With the death of Barbara Bush, much, though maybe not enough, has been made of her once-famous commencement address to the Wellesley College class of 1990. Read today it has the feel of an antique. But her voice is strong in it, and she was always worth listening to.
New documentary series pushes back at Kenneth Clark’s 1969 classic
It is a fact of history that we Americans believe all kinds of dumbass things. Different Americans believe different dumbass things at different times, but each of us must sooner or later fall for an urban myth, a lunatic philosophy, an obvious exaggeration, a prophecy of doom, or some other…
I don’t know the book acquisition budget of the public library in the town of St. Michaels, a quaint little tourist trap on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I hope it’s large enough to buy several copies of Ryan T. Anderson’s new book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.…
Quinn Norton is an engaging, funny, and stylish writer on technology and the odd communities that inhabit our digital world and make it so scary. She is also, to quote her own description, “a bisexual anarchist pacifist, prison abolitionist, & vegetarian. Currently I’m fretting about fair trade…
I write of cats as a dog person. For most of my life, an extreme allergy fueled my aversion to cats in general, but the individuals I got to know didn’t help their cause. In college, thanks to a roommate who owned her, I lived with a cat named Sophie. I appreciated Sophie as an aesthetic object:…
A story for our times: It took place, of course, on Twitter, though it was first written up in the trade publication Inside Higher Ed.
The new documentary The Final Year records the ups, the downs, the smiles, the frowns of President Obama’s foreign policy advisers during their last months in office. It was made for HBO but it won’t hit the small screen until later this year. For the moment it’s playing in a few theaters in Obama…
Years ago, during the long-forgotten administration of George H.W. Bush, I looked in on a friend of mine who had been “tasked”— the military jargon was just then creeping into civilian life – with writing the president’s State of the Union address.
Imagine being repudiated by Stephen Bannon, the most repudiated man since Rasputin. Any ordinary person would feel obliged to slink off to the remotest mountains of Madagascar, never to be heard from again. But Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart News blogger whom Bannon disowned as a colleague 15…
Joe Hagan has written what promises to be the standard biography of Jann Wenner—standard, because it’s hard to imagine anyone working up the energy to take another stab at it. Fifty years ago, at the age of 21, Wenner founded Rolling Stone magazine, and he’s been editor in chief ever since. Thanks…
It’s not always easy to sympathize with reporters for the New York Times, because so many of them act like . . . how to put it? . . . like reporters for the New York Times. But there are exceptions, and to their list we may now add the name of Richard Fausset. He writes (especially well) from…
We call it the Nobel prize in economics, but the Nobel that Richard Thaler won last week is technically a prize in “economic sciences,” and that bit of self-puffery (Oh, we’re scientists now, are we?) is fitting. Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, the latest craze to sweep a trade not…
We call it the Nobel prize in economics, but the Nobel that Richard Thaler won last week is technically a prize in “economic sciences,” and that bit of self-puffery (Oh, we’re scientists now, are we?) is fitting. Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, the latest craze to sweep a trade not…
When George Will was being packed off to graduate school, his father, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, asked him what, or who, he wanted to be in life: Ted Sorensen, Isaiah Berlin, or Murray Kempton? All three men were closely identified with a public trade. Sorensen, as…
When George Will was being packed off to graduate school, his father, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, asked him what, or who, he wanted to be in life: Ted Sorensen, Isaiah Berlin, or Murray Kempton? All three men were closely identified with a public trade. Sorensen, as…
A friend sent me news that E. B. White’s saltwater farm on the coast of Maine is up for sale, and my mind leapt back nearly 20 years—an impressive leap for a mind in my condition—to a visit I’d made there to mark the 100th anniversary of White’s birth in 1899. I was on assignment for a magazine, a…
San Francisco.
San Francisco
San Francisco
When an admirer once asked Harry Jaffa, the political philosopher who died earlier this month at the age of 96, what led to his interest in Abraham Lincoln, he answered without a moment’s hesitation, in a ferocious bark: “Plato!”
In the introduction to A Subtreasury of American Humor, published in 1941, E. B. White told of the various disappointments and disillusionments he and his wife had encountered in gathering the pieces that would make up the anthology. They had hoped to include a section of “newspaper humor” and…
In the introduction to A Subtreasury of American Humor, published in 1941, E. B. White told of the various disappointments and disillusionments he and his wife had encountered in gathering the pieces that would make up the anthology. They had hoped to include a section of “newspaper humor” and…
The news that Bob Dylan cribbed parts of his Nobel speech from SparkNotes, of all places, serves one excellent purpose: It has quieted down the high-brow Dylan fans who were competing to see who could overpraise the lecture most. (Don't worry, they'll be back.) The first cheerleader was the Nobel…
So there I am Tuesday morning, wheezing away on my exercise bike, trying to stay alert to telltale signs of the inevitable coronary thrombosis, when, for the first time in many, many years, I switch on the TV to watch Morning Joe.
So there I am Tuesday morning, wheezing away on my exercise bike, trying to stay alert to telltale signs of the inevitable coronary thrombosis, when, for the first time in many, many years, I switch on the TV to watch Morning Joe.
Many mistaken beliefs left over from the 1960s are embedded in mainstream, which is to say liberal, American culture. As an earnest young lefty I was taught that generals like war, that businessmen like free markets, that Christians think everyone else is going to hell, and that Republicans are…
Many mistaken beliefs left over from the 1960s are embedded in mainstream, which is to say liberal, American culture. As an earnest young lefty I was taught that generals like war, that businessmen like free markets, that Christians think everyone else is going to hell, and that Republicans are…
Arlington, Va.
Philadelphia
Editor's note: This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Chicago newspaper and syndicated columnist Mike Royko, a fixture of the Windy City's media for more than three decades. The Chicago Tribune, Royko's final professional stop, called him the "voice" of the city in its obituary;…
"Just who does they think they is?” That's the question that raced through the language snob community late last month. Maybe not phrased in those exact words.
"In any election,” Tom Coburn often says, “you should vote for the candidate who will give up the most if they win.” All things being equal, we should prefer politicians who have accomplished something in their lives beyond government work—and who are willing to sacrifice it, at least temporarily,…
A few years ago, an adjunct professor and disability-rights activist named Stacy Nowak went to take a look at a college course offered online by the University of California, Berkeley. The course was called "Journalism for Social Change." Nowak is deaf. She has no connection to UC Berkeley; she…
A few years ago, an adjunct professor and disability-rights activist named Stacy Nowak went to take a look at a college course offered online by the University of California, Berkeley. The course was called "Journalism for Social Change." Nowak is deaf. She has no connection to UC Berkeley; she…
Every few weeks, it seems, a new crack appears in the seemingly impenetrable wall of social-science dogma. The latest appeared last month with the publication of a paper by the well-known research psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, a professor at Emory University and coauthor of the indispensable…
Singles Awareness Day is fast approaching, which will probably be news to those of you who are already dragging the old ball and chain. On February 14—though some authorities cite February 15—single people across the globe will pause to contemplate their sorry, pathetic lives or to celebrate their…
Friday's edition of the indispensable Inside Higher Ed brings news of the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, just in case you were wondering. According to Colleen Flaherty's report, an air of apprehension hangs over the event, which is being held, where else,…
A good way to look at the Obama era is as a giant experiment in misdirection—the Age of Missing the Point. When a huge majority of Americans told pollsters that they were happy with their health care, the administration decided to remake the entire system of delivering health care. When vast,…
We shouldn't doubt that President Obama will read the new book by the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait. The title alone will be enough to grab him: Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail. He will read it slowly and carefully, Montblanc at the ready to…
We shouldn’t doubt that President Obama will read the new book by the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait. The title alone will be enough to grab him: Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail. He will read it slowly and carefully, Montblanc at the ready to…
For several years I enjoyed an affiliation with a "lifestyle" magazine that specialized in the toys and enthusiasms of the well-to-do. As a result my email address fell into the twitchy fingers of several thousand—or so it seems to me—public relations firms with names like Chill Strategics and…
For several years I enjoyed an affiliation with a “lifestyle" magazine that specialized in the toys and enthusiasms of the well-to-do. As a result my email address fell into the twitchy fingers of several thousand—or so it seems to me—public relations firms with names like Chill Strategics and…
Perhaps you too have been wondering why it is that President Obama is always, always telling us who we are as Americans and who we are not. Obviously, why he does this is a complicated question. And I guess “always” is an exaggeration. Frequently, though—he does it very frequently.
Among the many offenses that modern architecture has committed against Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington—America's main street, we like to call it—is a glass 'n' stone 'n' steel box that houses a museum about news gathering called, unfortunately, the Newseum. Funded by the New York Times,…
Among the many offenses that modern architecture has committed against Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington—America's main street, we like to call it—is a glass 'n' stone 'n' steel box that houses a museum about news gathering called, unfortunately, the Newseum. Funded by the New York Times,…
After all the wild stories in an unpredictable year, we are now at last moving into a news cycle that is reassuringly predictable, with discoveries as foreseeable and unstoppable as the coming of the cherry blossoms in April or the choking of the Caps in May. Suddenly, we are told, The Presidential…
After all the wild stories in an unpredictable year, we are now at last moving into a news cycle that is reassuringly predictable, with discoveries as foreseeable and unstoppable as the coming of the cherry blossoms in April or the choking of the Caps in May. Suddenly, we are told, The Presidential…
I skipped out the door of the polling place last Tuesday as I usually do after voting, filled with patriotism and awe and reverence and gratitude for such a privilege—and a tinge of regret that so many of my fellow voters weren't going to share the experience, because they were too stupid or too…
I skipped out the door of the polling place this afternoon as I usually do after voting, filled with patriotism and awe and reverence and gratitude for such a privilege—and a tinge of regret that so many of my fellow voters won't share the experience, because they were too stupid or too lazy or too…
We mastodons who still receive our daily dose of New York Times when the dead-tree version lands on our doorsteps with a dull thud got a special treat Tuesday, a textbook case of the way "the newspaper of record" goes about its business these days. The front page headline read: "Comey Role Recalls…
We've heard some weird political arguments this year. The strangest of them is raging in California, where else? There the hotly contested question revolves around an electoral initiative known as Proposition 60.
We’ve heard some weird political arguments this year. The strangest of them is raging in California, where else? There the hotly contested question revolves around an electoral initiative known as Proposition 60.
In the latest issue of Commentary, WEEKLY STANDARD senior editor Andrew Ferguson reviews the latest nonfiction offering from Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech. Here's an excerpt from the review:
There are many admiring things to say about Bob Dylan. While he may not be the hardest-working man in show business—the title once held by the martyred James Brown—he's still pretty close, recording and touring continuously at the age of 75. He's probably written more publishable songs, music and…
There are many admiring things to say about Bob Dylan. While he may not be the hardest-working man in show business—the title once held by the martyred James Brown—he's still pretty close, recording and touring continuously at the age of 75. He's probably written more publishable songs, music and…
One of the weirder aspects of anti-Trump mania is its sniffy tone. And it's especially weird coming from card-carrying liberal Democrats. For two generations our culture and its institutions have been living under a liberal ascendency. The country's elites—the Bigs of the news media and Hollywood…
The most read story on the Washington Post website Thursday was a little number called "Enabler or family defender? How Hillary Clinton responded to husband's accusers." As a piece of explanatory journalism it was weirdly imprecise and incomplete.
One step forward, two steps back—so goes the sorry arithmetic of the fight against political correctness on college campuses. The now-famous letter from John "Jay" Ellison, dean of students at the University of Chicago, has provoked a response from more than 150 faculty members. They are not happy.…
Press releases from the federal government aren't the most exciting documents around, as a general rule, and those from the National Archives are even less promising than most. But they're getting more interesting all the time, as the Archives continues its exciting transformation from a dusty…
From Simon Oxenham's excellent weekly column in New Scientist comes word of another social psychology study that will undermine our faith in social psychology studies. We can never get enough of those.
I spent a couple weeks this summer museum-hopping. Art museums, mostly, and while I don’t know much about painting or sculpture, I know what I like, and I know what I don't like, and I don't like people who go museum-hopping. Present company excluded.
The Washington Post is excited by a new poll of economists got up by the National Association for Business Economics. It shows, says the Post, "overwhelming support" for Hillary Clinton. "Overwhelming" might be a slight exaggeration on the Post's part—Clinton had 55 percent support, meaning that 45…
I guess all the flacks in the vast Obama administration public relations apparatus are at the beach. What else would explain this inelegant quote from Robert Pear's story today in the New York Times?
You might have mixed feelings if you heard the news from the Charleston Post and Courier the other day. Either a hero has exposed his feet o' clay, or a wronged man is getting his comeuppance.
For generations now, "If They'd Only Listened to Me" has served as the mythical title of the ultimate Washington memoir. The staffer/speechwriter/advisor/ex-close friend of a president/senator/ambassador lands a book contract and agrees to look back over his government service more in sorrow than…
A bit past the midpoint of the last century, roughly from early 1967 to late 1969, a sizable number of human beings believed that Paul McCartney was the coolest man who ever lived. Compared with your average world-historical claim, this one was not unreasonable.
After the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts approved a revised design for the Eisenhower memorial last month, a New York Times reporter asked Anne Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter, whether the controversial design could now, at long last, get built, despite the objections of her own family and countless…
It was easy to mock Alvin Toffler when he was riding high in the saddle, back in the 1970s. A self-described "futurist" (precise job description still TBD), he was part Jeremiah and part Arthur C. Clarke, warning us all about the dizzy pace of technological change even as he got giddy describing…
The invention of the smartphone has resolved a primeval fear of our species: What do you do when you’re out in public and forgot to bring something to read? Until a few years ago, the thought of facing a subway train, or the line at an ATM, or the waiting room at the Jiffy Lube, launched a…
The literary critic Edmund Wilson was ambivalent about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, but he didn't doubt Lincoln's genius as a writing man. "Alone among American Presidents," Wilson wrote, "it is possible to imagine Lincoln, grown up in a different milieu, becoming a distinguished writer of a not…
Few things in life are more fascinating than other people’s money. As the New Hampshire phase of the presidential campaign draws to a close, those of us who are tired of comparing the details of Jeb Bush's plan for medical savings accounts with Bernie Sanders's plan to enroll everybody in Medicare…
The sad news came today of the death of Forrest MacDonald, one of the greatest intellectual historians America has produced. McDonald’s specialty was the Founding Fathers and he was unapologetically conservative. He once said the two facts were closely related, because a proper understanding of the…
If you weren’t lucky enough to see it for yourself, it's hard to describe how charming—how reassuring and inspiriting—the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Monica was in the middle 1970s. The neighborhoods spread from the bluffs above the beach through a low-rise business district and then along avenues…
I never save anything—or rather I save lots of stuff that I don't want while I throw away an equivalent amount of stuff that someday I will. Improbably I've saved a sheaf of letters I got from Florence King, the great journalist and memoirist, and when I heard the other evening that she'd died, at…
In the city where I live, one of the pop music radio stations shifts to an all-Christmas music format beginning in . . . oh, I don't know, late August?
"Some idiot just flew his plane into the World Trade Center," a friend told me over the phone, so I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane go into the south tower, and I watched the TV more or less constantly until late in the afternoon, when I took a break for a couple of hours before…
This article originally appeared in the February 4, 2008 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and is being published today in memory of Fred Thompson who passed away Sunday.
One morning in August, the social science reporter for National Public Radio, a man named Shankar Vedantam, sounded a little shellshocked. You couldn’t blame him.
The conservative movement, along with numberless friends of every political coloration, lost a stalwart this weekend when John Von Kannon died, after a long wrestling match with cancer. Most of those friends knew him as “Baron,” though when he was mentioned in the third person, the definitive…
Like Lazarus, or maybe Frankenstein’s monster, the appalling plan for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., appears to be sputtering to life once more. Only two months ago it seemed safely kaput.
‘It’s as if he never existed,” a friend of a certain age (same as mine) said to me not long ago. He was referring to William F. Buckley Jr. When he died in 2008, at age 82, Buckley was eulogized as the most consequential American journalist of the second half of the last century: editor for 35…
Whenever the annual Clinton Global Initiative convenes, as it did in Denver last month, and I watch the billionaires and their hired policy experts rearing up to compliment one another for their plans to bring our troubled species ever closer to perfection, my mind detaches itself from the windy…
When news broke this spring about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s appetite for other people’s money and their indifference to other people’s rules, I was rereading my way through a shelf of old Hillary biographies. My memory thus was doubly stimulated. In the fresh revelations, as in the books, the…
When a new study came out late last year proving—scientifically!—how easy it is to turn opponents of gay marriage into supporters, the political scientist Andrew Gelman managed to summarize his reaction in a single unscientific word: “Wow!”
Nowadays when you mention the book Profiles in Character to Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and, as it happens, the coauthor of Profiles in Character, he immediately cracks wise.
Senior Editor Andrew Ferguson joined C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb for their Q&A series to discuss his career in journalism, the founding of the Weekly Standard, his writing process, and stories from his time on the 2016 campaign trail.
Des Moines
THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Andrew Ferguson on the 2016 field, his recent cover story on Bush, and how Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz are faring so far.
Boy, that didn’t take long. Over the span of a few short days in late January and early February, three members of the top tier of Republican presidential candidates demonstrated why they’ll never be president. They didn’t do anything to disqualify themselves directly, just revealed the traits that…
The film Selma, which chronicles the pivotal battle in the civil rights movement, is currently in theaters and has even garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. The film has an unlikely critic, however—PBS host and former White House aide to Lyndon Johnson Bill Moyers. Moyers accuses…
Like all charming and physically imposing persons, Ben Bradlee had an enormous head.
Cambridge, U.K.
As far as newspaper corrections go, it was a whopper. On August 24, the editors of the New York Times sucked the air out of a windy essay that had blown through its pages a few days before. The original article bore the headline “Generation Nice.” It was adorned with color photos of fresh-faced…
Teaneck, N.J.
You don’t have to be an Eisenhower Memorial groupie—yes, there are such people—to enjoy a new 56-page congressional report called “A Five-Star Folly.” But it helps. The mound of detail will bury all but the sturdiest student of what is shaping up to be one of the most memorable Washington fiascoes…
It wasn’t so long ago that visitors to the National Archives, in Washington, D.C., were expected to ascend. A trip to see the nation’s founding documents was an uplifting experience, literally. A broad flight of stone steps drew visitors up from the summer glare and clamor of Constitution Avenue to…
Senior editor Andrew Ferguson joined Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss his recent WEEKLY STANDARD article, "The Common Core Corruption." Ferguson explains how the education reform-industrial complex keeps getting it wrong. Watch the video below:
It has been five years now since America got the news, or was supposed to: Henceforth our children would enjoy a revolutionary new approach to learning in the public schools, in the form of national educational standards. They’re called the Common Core State Standards, or Common Core for short—or…
You can tell George Will is a serious baseball fan because—I wish I could find another way to put this—he is serious about baseball. The statement isn’t (quite!) as fatuous as it sounds. Lots of people who profess their love of baseball are mere romantics and mythologists. They’ll well up at the…
Was Andrew Wyeth so celebrated because he was so misunderstood, or did it work the other way around? His reputation seems ill-fitting, whether you consider him one of the great American painters of the last century, as many laymen and a few professionals do, or a kitsch monger and conman, as many…
A raft of new Education Department regulations has been bobbing among the roiling waters of American higher education for nearly a month now, and perhaps the most sensible reaction to the controversy comes from Sen. Lamar Alexander—a former governor, college president, and secretary of education.…
The tangled tale of the proposed Eisenhower Memorial next to the National Mall in Washington gets more complicated by the week. On April 3, the National Capital Planning Commission stunned just about everybody by rejecting the memorial design submitted by “celebrity architect” Frank Gehry and…
It's hard to find nice things to say about economists. Their detachment from the real world of human activity is matched only by their enormous influence over it, and by their unearned assumption that this arrangement is well deserved. That all changed last month, however. Now we can say something…
Partly because I’m a guy, partly because my professor insisted on holding our Feminism and Culture class at 8 a.m., making it impossible for me to attend, I find myself now, decades later, far behind the curve of gender empowerment. The curve is shifting heavily to the distaff side. Can I still say…
For reasons too boring to go into, I have recently inherited custodial duties of the family dog. When Buster first arrived, more than a decade ago, we spent a fair amount of time together. I took responsibility for training him with a rigorous program lasting several weeks. To this day, if you ask…
Herblock: The Black & the White, a documentary about the editorial cartoonist Herbert Block, had its cable premiere on HBO last week, and we can expect repeated showings for many weeks to come, creating a low-buzz Herblockfest interspersed dizzily among re-airings of Girls.
It's been more than a week now and I’m beginning to suspect she’s not going to call, so here I will offer Janet Yellen the advice I’ve been hoping to give her privately since the Senate confirmed her as the new chairman of the Federal Reserve. My advice is: Think about John Cowperthwaite. By this I…
One golden autumn morning 100 years ago, a few blocks from where I’m writing these words in northwest Washington, D.C., Ambrose Bierce said goodbye to his secretary, turned the key in the door to his apartment on Logan Circle, and went off to God knows where.
The new WEEKLY STANDARD Books & Arts Podcast, with literary editor Philip Terzian and his guest, senior editor Andrew Ferguson. This week they discuss Ferguson's recent cover story on Ambrose Bierce.
Everybody has an opinion about the pope these days and, what’s worse, feels compelled to express it. Rush Limbaugh has an opinion about the pope. He says he finds the pope “upsetting.” And he’s not even Catholic!
Stephen Jimenez sounds remarkably chipper on the phone when he calls in from Portland, his thirteenth city on a seemingly endless book tour. He’s plugging The Book of Matt, and the reason he’s chipper is that he hasn’t been burned in effigy, yet, or heckled mercilessly, yet, or denounced, at least…
Several times a day, especially if he’s out travelin’ and talkin’ to folks, as he always is when the U.S. Senate isn’t in session, Ted Cruz will stand before an audience and reflect, seemingly for the first time, about the generational shift taking place in the Republican party.
I'm showing my age again, but I can remember, just barely, when we had the war between men and women. Not a war, but the war: eternal and (of course) metaphorical, a fight without massed ranks of infantry or elaborate flanking maneuvers or formal parleys among belligerents. The opening salvo dated…
It's a thankless job, being a political aide. Your every prerogative and responsibility derives like planetary light from the combustion of your supernova, the Great Man or Woman who has brought you into his (or her!) orbit and whose gravitational field guides and sustains you. The connection isn’t…
The beleaguered Eisenhower Memorial Commission holds its next public gathering later this month, and before its members duck-walk into the hearing room, huddled in a hoplite phalanx against a shower of eggs and rotten vegetables unloosed by an audience of neo-classicist fuddy-duddies, they should…
The workings of Washington sometimes attain a kind of purity in their illogic. This happens most often after a particularly jarring event, when the frenzy to do something, anything, becomes irresistible to the beehiving journalists, legislators, lobbyists, and regulators who constitute the…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Andrew Ferguson, author of Crazy U, on the rising cost of college and whether it's still worth the cost.
Oral arguments on gay marriage take place before the Supreme Court the last week of March, and the pile of amicus briefs filed by interested parties long ago passed the point of redundancy. We prefer briefs filed by disinterested parties, such as the one put before the Court earlier in the month by…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Andrew Ferguson on the Supreme Court's consideration of same sex marriage and his editorial "The ‘Science’ of Same-Sex Marriage." Hosted by Michael Graham.
Last fall, a few days before Halloween and about a month after the publication of Mind and Cosmos, the controversial new book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, several of the world’s leading philosophers gathered with a group of cutting-edge scientists in the conference room of a charming inn in the…
Many, many thoughts crossed my mind as Richard Blanco finished reading his inaugural poem at President Obama’s swearing-in last week. Well, I guess it could have been worse was not one of them. But now I know: It could have been worse.
Ken Myers grew up in a conservative Christian household in Beltsville, Maryland, during the 1960s. When he was in tenth grade, two important things happened to him.
Twenty years ago an editor for the Chicago Sun-Times told Neil Steinberg—at the time a young reporter for the paper—that he might someday become the next Sydney J. Harris, and Steinberg, for reasons unclear, did not punch him in the kneecaps. Harris was dead by then, but from the 1950s to the 1980s…
A dedicated libertarian, William Niskanen was also a dedicated pot-stirrer. For him the two vocations—pressing the case for small government and, at least intellectually, making trouble—were inseparable. He was best known as an original member of Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, one of…
The news readers from NPR were mum-mum-mumbling in the background the other morning as I was putt-putt-puttering around the house when . . . all of a sudden . . . running counter to every fiber of my being . . . pulling against my every natural inclination . . . I began to pay attention!…
A website called 90days90reasons.com went online this summer, after the writer Dave Eggers got worried about the diminishing enthusiasm for Barack Obama among people like him. Eggers is a hipster, I guess you’d call him. He lives in San Francisco. He’s best known as the author of A Heartbreaking…
Journalists often play dumb as a way of drawing information from a reluctant source. But they are just as quick to act smart—to assume an air of authority over a topic with which they have been only briefly acquainted. Michael Lewis, the financial journalist and author of many bestsellers, is now…
Did you know that bitching about President Obama is now considered a “tradition” among liberals? It is. Things move so fast with those guys. One person has a gripe, another person chimes in, a third grouses about this or that, and the next thing you know—it’s a “tradition.” Very progressive.
Now that he’s officially the Republican nominee for president and has an excellent chance of becoming the most powerful man in the world, I feel free to admit, in the full knowledge that nobody cares, that I never liked Mitt Romney. My distaste for him isn’t merely personal or political but also…
There’s a DVD that’s been sitting in its jewel box on my desk for a few years (I’ve been busy—no time to tidy up), and the other day, after reading through two brand-new books about Barack Obama, one admiring, the other ferociously disapproving, I snapped the cellophane at last and slid the disk…
We were struck last week by a pair of instances of Republicans doing what Republicans do—one encouraging, one not so much. On the encouraging side, we had Sen. Tom Coburn, who never fails to lift a faltering conservative heart. He gave an interview to a blogger for the Washington Post, though we…
We are entering the age of the psychopundit (we can thank the science writer Will Saletan for this excellent word). Thomas Edsall, for example, is a veteran political reporter widely admired by people who admire political reporters. He has become very excited by social science, as so many widely…
He had gone public with his ideas. He had written a book—difficult but popular—a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator. The thing had been done quickly but in real earnest: no cheap concessions, no…
Deadline.com reports that screen rights for WEEKLY STANDARD senior editor Andy Ferguson's Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College are being acquired by New Line Cinema. "The film will be developed as a potential star vehicle for Will Ferrell," the website reports.
On the list of the world’s most unnecessary occupations—aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States—that of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial…
The aging fops and dandies who edit Esquire magazine—yes, it still comes out, check a newsstand if you don’t believe me—devoted a chunk of their issue this month to Bill Clinton. It was an unusual move. Typically, under the motto “Man at His Best,” the editors concentrate their attention on those…
To the long list of constituencies at whom President Obama is righteously cheesed off—millionaires, billionaires, international terrorists, those sorts of people—we may now add the bursars of America’s colleges and universities. He devoted a passage of his State of the Union address last week…
We have good news for all you skeptics who’ve been wondering whether you should trust the gossipy stories in the new book The Obamas: You can stop worrying. The author of the book, which was published to much hoo-ha this month, is a journalist named Jodi Kantor, and here’s what I read about her…
After he almost won the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, Rick Santorum was instantly dubbed a “Washington outsider,” even an “antiestablishment candidate.” It was a convenient tag that made it easier for reporters to keep all these strange Republicans straight: Newt Gingrich, Washington insider;…
At the end of the New York Times blog post that first reported Jon Huntsman would be dropping out of the presidential race today, there's an interesting bit of analysis explaining why the former governor of Utah never caught fire within the Republican field:
If I thought of Dwight Macdonald every time I came across a PBS pledge drive, I would think of Dwight Macdonald much more often than I do. But I do think of him now and then, and the pledge drive is usually the occasion for it. When America stares wide-eyed as its intellectual public TV network…
Is it possible that the people who run the Obama administration aren’t as smart as we’ve been led to believe?
Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole…
As a reader who has compulsively consumed the ever-expanding body of Beatles literature for 40 years, I have trouble picking out a favorite anecdote or most memorable quote. Is it John’s “If there is such a thing as a genius, I am one”? Or the note Paul sent John one day in the waning days of the…
Is there a more empathetic person in the world than Diane Sawyer, the top newsreader at ABC TV? I’m sure there must be—around seven billion of them, probably. But is there anyone who looks more empathetic than Diane Sawyer? Not a chance. When she peers at you through the camera she has the look of…
Jonathan Last: "The Wisdom of Juice-Boxers"
If you want a glimpse of the way Rick Perry operates as an executive and a politician, consider the issue of higher education reform in Texas, which no one in Texas knew was an issue until Perry decided to make it one.
Charleston, S.C.
Among the many surprises of Barack Obama’s presidency, perhaps the most unexpected have been his appointments to the federal government’s egghead agencies—the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Even his ardent admirers might admit that the current…
Covering political campaigns can be a dull, remorseless duty, but at least the reporters who gathered in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, on June 21 to see Jon Huntsman announce his presidential candidacy have this compensation: Someday they’ll be able to chuck their grandchildren under the chin and…
If I were smarter than I am I might be able to argue myself into believing that there’s hope for the Washington Nationals. If I were more realistic than I am I would define “hope” downward to mean merely the possibility, however remote, that the team could win almost as many games as they lose this…
As with Christmas form letters and amateur poetry, I don’t take kindly to friends sticking books in my hand that lie outside my areas of interest, then insisting that I must read them. When one recently did just that with Born to Run, it was nearly cause for excommunication. Sure, I subscribe to…
Santa Monica
Book of the Week
Andrew Ferguson -- with his son Gillum -- discusses his latest book, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College, on Reason TV:
In honor of the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, stop whatever irrelevant busywork you're engaged in and take a moment -- well, half an hour -- to read one of the greatest of presidential utterances. If your busywork won't wait half an hour, skip to the last paragraph. It's…
Andrew Ferguson (with his son Gillum) was on Fox News's "Red Eye" earlier this week to discuss his latest book, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College:
New York Times book critic Dwight Garner reviews Andrew Ferguson's latest, Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College:
Two memorable events in Washington, D.C. yesterday afternoon: a recital at the Kennedy Center by the spectacular Peruvian tenor, Juan Diego Florez; and a book party at a home in Northwest D.C. for the spectacular American author, our own Andrew Ferguson.
The Washington Post has a review up of the new book by Andrew Ferguson, Senior Editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The new book, Crazy U, tells the story of Ferguson's struggles getting his son through the college admissions process.
Steven Levingston reviews Andrew Ferguson's Crazy U for the Washington Post today:
“On the first nine levels, Reagan is the least interesting of men. But if you postulate a tenth level, then he’s suddenly fascinating.”
How not to understand Obama
TWS senior editor Andrew Ferguson's latest Commentary column is available online:
So maybe Americans aren’t so different from Europeans after all? If you read a lot of the opinion press—poor lamb—you might be getting the idea that we’re all social democrats now. This would be sad news for Republicans.
It’s starting to dawn on me that my personal campaign to eliminate the use of the word issue to mean difficulty, misapprehension, disturbance, irritation, objection, and a dozen unrelated words is doomed. My parallel campaign against reaching out is probably in trouble too. Reach out is a cant…
You can never be sure when or why one industry or another will draw the attention of the Mr. Fixits of our federal government. Just imagine: There you are, Mr. or Ms. Businessperson, walking along, making money, minding your own business, and then wham: They pop up out of nowhere, wheeling around…
Before Scott Brown rudely burst in with those big burly biceps of his, the attention of Washington’s political professionals had been fixed for ten days on Game Change, the new book about the 2008 presidential campaign. Think of it: ten days. In excitable, ADHD Washington, where the Internet…
"America is grateful to Brian Lamb,” said President Bush a couple of years ago, when he awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to the founder and CEO of C-SPAN. The network Lamb founded more than 30 years ago may be the greatest boon to American…
Almost all presidential speeches are too long, and President Obama could have shaved 60 percent from his address tonight, since he had approximately 15 minutes of content stretched over 35 minutes of talking. The excess came in platitudes about the economy, his own irenic intentions, and much else.…
He is one of the great artists of the century. --Andrew Motion, England's poet laureate, 2000
I read that the moviemaker Ken Burns spent six years filming his new PBS documentary, which is roughly twice as long as it takes to sit through it. I started to watch it last week but lost interest pretty quickly and moved on to other things. For all I know it's still on. Every time I wander by the…
In his speech to the United Nations last week, President Obama really broke the presidential pattern. At a glance these annual turns before the General Assembly are all alike. The president stands alone, dwarfed by the absurdly outsized dais angled together from blue-green granite, while the…
"Oh my," said Dorothy Gale, waving off the candy-colored cloud that trailed some departing witch, "people come and go so quickly here." As it was in Munchkinland, so it is in Washington, D.C. Less than a month has gone by since the death--I guess we're supposed to say "passing" nowadays--of Edward…
The House Committee on Education and Labor is having a busy summer. (Everybody in Washington is having a busy summer!) Earlier this month, for example, one of its essential subunits--the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education and Healthy Families and Communities, or…
Renegade
I looked for them--looked hard--but I don't think Jon Meacham or Maureen Dowd made it to the gala dinner last week where Helen Thomas gave Katie Couric the Helen Thomas Award for Excellence in Journalism. They should have been there. Everybody else was, it seemed. And we deserved a gala.…
William Strunk and E. B. White's Elements of Style turned 50 last month, and the most interesting thing about the anniversary, which came and went with a smattering of notices and a chinpull here and there, was what it revealed about the book's reputation. Half a century into its reign as the…
One Saturday morning this month, a quarter million kids or more will slump their way into the fluorescent tomb of a high school classroom, slide into the seat of a flimsy polypropylene combo chair-desk, and then, with clammy palms dampening the shafts of perfectly sharpened number two pencils, they…
A. Lincoln
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