October 1, 2018

I seem to recall an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson in which he predicts that the world will be subsumed not by fire or flood, but by an overwhelming mound of common pins. It hasn’t happened so far, but that may be because we have shifted the cultural weight, as it were, to a far more voluminous…

Washington fiddles while the entitlement problem metastasizes

The right-wing populist got his start with puerile antics at the ‘Dartmouth Review.’ American politics has finally caught up.

Rarely have we witnessed so many people pretend a controversy was about one thing when it was so obviously about another. Since September 16, when the name of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser became known—Christine Blasey Ford, a California psychologist, alleges that he sexually…

Bloomberg’s running again. And why not?

Germany cannot decide whether migrants or xenophobes are a bigger threat.

On a bookcase in my office here at The Weekly Standard may be found a well-thumbed copy of a volume entitled Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (1968) by Robert T. Elson.

Eyebrows were raised in Washington when President Trump responded to an allegation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The president didn’t mention the accuser. He said the Senate Judiciary Committee would go through “a process and hear everybody out [and] I’d like…

The pros and cons of ‘mandated reporting.’

St. John’s College lowers tuition, a lot.

A surprisingly competitive Senate race in New Jersey.

A lot of those spontaneous calls from constituents are the work of lobbyists.

Caitrin Keiper on America’s love affair with amateur advice.

John Wilson reviews ‘The Monarchy of Fear’: Are our lives and our politics really dominated by fear?

Thomas Vinciguerra on the odd tale of the Texan who tried to walk around the world backward.

One hundred years ago, she united symmetry and conservation in physics.

The comedy-thriller is memorable despite its forgettable name.

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…