culture

Also: Michel Houellebecq in Praise of Donald Trump, and more.

Alice B. Lloyd on parting words: After all, tomorrow is another day.

John Podhoretz on what makes a movie stand the test of time.

Hannah Long on how escape-room operators are locking in fun and profit.

Ian Marcus Corbin on values in the art world.

Clare Coffey on what these creatures of myth and mystery reveal about ourselves and civilization.

Algis Valiunas remembers the composer of ‘Ave Maria’ and the opera ‘Faust’ on his bicentennial.

John Talbot reviews A.M. Juster's translation of Maximianus, the forgotten 6th-century poet of bawdiness and decrepitude.

A new curriculum to teach students how to disagree.

What can be done about Americans’ declining life expectancy?

The guilty pleasure whose time has come

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

Maybe you have to live in the bleak midwinter to get it. Maybe you have to see the countryside in its ash-white purity to understand—the landscape burnt-over by the dead indifferent cold. Maybe you have to wonder, as you wander out under the distant stars, what it would mean to live in a universe…

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The Scrapbook has a weakness for hardcover collections of essays and columns. Not many people like them, judging by how well they sell, but we boast several shelves full of collections by William F. Buckley, Joseph Epstein, George Will, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Christopher Hitchens, and many others.

Much has already been said about Donald Trump’s rambling, semicoherent statement on the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia in light of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. We would only like to say a quick word about a single phrase in that strange document: “That being said.” It occurs at the…

We tried to look away, but it was no use once we read the headline: “Why It Matters That Alex Trebek Mispronounced The Name Of My People On ‘Jeopardy!’ ” The piece ran, fittingly, at the Huffington Post. The author, Ngozi Nwangwa—Shirley, to use her anglicized name—is a New York-based writer and “a…

Danny Heitman on a pocket-sized collection of Christmas cheer.

Also: A short history of the poinsettia, green madness, and more.

In this latest episode, the Substandard discusses the new Avengers trailer, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and the Netflix gambit. Sonny loves Office Space, JVL shares theories about the Avengers, and Vic shows off his Rainbow Loom bracelet—plus a possible connection between gout and salad?

Christoph Irmscher reviews a new translation of Uwe Johnson’s massive, masterly year-in-the-life novel, ‘Anniversaries.’

Paul Cantor explains how Mary Shelley’s monster tramples all over the supposed line between high culture and pop culture.

We call use a little faith and hope in our lives.

Also: Writing and walking, a fake poet returns to Twitter, and more.

Danny Heitman on the 1842 visit left the novelist profoundly unhappy with America and its capital.

Whose bathroom is it anyway?

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…

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

Plus: Larry Fitzgerald reminds us how great Jerry Rice was, exaggerated crime on TV, and diplomatic blunders.

Plus: Larry Fitzgerald reminds us how great Jerry Rice was, exaggerated crime on TV, and diplomatic blunders.

Plus: Larry Fitzgerald reminds us how great Jerry Rice was, exaggerated crime on TV, and diplomatic blunders.

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

Also: Flannery O’Connor’s letters to Caroline Gordon, and more.

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

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.’

Also: The women of Abstract Expressionism, and more.

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

Also: God in Denis Johnson’s work, and more.

In this latest episode, the Substandard discusses Green Book—Sonny shares his disdain while Vic lavishes praise. JVL and Sonny ask Vic if there's any movie he doesn't like. Sonny and Vic do their worst Italian impressions. Vic takes questions about his recent gout flare up.

For some reason yet to be fathomed, the 50 million Americans born between the greatest generation and the baby boomers were never assigned a name—at least not one widely recognizable.

Orchestras and universities are working together to feed our hunger for community and a shared American identity

Also: A short history of adaptations of Animal Farm, and more.

The league has an abuse problem with narcotics and with Toradol. Marijuana could be an off-ramp. Also: GM, GHWB, and GA football folds.

In late September, FedEx driver Timothy Warren was driving through a neighborhood in Portland, Ore., when Joseph Magnuson shouted at him that he was going too fast. When Warren, who is black, got out of the truck, Magnuson berated him with numerous insults, including, according to witnesses, a…

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

Also: The return of Jeeves, the decline of History, and more.

Also: The return of Jeeves, the decline of History, and more.

David Skinner on why the American Heritage Dictionary closed its usage panel this year—and why it existed in the first place.

Tony Mecia on how a Bond villain’s Alpine lair came to house a museum for 007.

John Podhoretz on seeing the Coen brothers’ new western on screens large and small.

B.D. McClay on the Muppets adaptation of Dickens’s classic tale of redemption.

Amy Henderson reviews Desmond Morris’s book dishing the dirt on the Surrealists.

Edmund Burke famously ridiculed the radicals and revolutionaries of his day for justifying violent and unjust acts by simpleminded appeals to abstract values. The abstract value he had in mind was liberty, which the mountebanks of France and their cheerleaders in England used to justify murder and…

Also: China’s chilling domestic spying program, Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, and more.

Also: China’s chilling domestic spying program, Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, and more.

Also: China’s chilling domestic spying program, Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, and more.

Facebook has had many moments of supposed reckoning in recent years. Is this one different?

Ricky Jay, 1946-2018.

The group comes out against equal treatment before the law.

A recent Washington Post report on the exploding market for school security equipment and services caught our attention. It’s now a $2.7 billion industry, a figure that doesn’t include the millions spent on armed campus security officers. Metal detectors, facial recognition software, pepperball…

Also: Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s sequel, and more.

On this latest episode, the Substandard takes on Creed II and the Rocky oeuvre. JVL buys a flatscreen, Vic remembers seeing Ricky Jay, and Sonny talks about standing "on" line.

One of the nice things about getting old these days is that you no longer become an old person. You become a senior citizen. Another is that we old people—wait, we seniors—are able to discern the sudden and sweeping changes in manners and morals and politics that seem to a young person to be just…

Every year, the folks at Oxford Dictionaries announce a word of the year, and the word this year is toxic. “The Oxford Word of the Year,” the release reads, “is a word or expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a…

How Cameron Hanes is redefining masculinity for a new generation

This fall Harvard College has been defending its admissions program against charges of racial discrimination brought in federal court. Ironically, this is not the first time that Harvard’s admissions practices have lain at the heart of an important case that could affect college enrollments across…

Plus, the hero America needs.

Booth crews just don't understand sports analytics. They should. Also: A less extreme (and more responsible) interpretation of the administration's climate report.

Booth crews just don't understand sports analytics. They should. Also: A less extreme (and more responsible) interpretation of the administration's climate report.

Plus, when Mission Impossible meets Paddington Bear.

The Christmas season has begun, and ballet companies across North America are blessing their towns and cities with performances of The Nutcracker. For The Scrapbook, it’s the season’s highlight.

Noemie Emery on the year that all the political nightmares came true.

John Wilson on “the Short 68,” “the Long 68,” and what’s missing from a new account of the protests and their legacy.

The extraordinary fidelity of Christopher Tolkien, last of the Inklings.

Alan Jacobs on Andrew Delbanco’s ‘The War Before the War,’ the horrors of the fugitive slave laws, and the costs of union.

Philip Luke Jeffery on how the murdered German theologian came to be a symbol in American politics.

I was raised in one and have spent much of my career researching them. My findings have shown positive life outcomes—reflecting my own.

An item in the New York Times on November 19 brought our attention to the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest at Columbia University. The contest is named for the famed author of the 12-line poem “Trees,” first published in 1913: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a…

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For generations, probably for centuries, Anglophone writers have struggled with the fact that our language lacks a gender-indeterminate third-person singular pronoun. In English, we have he for a man, she for a woman, and it for everything else. There is no option in the third-person for someone…

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

On this week's episode, the Substandard discusses Steve McQueen's Widows. JVL calls it No Country for Old Women. Vic and Sonny liken it to Lady Heat. The hosts talk about meeting the Substandard Expanded Universe (SSEU) for the first time, aged rum, and Beaver Nuggets. Happy Thanksgiving!

No ribbons for participation here.

Fletcher Knebel’s ‘Night of Camp David,’ re-released this week, is tamer than reality.

Another good reason not to drop acid.

Neologisms, words newly coined, are as necessary to language as water to land. New inventions, institutions, patterns of behavior require new words to describe them. Nor need all neologisms describe new phenomena. Some are required to cover long-established phenomena that have called out for but…

An all-time classic puts the future of the NFL on display. Plus: The NYT advocates for price controls, but not on newspapers; and how Donald Trump is like a cornerback.

An all-time classic puts the future of the NFL on display. Plus: The NYT advocates for price controls, but not on newspapers; and how Donald Trump is like a cornerback.

How J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis defied the spirit of the age.

Tolerating scoundrels is a bipartisan weakness.

A university named for George Washington and Robert E. Lee wrestles with its traditions and heritage.

Ten years after the financial crisis, Robert F. Bruner surveys the best books on what went wrong and what still should be fixed.

Danny Heitman on the slender volumes of Notting Hill Editions—treats for the mind.

Michael M. Rosen on border barriers and the human future—a review of ‘The Age of Walls’ by Tim Marshall.

Sophia Buono on the searching, spiritual journey of Elizabeth Seton, the first American-born Catholic saint.

Albert Louis Zambone reviews ‘Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics.’

The King, who receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump Friday, was basically Nixon’s Kanye.

The King, who receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump Friday, was basically Nixon’s Kanye.

The King, who receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump Friday, was basically Nixon’s Kanye.

Making the King an avatar for racial resentments so long after his death just creates more divisions.

Plus, why Alan Greenberg's memos were great.

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…

National Landing just made a huge mistake.

On today's Tuesday Morning Quarterback podcast, columnist Gregg Easterbrook and guest host Chris Deaton discuss what's behind the boom in NFL offense and what may cause it to slow in the season's second half, Drew Brees's place among the stars, and the stars' place amid the construction of several…

Plus: seeing space in a certain kind of light, and 2018 ballot referendums.

Plus: seeing space in a certain kind of light, and 2018 ballot referendums.

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…

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.

Can the Alexander Hamilton Forum prevent history from repeating itself?

Plus, will teens ruined 'boxed Tide?'

Stan Lee created an entire industry.

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…

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.

On this week's return episode, the Substandard takes on Bohemian Rhapsody. Special guest Mike Warren fact-checks and gives us a Queen ranking. JVL gets into queer theory and Vic recounts his New York City bar crawl. Plus a special review and trenchant analysis of Election 2018!

Were admission to Harvard based solely on academic merit, Asian-Americans would comprise 43% of the freshman class, while African-Americans would make up less than 1%, according to an internal Harvard report discussed at a trial here Wednesday.” That’s the sobering lede of a Wall Street Journal…

The program's and school's insiders put power and money ahead of academics, even ahead of human life, in the case of player Jordan McNair's death. Plus: No more unbeatens in the NFL.

Plus, one easy way to kill a platform.

Amazon-owned AbeBooks announced that they would no longer host sellers from multiple countries, prompting the response.

Alice B. Lloyd on the homespun magical realism of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, ‘Killing Commendatore.’

Does 12 or 13 count as an early age to become disillusioned? Maybe it was once on the young side for lost innocence. On the other hand, maybe I was just a slow learner.

It’s no longer Voltaire’s Europe.

On the interment of Matthew Shepard at the National Cathedral.

Christoph Irmscher on the strange, lifelong discomfort of the author of ‘Siddhartha’ and ‘Steppenwolf.’

Alan Jacobs on the maps that guide writers and readers through fictional worlds.

Paula Deitz on how a New York physician planted the seeds of American medical botany.

Micah Mattix on how Robert Louis Stevenson came to live, die, and be buried in Samoa.

Phil Christman on the Hulu film ‘Minding the Gap’: Three young skateboarders rewrite their destinies.

Also: How smoking can save lives, and more.

Plus, Halloween disaster!

Also: Donald Hall’s productive final years, and more.

Liberal politicos—as distinct from progressive ideologues—rarely express their belief that “family planning,” as it’s euphemistically known, can alleviate or even solve the problem of poverty. We recall President Bill Clinton’s first surgeon general, the logorrheic Joycelyn Elders, remarking in her…

"That's not funny." - my mom, probably.

Chris R. Morgan reviews a new history of the pre-‘Dracula’ life of the undead.

Also: Rod Dreher recommends A Gentleman In Moscow, and more.

News that P. G. Wodehouse will at last get a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey in London will warm the hearts of Wodehouse fans. For some years after the Second World War, the British government treated the writer with disdain, owing to the mistaken belief that Wodehouse had willingly…

Bellingcat’s amateurs excel at the intelligence game.

Todd H. Bol, 1956-2018.

The business of NFL broadcasting contracts. Plus: All things Scotland, from notes from a visit to notes on the TV show 'Outlander.'

Also: The lessons of Rome’s decline, and more.

Priscilla M. Jensen on the sisterhood of the spiral-bound cookbook.

Courts are more often recognizing the arguments of religious-freedom advocates.

Plus, news you can use for Texans.

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

Also: The life and poetry of Helen Pinkerton, British detective shows, and more.

Gary Saul Morson on the literary legacy of 19th-century Russian revolutionary terrorism.

Thomas Vinciguerra reviews a collection of Cornell lectures from the comic actor and Monty Python legend.

John Podhoretz on a down-and-out writer’s clever path to sham success.

The Roman Republic didn’t end all at once. As Ian Lindquist explains, its decline began with an earlier erosion of political norms.

Also: The relationship between geography and time, how Kit Kat conquered Japan, and more.

PEN International, founded in London in 1921, is an organization of writers dedicated to the cause of free expression. Originally the title stood for Poets, Essayists, Novelists, but the group now includes every sort of littérateur, even humble magazine writers. We revere the organization’s…

Also: The outrageous economics of peer-reviewed journals, and more.

Also: A trip to kitschy Salem, Massachusetts, and more.

Ask Matt Labash, who believes in these tribal times we are not enemies but friends, especially when neighborhood barbecues are involved.

Occasionally one reads an op-ed in one of the country’s big newspapers from an author, usually a Washington insider of some variety, who decided to get out and see the country he loves. The op-ed writer has taken a road trip across the country and wishes to tell his metropolitan readers about the…

I have a new set of socket wrenches. If you knew me well, you might not be completely surprised, but nevertheless, this is a first for me.

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

Also: How James Joyce’s father shaped his writing, and more.

Plus: 'Tis the season for around-the-clock coverage of Elizabeth Warren and around-the-clock Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel.

Plus: 'Tis the season for around-the-clock coverage of Elizabeth Warren and around-the-clock Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel.

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The ferocious incivility Americans have witnessed for decades has arisen largely from the left—and for good reason

He denied that there were Nazi-operated gas chambers and received an award from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Also: Jason Lutes’s “expansive” Berlin, in defense of the “bookish” life, and more.

Did you know we’re not supposed to notice the difference between male and female robots? In this month’s Wired magazine, we learn about the pressing question of whether we should assign certain gender traits to certain kinds of robots. Why do we care about this infinitesimal non-issue? Because…

Reassessing ‘bimbo eruptions’ in the #MeToo era

Chris R. Morgan on how Salem’s legacy of fear and injustice gave rise to a kitschy way of life.

The Swedish Academy took the year off. Robert Messenger explains why we should be glad.

Tim Markatos’s whirlwind weekend at this year’s New York Film Festival.

HBO’s ‘Come Inside My Mind’ examines his comic genius—and his struggles with drinking, drugs, and depression.

He built the first one in 2009. Now there are 75,000 of them.

Ordinarily The Scrapbook enjoys writing about the stupid things associated with modern politics and culture. It’s a touch irritating, though, to have to spend time and energy insisting that obviously true things are, in fact, true. Things like the differences between men and women.

Also: The eccentric Mark Twain, the most successful sitcom star ever, and more.

Plus, why Gavin McInnes is a baddie.

Also: Image appoints new editors, PEN America sues Donald Trump, and more.

On this latest episode, the Substandard reviews First Man, which Sonny and Vic enjoyed. JVL begs to differ. Vic goes to an all-you-can-eat Balkan restaurant. JVL enlightens us on the concierge bee-keeping industry. Plus a ranking of NASA-ish movies!

John Podhoretz: The new Neil Armstrong biopic starring Ryan Gosling is a joyless schlep.

Also: Israeli science fiction, the novels of Robin Jenkins, and more.

My daughter came to visit for the long weekend. Some friends mentioned that they were driving across the state, and so—on a whim, at the last minute—she threw some clothes in a bag, gathered up her schoolbooks, and piled into the car with her friends. And why not? It’s just 350 miles or so from the…

Plus, the U.S. mercenaries of Yemen.

Also: The most popular kids’ show on YouTube, and more.

The three most prolific QBs ever are evidence. Plus: the annual New York Times Corrections on Fast Forward!

Also: The music of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, why you should read Huxley’s Brave New World, and more.

The new film Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer begins with a title card: “Most incidents portrayed are exact representations of court transcripts, police interviews, or eyewitness accounts.” Those familiar with the case involving the Philadelphia abortion doctor—and that’s not…

The mystery, confusion, and fear of Lyme disease

Anthony Paletta sits with Pritzker Prize winner B.V. Doshi.

Danny Heitman on PBS’s ‘The Durrells on Corfu’ and the island childhood that inspired Gerald Durrell’s career.

John Check explains how Willa Cather’s classic, now 100 years old, still sings and dances.

Andrew Egger reviews ‘Where Did You Get This Number?: A Pollster's Guide to Making Sense of the World’

Mormons don’t want to be called Mormons anymore. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” is a bit of a mouthful—a bit like “the United States of America,” come to think of it—but in August the president of the church, Russell M. Nelson, issued a written edict about using the church’s full…

In 2003, the Supreme Court hoped the use of racial preferences would last no more than 25 years. They are becoming permanent.

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper shine in ‘A Star Is Born’—and Hollywood should make more melodramas.