:

Politico recently hired Timothy Noah to be the publication’s labor and employment editor. Noah is a former Slate and New Republic columnist known for being liberal. Of course, most reporters on the labor beat are pro-union, so you’re probably wondering what the news is here. Well, that would be…

Hilary Mantel is a bestselling British novelist whose works—mostly historical fiction, or novels and stories with contemporary political overtones—are better known in Great Britain than here. Which is surprising, since the 62-year-old Dame Hilary has a knack for self-publicity.

Appearing on a panel September 23 at the Heritage Foundation, National Review’s Kevin Williamson made the following observation (per the account of MSNBC.com’s Suzy Khimm): “ ‘The left is intellectually dead, and where it’s heading towards is authoritarianism,’ said Williamson, citing a Gawker blog…

The Scrapbook congratulates contributing editor Joseph Bottum on his latest Amazon Kindle Single—The Swinger, a consideration of Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter as his career comes to a close this season.

In Manhattan last Tuesday afternoon, The Scrapbook discovered what it’s like to get close to the president, and it stinks. We also now understand how to assemble a huge crowd to admire a presidential motorcade: You simply close 40 blocks of one of the busiest streets in the world. With typical…

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson seems like an unlikely candidate for celebrity, but he’s hawking something liberal America desperately wants: the sense of satisfaction that comes from pretending you’re smarter than others, without actually thinking too hard. Tyson, the driving force behind the…

Our friends at the Foundation for Constitutional Government have just released the latest in their “Conversations with Bill Kristol” series of videos. The Scrapbook’s boss had a fascinating sit-down with PayPal founder and storied tech investor Peter Thiel, whose new book, Zero to One: Notes on…

This week’s Fashion Don’t is awarded to our edgy friends at Urban Outfitters, who offered on their web catalogue a grungy pullover (“Get it or regret it!”) for the uber-grungy price of $129. This was no ordinary sweatshirt, however: On the front was imprinted the name and seal of Ohio’s Kent State…

Undoubtedly much to the chagrin of the former mayor, more New Yorkers are smoking these days. According to the latest data from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, adult smoking rates in New York City have risen to 16 percent, from an all-time low of 14 percent in 2010.

The 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement is upon us, and we’re willing to concede that the founders of the movement had a good slogan—even if it pains The Scrapbook to contemplate the damage done by “campus activists” since then. Whether the social and political change it foments…

Back in the Edenic days when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal and the people of this great nation were as one—way back in January 2011, that is—President Obama called on Americans to put one million electric cars on the road by 2015. It was a typically Obamian…

It has been a constant refrain from the president’s supporters that Barack Obama has been subject to levels of criticism that no other president has had to confront. To that end, we refer you to Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky, a usually sensible, middle of the road liberal as it happens, who…

During the siege of Bastogne in December 1944, the German general Heinrich von Lüttwitz sent his American adversaries a note, explaining how “the fortune of war is changing” and that “there is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: that is the honorable…

"Let’s stipulate that comparisons between our time and the World War II era are inherently vexed. Still, it’s difficult to miss the parallel between the statements of uncertainty from two presidents struggling with a world flying out of control in a domestic political environment .  .  .” (E.J.…

President Obama’s admission last week that “we don’t have a strategy” to contend with the rise of the Islamic State left just about everyone in Washington disturbed and unsettled. Republicans were disturbed because the administration does, in fact, have a strategy for dealing with Islamist terror,…

Back in March, The Scrapbook noted that federal judge Lewis Kaplan had thrown out a $9.2 billion judgment against the oil company Chevron. In his decision, Kaplan documented a staggering amount of corruption by the plaintiff’s attorney, Steven Donziger. (Donziger, by the way, frequently played…

President Obama, at roughly 4:30 p.m. on August 28, referring to the terrorists of the Islamic State: “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.” Obama press secretary Josh Earnest, less than an hour later: “In his remarks today, POTUS was explicit—as he has been…

In the event of nuclear war, only three things are expected to survive—cockroaches, Twinkies, and the political ambitions of the Kennedy family. 

The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker reported last week that Senator Mary Landrieu, currently fighting for her seat in a tough reelection bid, may not actually reside in Louisiana. In January, she told the Federal Election Commission she lives in Washington, D.C. But she claimed her parents’ address…

One of the stranger episodes of recent weeks is the reported death of an American who died fighting in Syria with the Islamic State. Stranger still is the Washington Post profile of this homegrown jihadist, Douglas McAuthur McCain, whose unlikely name was probably the most interesting thing about…

Sometimes it’s the little things that draw your attention. The other morning (August 20), for example, The Scrapbook noticed a subordinate headline for the main story on the front page of the Washington Post, about the racial confrontations in Ferguson, Missouri: “County prosecutor’s past raises…

The Internet may yet become a high-minded place, if our good friends at the Foundation for Constitutional Government have any say in the matter. To complement their websites devoted to important contemporary thinkers (Walter Berns, Irving Kristol, Harvey Mansfield, James Q. Wilson), they have now…

A foolish optimism about human nature can’t withstand even a nodding acquaintance with history. If you’re of a certain age you may well remember seeing this photo. It was published years ago in Life magazine, among other places. And once seen, it is not easily forgotten. The Scrapbook retrieved the…

"I taught the first course on rock music for credit in an American university (1970, Ball State University). I taught a course in Phil Spector at a junior college in 1974. It was therefore with great interest, indeed delight, that I .  .  . ” (letter from John Mood of San Diego, Times Literary…

The Scrapbook is in receipt of a timely piece of verse from Paul Lake, the poetry editor of First Things, and owing to its manifest excellence has received special dispensation from the editorial authorities here to violate, just this once, The Weekly Standard’s no-poetry rule:

We accept that a certain degree of pomp and circumstance is part of having a presidency, and, with a tolerance born of Washington’s summer languor, we can even find a certain pleasure in the extravaganza with which President Obama feted the African leaders who were in town for a few days last week…

It was a big week in Washington for what blogger Steve Sailer puckishly refers to as World War T: Now that gay rights are utterly in the ascendant, the next Most Important Civil Rights Issue in History is transgender “rights.”

Readers can well imagine the excitement in these precincts when The Scrapbook learned the news about Fareed Zakaria. If you haven’t heard it, here’s what we’re talking about: It was announced last week that Dr. Zakaria, after stints at Foreign Affairs, Slate, Newsweek, Newsweek International, Time,…

Last week something unusual happened: “Weird Al” Yankovic, the 54-year-old parody singer, captured Billboard’s number one slot with the release of a new album, Mandatory Fun. It’s hard to overstate how weird (sorry) this is. Yankovic’s first hits came in the 1980s with send-ups like “Eat It”…

Maybe you won’t be surprised to hear that The Scrapbook wishes Keith Olbermann had never gotten into political commentary. But don’t misunderstand: The problem isn’t his terminal case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, or his feud with Bill O’Reilly, or his unintentionally hilarious and pompous policy…

"So, obviously Israel has a right to self-defense, but .  .  . ” -(Hillary Clinton, in a July 28 interview on America with Jorge Ramos).

Keith Olbermann’s derisive reference to the “designated kraken” reminds The Scrapbook of a classic anti-designated-hitter article by Christopher Caldwell, published in these pages in April 1998. Longtime readers may yet remember it: “A DHuMB Idea at 25.” It’s still a great read, all these years…

The sad thing about plagiarism, aside from the act itself, is that examples are always plentiful. Just a few weeks ago The Scrapbook took note of the serial larceny of antiwar polemicist Chris Hedges (“War Is a Force That Makes Us Plagiarize,” June 23). Now, courtesy of the New York Times’s…

Last week, while Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria burned, and the immigration crisis intensified along the Texas-Mexico border, President Obama was hard at work for two days in Los Angeles raising funds for the Democratic party. 

Vladimir Putin “has taken thugs, thieves, rapists, ex-cons and vandals and turned them into a paramilitary force. He has permitted ad hoc commanders of separatist groups to kill or chase off intellectuals, journalists and other moral authorities in the cities of .  .  . ” (Bernard-Henri Lévy,  New…

On July 16-19, the online progressive community held its annual “Netroots Nation” conference in Detroit. The irony of holding such an event in a desiccated husk of a formerly great metropolis undone by unionism and unfettered liberal governance was mostly lost on the crowd, and the gathering made…

Last week the world of comic books reeled from two bits of sensational news. First, it was -revealed that Archie Andrews, hero of the classic Archie comics, was dead. Or rather, “dead,” as they put it in industry parlance, because only the Archie of one of the Archie books, Life with Archie, had…

Our colleague Daniel Halper’s highly anticipated new blockbuster, Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, goes on sale this week. It promises to be the go-to book for fearless, not to mention nonhagiographic, reporting on Hillary Clinton’s effort to return the family…

Last February President Obama launched a new initiative to help “boys and young men of color” facing tough odds in life to stay on track and reach their full potential. At the time we observed in an editorial that there was a not-exactly-minor problem with “My Brother’s Keeper” (as the initiative…

North Korea’s Kim dynasty is in decay—literally. According to a report in the defector publication Daily NK, the founding dictator Kim Il-sung’s embalmed corpse, which has been on public display for some 20 years, is starting to show its age. “Kim’s skin appears to be deteriorating and his head and…

Last week, Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, lashed out at President Obama over the border crisis. Since last fall, more than 40,000 unaccompanied minors, mostly from Central America, have been caught illegally trying to enter the country. Cuellar called Obama’s response “aloof,” “bizarre,” and…

The Scrapbook has its compassionate side, and confesses to feeling a twinge when it read the recent interview with Hillary Clinton in the New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR, it should be explained, interviews famous people about their reading habits​—​their recent dialogue with Lynne Cheney was…

Scrapbook correspondent Richard M. Langworth, the author and longtime president of the Churchill Centre in Washington, D.C., weighs in on the new statue of Gandhi to be erected in London .  .  . 

Our affable colleague, senior editor Victorino Matus, is famous for his big head, big heart, big appetite—and encyclopedic knowledge of food, drink, the consumption of same, contemporary German politics, and the sociology of his native New Jersey. Vic’s attention to detail, and mastery of English…

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, every four years America witnesses the reemergence of a rare and annoying creature, the soccer scold. With the onset of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, there have been numerous sightings of soccer scolds in their native habitat—that is, in the media.

With Iraq collapsing into another Sunni-Shiite civil war, the Kurds are holding their own in the north of the country. -According to the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, “The time is here for the Kurdistan people to determine their future.” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for one,…

Our affable colleague, senior editor Victorino Matus, is famous for his big head, big heart, big appetite—and encyclopedic knowledge of food, drink, the consumption of same, contemporary German politics, and the sociology of his native New Jersey. Vic’s attention to detail, and mastery of English…

We know the first book on your summer reading list: Vic Matus’s Vodka (see above). We know what the second item will surely be: Daniel Halper’s Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, due to be published in just a few weeks, and about which we’ll have more to say then.

The Scrapbook has previously lauded the work of the Foundation for Constitutional Government. To support the serious study of politics and political philosophy, it’s developed a series of websites devoted to important, contemporary thinkers (Walter Berns, Irving Kristol, Harvey Mansfield, James Q.…

One of the many things that The Scrapbook doesn’t like about life in modern Washington—aside from the politics, of course—is the extent to which the nation’s capital, especially its downtown core, has become a high-pitch security zone. Access to public spaces and buildings is severely restricted;…

It’s always a solemn occasion when The Scrapbook finds John Edwards back in the news. At this point, the stories are less a reminder of the former senator and vice-presidential candidate’s odious conduct than fresh evidence that there’s no Democratic rehabilitation project the media won’t…

Movies have the Oscars. TV has the Emmys, Broadway the Tonys. And the conservative movement has the Bradley Prizes. The Scrapbook isn’t exaggerating—much. Last week, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation held its annual celebration of individual achievement in the cause of freedom, and it was more…

Our friend and contributor Joseph Epstein once called himself a “serious dilettante,” which he defined as “someone who feels he needs to know nearly everything, but not all that much of any one thing in particular and certainly nothing in the kind of depth that will weigh him down.”

Two weeks ago, George Will wrote a column about how progressives have exaggerated the prevalence of rape on college campuses. The column was not well received by some or even, as a great many of the histrionic responses would indicate, well understood. Last week a press release landed in The…

The Scrapbook heartily recommends a new documentary on George H. W. Bush, 41 on 41, that airs this month on CNN, just in time for the 90th birthday of our 41st president. Among the talking heads brought out to kibitz and reminisce—41 of them, as you might have guessed—the popular historian David…

Chris Hedges is a former New York Times foreign correspondent whose popular antiwar polemic, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), enabled him to quit the newspaper business and become a full-time prophet, left-wing division. As Hedges has grown more austere in appearance—working-class duds,…

The Scrapbook was dimly aware that the U.S. Army was reengineering its ammo but still was taken aback to read that it took 15 years and an estimated $100 million to come up with a new 5.56 NATO round for our infantrymen. It cost so much and took so long because, you know, it’s not easy being green.…

The Scrapbook notes, with sadness, the death last week in London of 91-year-old Mary Soames, the youngest and last surviving child of Sir Winston Churchill. From her time as a very young woman in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the British equivalent of the WAC), where she assisted her father at…

This is the way democracy ends, not with a bang, but a footnote. In April, the Congressional Budget Office—the nonpartisan agency typically relied on to make fiscal assessments of government programs—-reported that it was no longer possible to measure the cost of Obamacare. This fact wasn’t…

It's an article of faith among bien pensant liberals that all institutions in society must achieve perfect gender parity. Consider, for example, the left’s outrage at the dearth of women employed at Google and other tech firms (despite the fact that far fewer women study computer science than men)…

Perhaps you’re aware that a prominent athlete recently posed for an Instagram photo alongside an attractive woman who happened to be involved with another man. Her significant other got carried away with his emotions. Hounded by the green-eyed god jealousy, he acted foolishly and spoke rashly. And…

On May 23, a young man killed 6 people and wounded 13 others near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, before turning a gun on himself. But you probably knew that, because the incident was unavoidable in the news. Despite all of the national coverage, the…

"I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Maya Angelou, a true national treasure whom I have admired for many, many years. Dr. Angelou was much more than a literary genius, a chronicler of Jim Crow, and a witness to history. Through her extraordinary work, she captured the tenacity of the…

The Scrapbook keeps an eye on the British press—largely because it’s interesting, and sometimes fun, to read; but also because, now and then, a little nugget emerges which tells a larger story. 

In the spirit of bipartisanship, The Scrapbook is happy to endorse the proposal​—​offered by the two Missouri senators, Claire McCaskill (D) and Roy Blunt (R)​—​to rename Washington’s Union Station for the 33rd president. If all goes as planned, the main railroad terminal in the nation’s capital…

We’ve weighed in sufficiently in recent issues on unhappy commencement activities at the nation’s universities. So here’s a change of pace: a fantastic speech, delivered by Admiral Bill McRaven. As Navy Times blogger David Larter reports, McRaven “is a bad-ass​—​and fount of good advice. Head of…

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from predatory practices by financial institutions. That sounds like a noble goal, but asking a federal agency to police irresponsibility has almost always been a bad idea in practice.…

"The more I read the news, the more it looks to me that four words are becoming obsolete and destined to be dropped from our vocabulary. And those words are ‘privacy,’ ‘local,’ ‘average’ and ‘later.’ A lot of what drives today’s news derives from the fact that privacy is over, local is over,…

Far be it from The Scrapbook to know why Jill Abramson was fired, after three short years, as executive editor of the New York Times. Or to care why she was fired. 

Last week in these pages (“Unfree Speech”), editorializing on the shamefully canceled commencement addresses of Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Philip Terzian noted, “Both are identifiably conservative, and therefore, so far as the left is concerned, persona non grata. .  .  . But as it…

New York enjoyed a mid-season subway series last week with four games between the Mets and Yankees. Seeing the two teams play every year instead of once in a generation is one of the upsides of Major League Baseball’s recent experiment in inter-league play. But for the hometown TV audience, it…

There was a lot of hullabaloo last week over Michael Sam, who, after being drafted in a late round by the St. Louis Rams, is poised to become the NFL’s first openly gay football player. Sam was the SEC defensive player of the year, so a chance to play in the NFL seems well merited, regardless of…

Democrats habitually congratulate themselves on being the brainy party. They’re rational and rely on empirical evidence for their views. Or so they insist. And they strongly believe in science and are quick to accuse Republicans of being antiscience—that is, dopey and inclined to fall for…

The Scrapbook cited Gary Becker last week, in a list of outstanding recipients of the Bradley Prize. We’re sorry to have a sadder reason to mention his name this week: He died May 3, at the age of 83. “He was perhaps the greatest living economist,” George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen…

The Scrapbook’s friends at the Foundation for Constitutional Government last week announced the launch of a new website devoted to the writings of Irving Kristol. Both new readers and longtime admirers of Kristol’s work will want to bookmark the site. Presented in a catalogued, searchable format,…

The Scrapbook would be remiss if we failed to note that Monica Lewinsky is back. She has a tell-all article in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, and it’s a curious moment for her reemergence. Much more than during the Clinton era, the American left is now ruled by identity politics and the virulent…

Last week’s “botched execution” of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma has rekindled the national debate about capital punishment. Not that the debate needed much rekindling. Since 1972, when the Supreme Court essentially suspended capital punishment, and 1977, when it ruled that state death penalty…

The Scrapbook heartily congratulates Weekly Standard friend and sometime contributor Terry Teachout, who was just announced as the recipient of a 2014 Bradley Prize. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation annually presents up to four awards to “individuals of extraordinary talent and dedication”…

We're sorry to report the death last week of Werner Dannhauser, whom we had the honor of occasionally publishing in these pages. He was a serious thinker and a graceful writer, dealing with a wide variety of topics with an unusual combination of elegance and directness, and of power and irony. As…

The names of cities are not static. Even old New York was once New Amsterdam, as the song goes. And now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople. What once was known as St. Petersburg became Petrograd in 1914, and then Leningrad in 1924—only to revert to St. Petersburg after the fall of communism. (One…

One of the stranger stories floating around Washington at the moment is the news, first reported in the Washington Post, that NBC is so concerned about the ratings collapse of its Sunday-morning talk show, Meet the Press, that it hired a “psychological consultant” to interview the friends and…

"The state of Massachusetts doesn’t recognize three-way marriage​—​but .  .  .” (“Married lesbian ‘throuple’ expecting first child,” New York Post, April 23).

Last week, a press release landed in The Scrapbook’s inbox informing us that author Matt Taibbi would be talking about his new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, at an event hosted at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) headquarters. Now there’s no particular…

Last week the website for the Atlantic ran a highly instructive report about the extent to which the progressive worldview now dominates the university. The most recent conquest: college debate competitions.

Last week, National Journal reporter Major Garrett provided an interesting explanation for the White House’s obsession with promoting a dubious statistic on the alleged “pay gap” between men and women. The White House has repeatedly claimed that women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men earn.…

For the sake of argument, The Scrapbook is willing to concede that it is possible that Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher, ought to be allowed to graze his cattle on federal land in Nye County. And that protecting the desert tortoise as an endangered species on that same federal land is no good…

When it became known last year that George W. Bush had taken up painting, The Scrapbook took note of the fact, commenting on a couple of random examples that they were “better than you would expect, show imagination, and are certainly evidence of Bush’s well-developed sense of humor. .  .  . The…

The Coastal Barrier Resources Act, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1982, ranks among America’s greatest free-market conservation success stories. Administered on a shoestring budget out of an obscure Fish and Wildlife Service office in Arlington, Va., the Coastal Barrier Resources System protects an…

Last week, Brandeis University withdrew the honorary degree it was going to bestow next month on human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. According to a statement from Brandeis, “We cannot overlook that certain of her past statements are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.”

Distinguished lineage is no guarantee of good breeding, and in the case of the junior senator from Rhode Island, the gap is startling. Mayflower ancestry, a diplomat grandfather and father, railroad money, and education at the best schools seem, if anything, to have encouraged the hauteur and…

From the journalists of the Mumbai Mirror (with acknowledgments to HuffPost, which drew the clarification to the attention of The Scrapbook): “For the last 12 years we have been writing about the chief minister of Gujarat [Narendra Modi, likely India’s next prime minister] as being responsible for…

Whenever the topic is broached, proponents of same-sex marriage assert that people who have reservations about redefining the primary building block of civilization are simply on the “wrong side of history.” Now, no one would deny that the political crusade for same-sex marriage is on the march.…

The Scrapbook is a Johnny-one-note when it comes to our favorite quarterly, National Affairs: It’s great. The Spring 2014 issue arrived on our desk this week, and as usual editor Yuval Levin has assembled a winning lineup. Jim Manzi’s essay on what he calls “the new American system of innovation”…

The Scrapbook has an announcement to make: Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2016. She may not necessarily win the election, but she will definitely run. And The Scrapbook is absolutely confident about this. How do we know? By a complicated process of induction, deduction, instinct, and…

Howard “Bo” Callaway, who in 1965 became the first Republican congressman from Georgia since Reconstruction, died last week at the age of 86. A West Point graduate and Korean War veteran, Callaway was the scion of a wealthy Georgia family—his parents were founders of the Callaway Gardens resort…

CVS, the nation’s second-largest pharmacy chain, recently decided to stop selling tobacco products. That was all well and good: There’s nothing objectionable about a corporation making the decision to stop selling a product that is well-known to be harmful. (Though we could have done without the…

The Scrapbook continues to scratch its head over the barrels of ink spilled over the Chris Christie bridge scandal. It’s well worth reporting, but none of the Christie revelations to date justify the flood-the-zone coverage. So you’ll forgive us for suspecting that Christie’s political affiliation…

Did Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, help Osama bin Laden hide in the years before he was killed in Abbottabad in May 2011? According to an extraordinary piece of reporting in the New York Times Magazine, we finally know the answer: yes. 

The carousel of failure at MSNBC has been spinning a little faster the last couple weeks. First Alec Baldwin blasted the network in New York magazine. And then the network’s latest savior, Ronan Farrow, experienced some .  .  . difficulties during the launch of his show, Ronan Farrow Daily.

Liberal media bias is such a fact of life The Scrapbook can’t get exercised about it every day. But there are two subjects in the news a lot in which the fourth estate’s inability to play fair is never less than appalling: Senator Ted Cruz and abortion. Last week, the Associated Press tried to…

In 1968, so the story goes, a 25-year-old aspiring journalist named Joe McGinnis overheard an advertising executive on a train report that his firm had acquired “the Humphrey account” for the forthcoming presidential election. “Until that moment,” wrote the Washington Post decades later, “Mr.…

Last week, a federal judge ruled that a $9.5 billion judgment for environmental damage in Ecuador could not be enforced against Chevron. American environmental lawyers had brought suit against Chevron for polluting the Amazon basin in Ecuadorean courts, which in turn handed down the astronomical…

Back in the nineties, the notion of an online magazine was new and exciting. Salon was one of the first big web publishing endeavors, and for a number of years, the site attracted respectable literary and political contributors. It always had a liberal bent, but it was a serious publication. Over…

Terry Eastland noted three weeks ago in these pages (“After the Filibuster,” February 24) that “President Obama and Senate Democrats have gone to great lengths to secure the appointment of executive-branch officers and judges and thus help advance his policies and programs.” A key move was Senate…

It’s not often that The Scrapbook finds common cause with Vincent Gray, the mayor of Washington, D.C. But occasionally, worlds do collide. And in this instance, we are in full agreement with the mayor about a familiar topic for readers of this page: the United States Secret Service.

The Scrapbook confesses to a soft spot for the preservation of historic architecture. We understand, of course, that cities are dynamic, not static, and that sometimes progress demands sacrifice. But we also understand that the march of “progress” sometimes points us upside-down—has New York ever…

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. When the suits at CNN were searching around for a successor to crotchety, unfocused old Larry King—“There’s a lot of good restaurants in Philadelphia. .  .  . What do you make of Dancing with the Stars?”—they settled on 45-year-old Piers Morgan, a…

Last week, things reached a fever pitch in Arizona as legislators tried to clarify existing religious liberty protections in state law in light of incidents, in which Christian business owners have been sanctioned for refusing to participate in gay weddings. The bill in question was immediately…

There’s long been a certain romance associated with train travel. Think of the trains of the 1920s, replete with well-appointed compartments and dining cars featuring white tablecloths and five-star cuisine. And one need not necessarily go back in time to find examples of impressive trains: Even in…

A couple of weeks ago, Ethan -Epstein wrote in these pages about President Obama’s “naked philistinism,” exemplified in the cheap shot the president took at the study of art history in a speech in Wisconsin (“Philistine in Chief,” Feb. 17). “A lot of young people no longer see the trades and…

The Scrapbook has taken a shot or two (or three, or four) at the United Nations in the past, but the organization still does good work from time to time. Last week was one of those times. The U.N.’s Human Rights Council released a deeply disturbing and extraordinarily important 400-page report on…

Readers may recall The Scrapbook taking note of a fawning, seven-page, profusely illustrated story in the Washington Post by Dan Zak (May 13, 2013) about three antiwar activists on trial in Tennessee for invading and vandalizing the nuclear weapons research facility at Oak Ridge. The heroes seemed…

To hear the left tell it, the right is seething with hatred, ready to erupt into violence at any moment. Pro-lifers, gun owners, and Tea Partiers—a Venn diagram that encompasses more than half the country—are all sub rosa thugs. The media assist by reflexively blaming acts of political violence on…

Last week, South by Southwest—the hugely influential technology and music festival held in Austin every spring—announced its keynote speaker for 2014. The keynote speaker last year was Elon Musk, of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors fame. Other South by Southwest keynotes in recent years have been…

The Scrapbook hesitates to kick a football town when it’s in the dumps, but we are baffled by the crazy news coming out of Cleveland. And no, we’re not talking about the Cleveland Browns coaching drama.

Hazel Motes, the hyperanxious protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s great novella Wise Blood, finds himself so bedeviled by the demands of religious belief that he rebels by founding a religion of his own: The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ. The mainline Protestant churches of the twentieth…

"So Barbie is posing for the 50th anniversary Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, histrionically titled SI Swim Legends. I get it, I do. She is 55 years old; I’m sure it’s extremely flattering to be asked. And although I’m a feminist, and I’m trying to raise a daughter to value herself for a million…

A number of things seem to have “gotten us through” the Great Depression—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, FDR’s presidential oratory, the movie musicals of Busby Berkeley—but the fact that one of them was a 6-year-old child who sang and danced and acted like a veteran is nothing short of amazing. So…

Appearing at the National Prayer Breakfast last week, President Obama gave a speech on the growing threat to religious liberty around the world. As Obama speeches go, the message was a good one. But as is typical for Obama, the message was at odds with his commitment to the issue:

The Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus), as its name would suggest, is a longtime denizen of the frozen north, customarily ranging in the polar regions, upper Canada, Alaska, and northern Eurasia. In recent years, however, it has been migrating southward and, during the past few decades, has been sighted…

While in the popular Portlandia-inspired imagination, Portland, Oregon, may be nothing but an endless array of organic food shops, “fair-trade” coffee roasters, and “subaltern”-themed, not-for-profit bookstores, Portland is still a midsized American city with the typical problems that midsized…

A remarkably depressing Pew survey released last week found that a full 40 percent of Americans now consider themselves “lower class,” or “lower middle class” versus 44 percent who see themselves as “middle class.” As recently as 2008, 53 percent of Americans considered themselves “middle…

The Scrapbook has devoted plenty of column inches over the years to detailing the incestuous relationship between public employers and public employee unions. Every election cycle, union dues—paid with taxpayer dollars—go to Democratic politicians, who, when in office, thank their donors with…

Where you stand on President Obama’s State of the Union address last week depends, to some degree, on where you sit. Liberals thought the president was feisty, determined, basking in the glow of historic achievements, throwing down the gauntlet at obstructive Republicans. Conservatives thought the…

Doug Kmiec has had an amazing political journey. Today a chaired professor at Pepperdine Law School, Kmiec has traveled nearly the full gamut of public life: He worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and pursued an active career teaching law, at Notre…

The Scrapbook is a grizzled veteran of the groves of journalism and so can’t compete, but his fellow print and online journalists with less than 10 years of professional experience should be aware of the looming deadline (February 11) for the annual Robert Novak Journalism Fellowships. Both…

Among the many topics of discussion that do not keep The Scrapbook awake at night, the naming of federal buildings is high on the list. The Department of Justice building, for example, was recently named for Bobby Kennedy—not the most distinguished attorney general in American history—and the U.S.…

The Scrapbook’s attention was drawn last week to a front-page story in the New York Times about a small organization, based in Los Angeles, that is applying for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. Called the Friends of Abe, it is a loose association of about 1,500 “players in the…

The political debate over what to do about global warming rages on, largely because liberals refuse to have an honest discussion about their plans to deal with it. The heart of their every proposed “solution” to climate change is a radical economic program that would threaten the livelihood and…

Despite what readers may think, when people we never liked reach their expiration date, The Scrapbook tends to lean in the direction of de mortuis nil nisi bonum. (Loosely translated: Don’t speak ill of the dead.) It’s a little different, however, when political careers die—and so we freely confess…

In our November 25, 2013, issue, Jonathan V. Last chronicled the story of Ocean Grove, the New Jersey shore town which was being denied FEMA relief funds to repair damage from Hurricane Sandy. The problem was that Ocean Grove was originally settled as a Methodist campsite and that the town remains…

These observations of his on the Middle East have easily withstood the test of time:

You would guess that an agreement between the United States and Japan to move a Marine air base from one location to another on Okinawa would be good news. And it is, for three reasons. First, because there has been opposition to relocating the base on the island, and negotiations had stalemated.…

Things have been a bit of a mess at MSNBC lately. The network’s fortunes are tied to the fate of liberalism, and with Obama’s undeniable incompetence the preeminent political topic for the last few months, this has sent the network off on an increasingly desperate search for right-wing villainy to…

Before Chris Christie’s first scandal devolves into an obsessive quest to prove who knew what, when, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the wonderful, quintessential New Jerseyness of the incident itself. What happened, roughly, is this.

"Walmart recalls donkey meat in China,” announced a headline on FoxNews.com last week. The Scrapbook, for one, was incensed: How dastardly to lace edible meat with donkey! We hungered for more information: What were the tainted goods? Were the “100 percent beef” hamburgers at Walmart’s Beijing…

Our item on rampant grade inflation at Harvard (“A Gentleman’s A+,” The Scrapbook, December 16) caught the eye of reader Robert D. King, who also happens to be founding dean of liberal arts and Rapoport chair of Jewish studies emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor King writes to…

Like Diogenes in search of an honest man, The Scrapbook has been on an extended quest to find the Golden Age of American journalism. That was the era, not so long ago, when a literate public was downright serious about the news, and America’s newspapers, magazines, and television networks paid…

Members of the American Studies Association voted last week to boycott a country until it “ceases to violate human rights and international law.” Which nation could it be? New York University’s Scholars at Risk Network offers a number of options, citing 10 countries in which scholars are either…

The novelist Christopher Buckley says that The Baby Boom, the just-published memoir/history by P. J. O’Rourke, is O’Rourke’s best book. The Scrapbook is reluctant to disagree with any judgment from so authoritative a source. Plus, we’ve read The Baby Boom, and between chortles, snorts, guffaws, and…

We’re long past the point in contemporary America at which the concept of tolerance has any traction. Our cultural conversations have devolved into shouting matches with a cabal of white urban liberal enforcers insisting the rest of us be outraged by something no one was much concerned with five…

Truth to tell, The Scrapbook has gotten as good a laugh as anyone out of the saga of John C. Beale, the retired Environmental Protection Agency official—Princeton grad, onetime deputy assistant administrator in the Office of Air and Radiation, congressionally certified expert on global warming—who…

The Scrapbook is delighted to commend to readers a new ebook from our contributing editor Joseph Bottum. Nativity: A Christmas Tale “re-imagines Melchior, the Wise Man who brought gold, as a wealthy cancer patient adrift in the American Midwest, picking up a menagerie of strays as he fights his way…

Neson Mandela, a man of some considerable personal dignity, might have been distressed by the series of mishaps at his public memorial service: the disorganization which left thousands unable to get to the event, rendering the stadium half-empty; the embarrassing “selfie” taken by Barack Obama…

Last month, the Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” the word of the year. If you are blissfully unaware, a “selfie” is a photo taken of yourself by yourself, holding a smartphone at arm’s length pointed towards your face. It is then typically shared on a social media site such as Facebook,…

The Scrapbook has always observed that while Newton’s Third Law of Motion—“to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction”—is true of the physical world, it does not always apply to the political universe.

Last week, a headline in the Harvard Crimson confirmed that Harvard is continuing its depressing slide from an elite educational institution to a really expensive way to boost the self-esteem of America’s overachieving youth: “Substantiating Fears of Grade Inflation, Dean Says Median Grade at…