November 19, 2018

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…

A 60-count federal indictment was only a slight impediment to reelection. Whether he serves out his term is another question.

That is the lesson of the midterms

The Obama administration’s decision in 2014 to trade five imprisoned Taliban fighters for Bowe Bergdahl, the deserter captured by Afghan insurgents, continues to spawn ill consequences.

The midterm elections were a draw, with both sides able to make claims of victory. The Republicans bolstered their majority in the Senate, thanks largely to the Democrats’ shameful treatment of Brett Kavanaugh. The Democrats took the House, cutting off any chance that the GOP will pass major…

The real reason Jeff Sessions was fired.

My attention was caught last week by an op-ed piece in the Washington Post written by Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III. Mr. Sullenberger, of course, is the pilot who skillfully maneuvered his disabled airliner to safety on the Hudson River, saving all 155 of its passengers and crew. His essay…

This Election Day, like every Election Day, I entered the sanctum sanctorum of the voting cubicle, searched my conscience, remembered that I’d left it in the car, then voted for my own amusement. This time, I pulled the lever for a state-senatorial longshot named Jesse Peed. It felt exciting and…

National party dynamics seemed to drag incumbents over the finish line

Republicans lost the House but held the Senate in the midterm election. That puts Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in the catbird seat.

Not perfect, but nonetheless impressive.

The suburbs spell trouble for Trump.

The winners and losers of 2018.

Iowa’s worst congressman ekes out a victory.

Algis Valiunas on the longing that defined Napoleon, man of action.

William A. Wilson on ancient robots and today’s intentionally imperfect quest for artificial intelligence.

Dominic Green on a half-century of the marvelous, mixed-up mess that may be the Beatles’ greatest album.

The wartime prime minister as leader, painter, friend.

Carl Rollyson on the friends and fights of the author of ‘A Dance to the Music of Time.’

The Queen pic is a surprise hit—but, writes John Podhoretz, it is unsurprisingly unoriginal.

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…

There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer,” the business writer Peter Drucker once said. One of the great things about capitalism is its concern with pleasing the customer, but in recent years this concern has gotten out of hand. Nowadays almost every…