September 3, 2018

Barton Swaim, Luddite 2.0

A year after President Trump announced his Afghan policy, the Taliban are closer to victory than we are.

The primary election victory for Wyoming’s Mark Gordon on August 21 was widely interpreted as a defeat for Donald Trump. And it was—just not in the sense the pundits thought.

Almost two years ago, the American Presbyterian minister Andrew Brunson was taken hostage by the Turkish government. The charges against him—“political or military espionage” and “support for a terrorist group”—are absurd. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants the Islamic cleric Fethullah…

The Turkish president's thuggish autocracy and reflexive anti-Americanism make him very popular in his country.

I’m not dropping a heavy hint to book publishers when I say I’ve been daydreaming this week about what it would be like to ghostwrite Michael Cohen’s inevitable memoir, set to appear—I’m guessing—in the fall of 2020.

What does the kooky libertarian see in the authoritarian Putin regime?

After Manafort and Cohen, the Democrats are struggling not to overreach.

The chairman of the Judiciary Committee is no longer Senator Bipartisan.

Kofi Annan, 1938-2018.

Hush money and campaign-finance law.

With Cohen and Manafort going to jail, the president could choose to burn the system down.

Dominic Green on putting the saxophonist’s classic quartet’s ‘lost album’ in its context.

Eric Gibson on Delacroix—we know him for his paintings, but he transformed modern drawing as well.

Tom Perrotta on how family and hard work have made Frances Tiafoe a rising tennis star to watch.

John Podhoretz on overlooking the identity-politics marketing to just enjoy the movie’s old-school fun.

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.