Magazine

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.

A new curriculum to teach students how to disagree.

The president can’t save an industry he doesn’t understand

What can be done about Americans’ declining life expectancy?

One of every seven pickups sold in the U.S. is diesel—for good reason.

The astonishing resilience of the Department of Justice.

At a congressional hearing this week, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) asked an irate and not entirely comprehensible question about his granddaughter’s iPhone. The only problem, as the tech exec who was the hearing’s sole witness explained, is that iPhones are made by Apple but the tech exec was the CEO…

Not for the first time, Americans appear to be slightly confused about events in France. The mass demonstrations that began as a protest against President Emmanuel Macron’s “climate-change” taxes gave comfort to conservatives here, and not without reason. The new levies on gasoline and diesel…

The hot cause right now is prison reform, and even lots of conservatives are on board. The Heritage Foundation put out an article with this title: “How This Criminal Justice Reform Bill Could Make Our Neighborhoods Safer.” My reaction: Have supporters of the bipartisan reform bill now before the…

The guilty pleasure whose time has come

In most of the European Union, when the authorities hold a plebiscite and don’t get the result they want, they hold another, and another, until the voters see it their way. The English tradition holds democracy in greater esteem than that. Or at least it used to, before the Brexit mess.

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…

The Scrapbook has had occasion to complain from time to time about the way in which journalists in the mainstream news media use the terms “conservatives” and “Republicans.” “Conservatives” hold this loathsome opinion, they might write, or “Republicans” are doing that bizarre thing, but when you…

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New information from the Census Bureau confirms that the Swamp is still the Swamp. Between 2013 and 2017, the five wealthiest areas in America by median income were Loudoun County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; Howard County, Maryland; Falls Church City, Virginia; and Arlington County,…

New information from the Census Bureau confirms that the Swamp is still the Swamp. Between 2013 and 2017, the five wealthiest areas in America by median income were Loudoun County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; Howard County, Maryland; Falls Church City, Virginia; and Arlington County,…

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.

For two years we’ve watched as highly educated liberals come up with one reason after another for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election. Russian trolls and hackers, James Comey’s memo, hopelessness among white opioid addicts, Donald Trump’s sophisticated use of a metaphorical “dog whistle,”…

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…

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…

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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…

Theresa May retains office but hemorrhages power.

The outgoing U.N. ambassador sounds a lot like someone running for something.

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…

Transcripts.

It's not just for Brett Kavanaugh.

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

Is anyone fit to host the Oscars?

High-ranking public officials have resigned for less than what these documents allege.

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

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

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…

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.’

How Edwin Meese saved originalism.

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

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.…

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

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

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

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

Theresa May’s Brexit deal means the end of sovereignty and democracy.

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…

Trump will struggle to win Michigan again.

I used to write a fair amount about West Germany and report on the federal elections. Like most American journalists, historians, political analysts, and politicians—and most Germans, for that matter—I could not imagine the collapse of the Soviet empire and the unification of the two Germanies.

Ex-NFL receiver Anthony Gonzalez’s impressive political debut in the suburbs of Cleveland, Akron, and Canton.

President Trump is in deeper political trouble than he thinks. And I’m not talking about whatever special counsel Robert Mueller has up his sleeve. Trump has real-life re-election trouble.

A quiet leader, and a good one.

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.

What it was like to work for the man.

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…

On November 25, Russian military forces opened fire on three Ukrainian ships off the coast of Crimea, rammed one of them, and seized all three. The ships were manned by 23 crew members. Ukrainian authorities say between three and six were injured.

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.

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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…

On November 28, Democrats officially nominated Nancy Pelosi to be the next Speaker of the House. No one ran against her; she received 203 yeas against 32 nays. Democrats who vowed during the campaign to vote against the former speaker were always a small group. Their opposition—largely rhetorical,…

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…

Negotiating with terrorists won’t bring peace to Afghanistan.

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…

In 1918, Henry Ford ran for the Senate and lost. Did he concede? Are you kidding?

Federal forest (mis)management is high on the list of reasons.

What happens when the president's son and one of his closest allies spar over criminal justice reform?

Florida counts the number of ways to screw up a machine recount

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.

With Gary Hart, political journalists went from covering “the issues” as a public service to servicing the public with prurient material.

The GOP can’t even win in Orange County.

One is hard put to see how a government commissioned to negotiate in good faith for independence could have come up with a deal quite this bad.

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.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words,” says the biblical proverb. All of us can profit from these words, but perhaps Donald Trump needs to hear them more than most. His helter-skelter, self-exculpatory statement on his administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia was Trump at his logorrheic…

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…

An unlikely outcry over a U.K. government architecture committee.

Since most political journalism tends to be wishful thinking, most of the post-midterm analysis this year followed predictable paths.

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…

A new report details the U.S. military is ill equipped to meet the threats of the next decade.

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

Tolerating scoundrels is a bipartisan weakness.

Are you running for president?” For aspiring presidents who haven’t fully committed to running, the question is almost impossible to answer in a way that sounds genuine. “I haven’t given it much thought” means “I’ve been planning to run since I was a teenager but haven’t decided if this is the…

The debate over gun control in America, if “debate” is the right word for it, has become stale and predictable to the point of parody—but a sad, bitter parody, not a funny one. That’s true largely, if we may be permitted to generalize, because the measures gun-control supporters propose after mass…

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.

Last week, a group of anti-“fascist” or antifa thugs posted online the home address of Fox News host and former Weekly Standard writer Tucker Carlson. They then gathered outside his Washington residence and terrorized his wife, who was home alone at the time. Maybe these menacing shenanigans were…

In two phone chats after Democrats won the House in the midterm election, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and likely House speaker Nancy Pelosi broached the subject of bipartisanship—or as McConnell put it, “ways we might be able to find a way forward.”

For a full year, maybe more, Americans who follow national politics were subjected to the unabating use of a single metaphor: the “blue wave.” Would there be a blue wave? If so, how big? What would the blue wave, if it turned out to be a wave, mean for the Trump administration?

The last two years have seen a great deal of handwringing about the future of democracy. Scores of commentators, left and right, have claimed America’s democratic institutions are under siege. Some, mostly on the left, advocate a variety of changes to the Constitution in order to make our electoral…

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A hudna is not a resolution.

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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.

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…

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.

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

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…

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.

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

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.

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

The real reason Jeff Sessions was fired.

The illusory dream of democratic socialism lives again.

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…

Russian operatives may be feeding preposterous fictions to gullible Americans on Facebook, but at least our countrymen don’t believe in “statuesque superhuman blonde Baltic snipers in tight white outfits.” In his invaluable daily digest, Windows on Eurasia, the Russia scholar Paul Goble reminds…

One of the most underreported asininities of modern American politics is the existence of political “consultancies” that rake in money from candidates, fail to get those candidates into office, then go on to rake in even more money from other candidates. Consider:

Do customers resist businesses that #Resist?

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.

In the days since Robert Bowers murdered 11 congregants inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Americans have contemplated and debated the most urgent questions in our common life. There has been mercifully little discussion of gun laws. Observers on both sides have grasped that these…

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.

The shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue—11 dead, 6 wounded—was especially shocking: It was the most lethal attack on Jews in American history. At the same it reminded us how disconcertingly commonplace mass violence has become. In February, 17 people were gunned down at a high school in Florida, and…

The polarization of American politics has done its work and we now have an especially ugly example of where it leads. I’m referring to the fight over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a justice of the Supreme Court.

“I wasn’t born chancellor,” said German leader Angela Merkel in an ad for her 2009 reelection campaign. She repeated the phrase in late October at a press conference to announce her coming resignation as chairman of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Recent state elections have…

Is Saudi Arabia’s crown prince joining a long line of absolutist rulers in the Middle East?

The plot to get Mueller.

The NRCC takes a stand.

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…

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.

With a body count in the millions, you’d think it would be hard to rebrand.

Todd H. Bol, 1956-2018.

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

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

No state that actively supports terrorism and foreign insurgencies ought to have access to the global financial system.

It took the United States 193 years to accumulate its first trillion dollars of federal debt. We will add that much in the current fiscal year alone.

A recent headline in the New York Times: “Democrats Want to Beat Scott Walker But the Wisconsin Economy Is a Hurdle.” The lengthy report examines the Badger State’s Democrats’ attempt to deprive Walker of a third term as governor. Their problems consist mainly of good news: The state’s unemployment…

What the model shows.

Political dysfunction as far as the eye can see.

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 Washington Post ran an item recently about a private school in the greater Washington area that was hiring a director of alumni. Doesn’t sound like much of a story, except for the fact that the institution in question is Georgetown Prep, the school attended by Supreme Court justice Brett…

The Washington Post ran an item recently about a private school in the greater Washington area that was hiring a director of alumni. Doesn’t sound like much of a story, except for the fact that the institution in question is Georgetown Prep, the school attended by Supreme Court justice Brett…

Italy’s coalition government came to power in May partly by winning an economic argument: The tight-budget “austerity” policies promoted by the European Union in the wake of the financial crises that began a decade ago were a sucker’s game, at least for slow-moving economies like Italy’s. Now the…

A close Senate race may hold clues for 2020.

But don’t call Missouri’s Josh Hawley a ‘golden boy.’

The voter-suppression rap on Georgia’s Brian Kemp is unfair.

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…

More and more Democrats are embracing socialized health insurance, but calling it that won’t necessarily help.

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.

I was awakened out of my reverie the other morning by a shocking news flash: Nikki Haley was resigning from her post as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations! According to initial reports, the envoy’s announcement was “sudden” and “unexpected” and “caught Washington”—certainly caught me—“off guard.”

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In New Jersey’s 11th, GOP candidate Jay Webber promises to be ‘a tough out.’

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

Can Rhode Island’s tax-cutting governor win another three-way race?

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

A Democratic takeover of the House will change things.

If Katie Arrington wins her race, it will be just the latest triumph in a life of struggles.

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

Adam Roberts reviews ‘Red Moon,’ the latest novel from science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson.

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

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.

A peculiar argument has begun to circulate on the right: Conservatives who care about the future of conservatism should not only refuse to vote for Republicans who share Donald Trump’s worst traits on November 6, they should support Democrats across the board. Doing so, this reasoning goes, would…

Concluding her Senate floor speech in behalf of Judge Brett Kava­naugh—her vote for him was the decisive one—Republican Susan Collins expressed “her fervent hope” that he “will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have fewer 5-4 decisions and so that public confidence in our…

We now know why President Obama had to struggle so hard to spur the economy and allow it to grow more than 2 percent a year. And that was the high-water mark. In the last quarter of his presidency, growth had slipped to 1.5 percent. Today it’s obvious what Obama’s problem was. He had the wrong…

It’s not because Beijing disappeared Meng Hongwei.

Marsha Blackburn finally seems to be pulling ahead in the Senate race.

Readers will know the background already: Elizabeth Warren claimed to be Native American while she was a law professor at Harvard despite (a) appearing about as Anglo-white as one can appear and (b) having scant evidence that her claim of Native American heritage was true. She cited family lore…

The Taliban, which knows the U.S. is desperate to leave, just attacked a meeting between Afghan officials and the top U.S. military commander.