December 17, 2018

James Bowman on judging a classic Hollywood director by the standards of the wrong era.

The caravan is overwhelmingly made up of young men looking for work—not women and children.

The 2020 campaign has begun and Cory Booker is in it to win it.

Elections aren’t immune from the human tendency to bend the rules and cheat.

A quiet leader, and a good one.

Transcripts.

How Edwin Meese saved originalism.

This is the saga of Jason Lewis. For a quarter-century, the Minnesota congressman was a talk-radio host. He started in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolis and did a spell in Charlotte before returning to the Twin Cities. I was a guest on his show a few times. As best I recall, they were frisky…

To his credit, President Trump rose to the occasion on the death of George H. W. Bush. Among other things, his immediate response—on Twitter, of course—was a generous and eloquent tribute, mindful not only of the late president’s distinction but of his own obligation to the office he now inhabits.…

Whose bathroom is it anyway?

The gene editors can’t be trusted to self-regulate.

High-tech dominance won’t be solved with tariffs.

California’s politicians dream of ecotopia, but fire victims just want to rebuild.

What it was like to work for the man.

Given their comparable movie careers, why is John Wayne still an icon while Gary Cooper is all but forgotten?

Joseph Epstein on Marcel Proust among the grand women of the belle époque.

Paul Dean on misbehavior in Shakespeare’s day, from insults to mobs to cross-dressing.

David Bahr on the project to see Xenophon alongside his peers.

Amy Henderson on the technologies that brought show tunes to the masses—a review of ‘From Broadway to Main Street.’

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…

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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…

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…

The story goes that the head writer on The Simpsons television show walked into a meeting one morning, two small band-aids on the same cheek, another on his neck under his chin. “What kind of a country is this?” he exclaimed. “They can kill all the Kennedys, but they can’t make a decent razor…