June 18, 2018

One of the last laws in Europe banning abortion, Ireland’s eighth amendment, was decisively rejected by voters on May 25. The plebiscite’s result allows the amendment to be struck from the country’s constitution. Once that happens later this year, Irish women will no longer have to smuggle in…

Colorado legalized marijuana in 2014 and the Pot Rush is on—but the ERs are filling up and a generation of kids is at risk.

We all will—in about eight years.

The absurd logic of hyper-individualism is upon us.

Poor Mrs. Weinstein, Mrs. Harvey Weinstein that is, estranged wife of the man who’s the King of the Hill atop a long list of sinners knocked off their thrones for having treated the females in their employ as slave owners once treated chattel on their plantations and lordlings once treated their…

A writer in the New York Times Magazine recently fixed our present epoch in time as “a few decades after the heyday of the notorious ‘three-martini lunch.’ ” The gin-soaked midday meal, he explained, had been “an anachronistic ritual during which backslapping company men escaped a swallowing sense…

We have President Trump to thank for the noisy and exciting midterm elections. If John Kasich were president, the sound of the campaign would be zzzzzzzzz. Trump’s aides must have forgotten to tell him presidents aren’t on the midterm ballot. With luck, they’ll keep it a secret.

Investigating discrimination at Harvard.

From Brooklyn to Buffalo, ‘Miranda’ takes her show on the road.

Mike Pence and John Bolton are on the bench.

A misbegotten ‘ceasefire’ in Afghanistan.

Paul Schrader’s dreary latest film creates a noxious new cliché for our times.

Harper Lee’s inspiration in creating Atticus Finch.

Adam J. White on the states’ underappreciated role in our constitutional system(s).

Ian Marcus Corbin on the illiberal philosophers and our fractured politics.

Peter Tonguette on Rodgers and Hammerstein in their day—and ours.

John Julius Norwich, 1929-2018.

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…

It’s difficult to quantify how upset progressive America was in the wake of Donald Trump’s winning the presidential election, but one reliable measure of that anguish is $7.3 million. That’s how much money 161,000 Americans donated to the Green party presidential candidate after she promised to…

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.

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…

"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…

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Andrew Ferguson’s boon companion in Rome.