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Detroit

The biggest scandal that nobody is talking about has nothing to do with the Donald Trump White House or the connection between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Russia dossier. It involves New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, who stands accused by the federal government of bribery,…

On November 2, 1917—a hundred years ago this week—the British government sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, declaring its “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and promising Britain’s support in “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Marvel-ous Creator

Marvel-ous Creator

On October 31, exactly 500 years will have passed since a German monk named Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. That’s at least the tradition, but certainly Luther circulated his collection of brief contentions. Mainly he intended to provoke a debate…

When Steve Bannon became CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, Trump was far behind Hillary Clinton, according to Bannon. “We were 16 points down,” he said.

Just when it seemed as if the election of Donald Trump had rendered his supporters incoherent with triumphalism and his detractors incoherent with rage—thereby dumbing-down political conversation for a long time to come—something different and more interesting happened. A genuine debate has sprung…

Bisbee, Arizona, is at the center of a jurisdictional tussle with the state government, a kerfuffle that may prove whether there’s room in a conservative state for local self-determination—even liberal local self-determination.

In mid-October, President Trump was due to make a certification to Congress on four conditions about its nuclear deal. He has repeatedly said this deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), gave the Iranians too much for too little. On October 13, he surprised no one by…

My guess is that up until two weeks ago, the name of Harvey Weinstein meant little if anything to most people, including readers of this magazine.

The American Red Cross was founded in 1881 by Civil War nurse Clara Barton. It was the first U.S. relief organization and established its effectiveness with responses to the Great Thumb Fire of 1881 and the Johnstown Flood in 1889. In the 20th century, the Red Cross became a byword for…

The Scrapbook has a smartphone, but we are sorely tempted to go back to a flip phone. Or maybe something with a dial. Smartphones were supposed to make everything easier, but we’re not so sure.

The attic where I write is stifling for half of the Washington, D.C., year. But in the autumn, breezes gust through the open windows and so do the sounds of our neighborhood—children chatting on their way to school, a barking dog, the squeak of the mailbox across the street being opened, and the…

Mark Herring, Virginia’s attorney general, wanted to run for governor this fall. But Terry McAuliffe, the current governor, thought otherwise. And his endorsement of lieutenant governor Ralph Northam for the Democratic nomination for governor sent a blunt message to Herring: forget it.

Boston

Scottsdale, Ariz.

Abingdon, Va.

"Do we want Iran to have a nuclear weapon or not?" asks Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in a video making its way around the Internet. “The answer? No. So why is President Trump trying to make it easier for Iran to get a nuclear weapon?”

In a speech on October 11 promoting his tax-reform plan, Donald Trump spoke rosily of America’s economic revival, crediting himself for having cleared the way for growth. “Since January of this year, we have slashed job-killing red tape all across our economy,” the president said. “We have stopped…

There are fewer and fewer economic principles on which Democrats and Republicans can agree, and any point of consilience will surely be forgotten as some momentary partisan need overwhelms reason and sense. Surely, however, we can all agree on a few points:

As the major league playoffs continue on into the World Series, there is lots of talk—complaining, really—about the lengthening time it takes to play, and therefore watch, a baseball game. The average time of a baseball game is now three hours and five minutes. I don’t know if the average time of a…

Oakland, Calif.

Obamacare “repeal and replace” may have failed this year, but that doesn’t mean the Affordable Care Act can’t be significantly defanged. For example, there is still time to excise the Independent Payment Advisory Board from the law before it is up and running.

The late North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-il had thousands of Hollywood movies in his personal collection, furnishing him with what he thought was a deep knowledge of a country he would never see. He was particularly fond, reportedly, of The Godfather—so much so that he ran his country like a Mafioso.…

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case in which University of Wisconsin professor William Whitford and a group of plaintiffs (all Democratic voters in the state) contend that the drawing up of Wisconsin’s state legislative districts was an…

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…

Jennifer MacMillan is a tax preparer. Her business ebbs and flows with the season. In the months before April 15, she talks with clients and pores over the records of their financial lives. She deciphers statements from their brokerages, determines how much they can claim for their home offices,…

With police intensifying their long-running corruption probes, Israel is awash with speculation that Benjamin Netanyahu’s days as prime minister may be numbered. Opponents—both within the Likud party and without—have been organizing. Sensing the danger, Netanyahu and his allies have fought back,…

I was recently in San Francisco on business. I was there on business because, well, I would never go there for pleasure.

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…

Presidential candidate Donald Trump disparaged the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in characteristically superlative terms: “My number-one priority,” he said to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March 2016, “is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. I have been in…

On October 3, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, spoke to a group of Republican donors at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington. Unbeknownst to Ayers, his remarks were recorded, and the audio was subsequently obtained by Politico.

In the 1970s, about 10 percent of American workers required licenses to perform their jobs legally. By 2015, that proportion had more than doubled to 22 percent. There is widespread agreement among economists and an increasing awareness among politicians that there is no public-interest…

In the past 100 years, no visual artist has contributed more to the sum total of human happiness than Alexander Calder. If you think about it, this generating of happiness, to the extent to which it retains any cultural prestige these days, is seen as the domain of musicians and writers far more…

The Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, who in the 1970s won the Panama Canal back for his country, used to tell less successful Latin American leaders that the United States is like a monkey on a chain. You can play with the chain all you like—but if you play with the monkey, you’ll get badly hurt.…

By October 15, Donald Trump must decide what to do with his predecessor’s nuclear agreement with Iran. He has felt obliged, against his instincts, to recertify the deal every 90 days, per the requirements of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, Congress’s attempt to supervise Barack Obama’s…

Before Jack Henry Abbott, there was Edgar Smith.

As I was leaving the theater after a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, the friend I watched it with turned to me and observed, “For a documentary about a library, that movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about books.”

Eating disorders are not unknown in the land of foie gras (and we’re not talking about the force-feeding of geese), and authorities there blame the fashion industry’s unhealthy fondness for starvation-chic. Thus the French law that recently went into effect decreeing that fashion photos be honest…

This summer, the Cleveland Indians won 22 consecutive baseball games—a seemingly impossible streak that elated fans of the team and captivated non-fans. The Indians won large and they won small. They won the 22nd game in a comeback, getting a hit with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the…

"I want them to hate him," a federal prosecutor said quietly on the evening of October 2 as his colleagues packed up. It had been a long first day in the trial of Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the man charged with instigating the tragic 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

In 1894 San Francisco dedicated an elaborate monument to the history of California, a vast pile of granite and bronze paid for by the estate of philanthropist James Lick. Last week San Francisco took a step toward getting rid of it.

Donald Trump was frustrated. Five days earlier, on July 12, 2017, the president had decided for the second time in his young administration that he would certify to Congress Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal he’d promised as a candidate to dismantle. He wasn’t happy with the decision he’d…

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares…

A few years ago, some friends of mine, weekend musicians, started jamming together and formed a cover band called the Porch Lights. To be honest, their big world tour is a bit slow in developing. Conquering the globe one backyard at a time, they haven’t quite made it outside of our neighborhood,…

“When I was in law teaching,” recalled Antonin Scalia in a speech just days before his 1986 nomination to the Supreme Court, “I was fond of doing what is called ‘teaching against the class’—that is, taking positions that the students were almost certain to disagree with, in order to generate some…

As Kim Jong-un’s cavalcade of menace has proceeded across the 2017 calendar, revealing a North Korean arsenal that now includes a hydrogen bomb and missiles capable of reaching New York City and Washington, D.C., America’s strategic posture has been old and familiar (if now more colorfully…

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on September 22 formally rescinded the Obama administration’s commands that universities use unfair rules in sexual-misconduct investigations—rules that had the effect of finding more students guilty of sexual assault. And she appears also to be preparing for far…

The victory of Roy Moore, a populist and religious fundamentalist, in the Alabama Senate primary last week can be seen in two different ways: continuity with the recent past of GOP politics and a radical break from it.

Last week, President Donald Trump picked a fight with the NFL, arguing that players like Colin Kaepernick who take a knee during the national anthem should be fired. As he has done so many times before, the president kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy. Maybe the commotion will work to his…

I used to have this annual argument at Christmas with my brother-in-law, a well-regarded film editor in Hollywood. I would arrive brimming with complaints about a movie like Argo, said to be “based on actual events” but with an entirely fictitious Keystone Kops-like airport chase scene. I would…

Since Donald Trump took office, the growth of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and the increasing capability and diversity of its ballistic missile force have made that country the most urgent threat to U.S. national security. Observers as diverse as Mark Bowden in the Atlantic, Michael Auslin of the…

Berlin

How bad is grade inflation in the humanities? So bad that when U.S. News & World Report issued its annual college rankings last week, it gave more credit to schools for graduating students in math and the hard sciences than it did in other disciplines. According to the publication’s press release:…

Unmasking. Leaks. Wiretaps. The mounting surveillance scandals of 2017 are suddenly threatening one of the most effective intelligence-gathering programs in U.S. history.

On September 9, at the beginning of the women’s final of the U.S. Open, Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys walked onto the court carrying flowers. The rest isn’t worth overanalyzing: Stephens won the match in a rout as Keys struggled with her nerves and her mobility. It’s that they were both there…

We’re suffering a period of remarkably low labor-force participation. The national unemployment rate was only 4.4 percent in August, but just 62.9 percent of the U.S. population is working or looking for work. Ten years ago, before the recession, the number was 65.8 percent. There are around 7…

To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme…

To understand the pragmatic realities of federal governance in the 21st century, one must recognize the existence of a fourth branch of government: the administrative state. We have some two million federal bureaucrats with extraconstitutional legislative powers. Not only do they write the reams of…

Even if you hold no religious beliefs, you might want to consider adopting some simply for the sake of your wedding. That’s the conclusion I reached after attending several secular nuptial ceremonies in the years after college. There was little worse than listening to vows that had been made up by…

Once again officials within the FDA are proposing to put other interests over the needs of dying patients, predominantly children.

The Trump White House has yet to roll out its much-anticipated, comprehensive, government-wide Iran policy review, but administration principals have met over the last few weeks to iron out details regarding the nuclear deal with Iran, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On…

In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who…

Long before I ever even picked up a golf club, I wanted to be the kind of person who golfed regularly. A Real Golfer, in other words. Even as a child, I loved the manicured, tightly controlled aesthetic of golf courses—​just the right (which is to say, minimal) amount of “nature” for my…

If I were a Republican strategist, which I’m pleased to say I’m not, I would pay especial attention to Shelby Steele’s op-ed “Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism” in the August 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Toward the close of his article, Steele writes that “the great problem for…

In President Trump’s politics, “the overall impression matters more than the details,” writes Newt Gingrich in his book Understanding Trump. This is not only true and insightful, it also explains Trump’s conduct of late.

Josh Cobin seems a good enough guy. A little pudgy, maybe, with his hair thinning on top and a beard borrowed from a Civil War officer—one who forgot to get a trim before Mathew Brady showed up to take the battalion photograph. At 29, Josh is probably a little old for the sloppy look he affects. A…

Something has gone missing from American politics. Since the beginning of the new administration in January, public debate focused on general ideas has largely disappeared. Yes, President Trump has a few issues he consistently supports, such as limitations on immigration and lower taxes; and yes,…

For those of us who wish (or hope) that Donald Trump may ultimately settle into something resembling a conventional president, his ex-chief strategist Stephen Bannon offered a glimmer of encouragement last week.

A year from now will mark the start of the traditional campaign season for the 2018 midterms​—​which will see all the seats in the House of Representatives plus a third of the Senate up for grabs. Obviously, these contests are too far away to estimate results, but a general outline is coming into…

When he won election, Donald Trump—along with his national security adviser Michael Flynn, his all-purpose counselor Stephen Bannon, and, perhaps, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner—was fond of the idea that Russia and Iran, comrades-in-arms in Syria, weren’t natural partners. Flynn was particularly…

Even before the Senate failed to pass a weak health care reform bill in mid-July, congressional Republicans were rationalizing their failure: Health care wasn’t their issue, they reasoned. But tax reform—now there was something they could win with.

In tax reform, the negotiators from the Trump administration and Congress who are thought to be in charge are called the Big 6 by Washington insiders. But there’s also a Big 4, a group of supply-side economists who are playing an influential role.

In June 2012, when President Obama issued the executive order known as DACA—“deferred action on childhood arrivals”—he had a good moral case but a bad legal one. The order allowed illegal immigrants who had entered the country as minors—people who hadn’t come to America of their own will—to apply…

On August 30, New America president Anne-Marie Slaughter terminated the left-leaning think tank’s relationship with scholar Barry C. Lynn and his Open Markets program. Slaughter says that Lynn was not abiding by New America’s “standards of openness and institutional collegiality.” He says he was…

San Francisco

The crisis between the United States and North Korea shows no signs of abating. Indeed, Pyongyang escalated its provocations last week, firing a missile over Japan on August 29. Critics of the president cite his brash approach to Pyongyang as a factor behind North Korea’s belligerency. Some also…

Few Americans noticed, but this past June, Muammar Qaddafi’s longtime spy chief Abdullah Senussi was apparently released from prison in Tripoli, where he had been sentenced to death in July 2015 for decades of officially sanctioned murders of his fellow Libyans. If Senussi was not…

A friend sent me an article, accompanied by several photographs, from the July 5 Daily Mail about the celebration of the playwright Tom Stoppard’s 80th birthday. The photographs, chiefly of English actors whom I’ve watched with much admiration on PBS and in the movies over the years, confirmed my…

"Make no mistake,” writes New Yorker editor David Remnick, “white supremacists are now at the forefront of American politics.” That platitudinous “make no mistake” put us in mind of Joe Queenan’s observation years ago in these pages. The phrase is “an underhanded way of clinching an argument…

When is a college acceptance letter not a college acceptance letter? When a school suddenly realizes that it has 800 more freshmen than it knows what to do with. This is what happened last month at the University of California, Irvine, which—in an effort to reduce that number—started rescinding…

The Fourth Amendment is in a sorry state. The constitutional provision intended to protect us and our property from unreasonable searches and seizures has been weakened over decades—a fact that ought to be of acute concern at a time when surveillance technology is increasingly intrusive and…

Seven months after taking office, President Donald Trump finally announced how his administration plans to fight the longest-running war in American history. “My original instinct was to pull out—and, historically, I like following my instincts,” Trump told the nation in a prime-time address…

Donald Trump’s remarks following the killing of a young paralegal by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, generated widespread opprobrium—and no one was more cutting than many of the president’s fellow Republicans. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio were just a few among the…

Let’s call her Jane. She’s 32 and a junior vice president at a big investment bank. The firm’s attempt at more manageable hours has made it possible for her to reshuffle her work and stay on after having a baby. But growing responsibilities to clients pull her away from her new role. She totes…

It would be nice, in a way, to be a progressive. You’d be confident you know the direction History is moving. And you’d have faith that the direction in which History is moving is the direction in which History should be moving.

Because there are so few of them, any movies about Americans living east of Los Angeles and west of Chicago will nowadays be labeled “important” on first sight. Taylor Sheridan, who grew up on a Texas ranch and moved to Wyoming after 20 years of intermittently rewarding acting work in L.A., has…

While vacationing this past June at the Outer Banks, I stopped one afternoon at a small bookstore in the sleepy coastal town of Buxton. After navigating past romance, mystery, and local fiction to the classics corner (Moby-Dick and the Odyssey make the best beach reading), I was arrested by the…

As presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised he would make really great deals that would bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. “We will get our people off of welfare and back to work—rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor,” President Trump said in his…

President Trump’s new strategy for Afghanistan shows considerable reflection among the president and his top advisers on many military questions but deep confusion on the issues of “nation-building” and democracy.

For many years General Franco’s regime used the slogan “Spain is different” to attract tourism. Spain had sun and great beaches, unlike, say, Germany and Belgium, but the country was also a dictatorship and lagged economically and socially. We were indeed different from the rest of Europe. Today,…

Every few years, somebody gets pushed out of a job for suggesting that one group of people, on average and in part due to biology, scores differently from another group on some measure of attitude or aptitude. Ten years ago, it was DNA pioneer James Watson, who said blacks registered below whites…

For all the millennials “feeling the Bern,” Time has come to a startling realization: “Young Americans Are Actually Not Becoming More Progressive,” the magazine announced last week (with a parental sigh). Republicans, you’ll remember, were predicted to have a “young-people problem” in 2016, but 37…

Much ink has recently been spilled because of America’s statues of Confederate generals; in Charlottesville, wicked men flying Nazi flags caused blood to be spilled as well. In hopes of avoiding further violence, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, recently removed its Confederate statues in the…

Hassan Rouhani was sworn in for his second term as president of Iran on August 5, surrounded by fresh flowers, fervent followers, and around 500 foreign officials. Representatives of the United Kingdom, France, the United Nations, and the Vatican rubbed shoulders with the Syrian prime minister,…

Last week, insurance giant Anthem announced it was pulling out of the Obamacare exchanges in Nevada, leaving most of the counties within the state without even one insurer to cover demand in the individual marketplace. This latest development only increases the pressure on Congress to do something.

San Francisco.

The war in Afghanistan is nearly 16 years old. It is the longest in our nation’s history. Many Americans wonder why our soldiers are still there. This widespread frustration is shared by our commander in chief. The Trump administration has not yet announced its plans for Afghanistan in large part…

In many quarters of the American news media today, seasoned journalists seem incapable of pondering those parts of reality that don’t complement their political worldviews. It goes beyond “bias”—we’re all biased. This is negligence.

In Chaos Monkeys, his memoir about his rocky career in high tech, Antonio García Martínez lists a few pithy rules for understanding how Silicon Valley really works. The best of these insider insights: “Company culture is what goes without saying.” That is, if you want really to understand the firms…

On November 12, 2015, officials in New York and New Jersey thought they had struck it rich. They had arranged a 50-50 deal with the federal government in which the feds would pay for half the cost of a new tunnel under the Hudson River, the renovation of Penn Station, and a lot more.

A presidential decision on a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, long delayed and the subject of bitter dispute inside the White House, may finally be at hand. Key members of the Trump administration’s war council met with the president on August 10 at the summer White House in Bedminster,…

Last month, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled the city’s first-ever “cultural plan.” Although the details are murky, he hopes to tie funding for arts organizations to the “diversity” of their staffs and boards of directors. The city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, Tom Finkelpearl,…

In the past half-century, there have been two presidential elections that Democrats should have won by a landslide but did not.

Before his untimely passing earlier this year, political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler offered up some timely reflections on Allan Bloom’s “souls without longing,” the elite students who comprise the bulk of Bloom’s study in his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. As Lawler…

Orkney, Scotland

Six years ago, on a July Tuesday in Los Angeles, members of MS-13’s downtown cell got into a fight with a rival gang. “Porky,” its leader, was none too pleased.

If an award were given for winning awards, it would surely go, by acclamation and universal consent, to Robert Rauschenberg, the most beribboned figure in the history of art. Not only did he win almost every award you can think of, but others were invented so that he could win those as well. Had…

Enough, already! It is time for the commentariat to stop attributing every vulgarity erupting from this administration to the fact that the president, like his now-defenestrated potty-mouthed spokesman, is a New Yorker.

In July, when news broke that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met last year with a Russian lawyer and a former Russian intelligence officer who promised dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign, there was a media feeding frenzy. After months of speculation…

The Washington Post outdid itself last week in the dog-bites-man department, trumpeting one of those yawn-inducing nonevents that have come to be hyped in the age of the Trump resistance. Here’s the ballyhooed breaking news item: A long-time EPA employee is retiring. Yes, that’s the story.…

The failed Republican effort to kill Obamacare had a saving grace. It’s small but significant. We now know the chief cause of skyrocketing health-insurance premiums since Obamacare was activated in 2013. And it’s not the “essential benefits” everyone is forced to buy, though they’ve often been…

Los Angeles

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” The opening line to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 jeremiad The Population Bomb is a sober one. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

Of all the unanswerable questions in the universe, there’s one that brings the brightest minds of Broadway and Hollywood to their knees: What makes one musical or movie musical a hit and another a flop? A veritable ocean of cocktails flows over this question. But during the 1940s, the Hollywood…

What a week! Newly minted White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci goes nuts; White House chief of staff Reince Priebus gets fired and is replaced by retired Marine general John Kelly; General Kelly fires Scaramucci; Kelly then reassures Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had…

Google Glass, the wearable robot eyeglasses rejected by consumers as a creepy invasion of personal privacy, has quietly been making a comeback, WIRED reports. Developers have made sure to keep their progress a secret this time, perhaps cowed by the proper thrashing they received from Matt Labash in…

An America thoroughly fed up with both politics and political correctness slogs through a surreally dirty, bizarre, and finally insane election season—and, when the dust settles, finds itself in the grip of Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin.

Two days after the 2016 election, we had this to say about Donald Trump’s stunning victory:

We now live in an era when news cycles are lucky to last a full 24 hours, so please take a moment to clear your mind as we travel back in time to two long years ago.

The Trump Education Department’s plan to change the Obama administration’s policy on campus rape accusations—a policy that has helped expel countless students who were innocent of any sex crime—set off a frenzied attack by interest groups. In joining this attack, major media outlets have continued…

I once worked in a small state agency that, among other things, analyzed legislation. At one point the agency’s head hired three new analysts. One of them was a woman in her early thirties​—​call her Leena. Her job was to brief other staffers on budget-related bills. When she first took the job,…

These are not the journals you’re looking for.

Is the multinational behemoth that owns Budweiser—AB InBev—a threat to American beer? Democrats seem to think so. In their populist campaign manifesto for 2018, “A Better Deal,” they warn, “In the last year, InBev which owns Anheuser-Busch and is the world’s largest beer company, struck a deal to…

When Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appeared in print, in 1839, its wintry world of Christian revelry, chivalric honor, and Arthurian romance had long since vanished. Indeed, that world, or rather, medieval romantic literature as a whole, was antiquated even at the time the poem was written,…

No contemporary political issue is more emotionally fraught: The LGBT lobby, enjoying its new political ascendancy, worries that religious conservatives wish to diminish the self-definition and harm the dignity of the wider LGBT community; meanwhile, religious conservatives, feeling beleaguered,…

Some people endeavor to live an eco-friendly life. But why should your environmental activism stop just because you die? California legislators are debating a bill that would give morticians permission to dispose of corpses in a relatively new way—one in harmony with nature—known as “water…

Pamplona, Spain

Athens

In a recent article for Townhall, columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote that the putative Senate candidacy in Michigan of “Kid Rock” (stage name of rocker/rapper Robert Ritchie) “should make every normal American smile” because “it will drive the liberals insane” and “make George Will [and other…

Burlington, Vt.

Tim Gill is best known as the Denver-based mega-donor who bankrolled the successful national campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. In June, Gill sat down for an interview with Rolling Stone. He was asked about the future of the gay rights movement. If you had any doubt that Gill and other…

What is one to think as one watches the clown show in the White House, the train wreck in Congress, and the multi-vehicle accident that is conservatism today? We’re inclined (as we so often are) simply to quote Winston Churchill, in this case speaking in 1931 about Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald:

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of futurology, the utopian and the apocalyptic. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, like the Book of Revelation, offers a bit of both. And why not? The function of imaginary futures is to deliver us from banality. The present, like the past, may be a…

There are few events in the history of war comparable to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French beach at Dunkirk in the late spring of 1940. It is an episode that repays close attention to its every aspect—the terrifying Nazi triumphs in combat that led to it, the halting…

We’re not fans of adding “ism” to the names of presidents—“Reaganism” and “Jeffersonianism” make sense to describe those men’s political worldviews, but you wouldn’t use the formulations “Fordism” or “Clintonism” and expect to be understood. Nonetheless, “Trumpism” meant something definable to a…

Some years ago, a group of newspaper reporters came up with a headline that could work with almost any story. Here’s what they agreed on: “They’re at it again.”

These are perilous times for understatement and modest expectations. In the age of Trump, even the smallest of things are transmogrified into epoch-defining events. These are the days of mountains out of molehills, “a new low” almost daily, and more proof (as if more were needed) that your…

As President Macron and President Trump stood side by side during the Bastille Day ceremonies in Paris, it was not difficult for commentators to point out the differences between the two men. Neither in personal style nor substantive policies do they have much in common. Indeed, Macron’s victory in…

My wife and I are record collectors. At the moment, we own 1,151 of them (I have an app on my phone cataloguing the collection), and that number has been growing at a good clip. There’s no real organizing principle—it’s a diverse collection of rock, classical, jazz, soul, and even a fair bit of…

It looks like the finale for the final clubs. A Harvard faculty committee released a report last week recommending that all fraternities, sororities, and similarly “exclusionary” single-sex social organizations be phased out by the spring of 2022. The committee determined that it would not be…

Over 2,700 words would seem to be quite a superabundance of prose when you have but one point to make, especially when that point can be made in four words: Donald Trump is overweight. But the folks at Politico did just that last week, releasing a breathless piece declaring “Donald Trump is the…

Readers of The Scrapbook will recall the recent item about L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, where some locals mounted a campaign against an art gallery, claiming it represented an intrusion of gringo culture into the predominantly Hispanic community (see “White Out,” March 6, 2017). The activists…

Opinions may vary about Donald Trump Jr., but nearly all can agree that his meeting with the mysterious Natalia Veselnitskaya—and two or four or seven other people in Trump Tower last summer—has done his father no good. I plead agnosticism on this particular case, tending to conclude that it…

Cambria, Calif.

Harvard is banishing the off-campus “final clubs” that have functioned for generations as the school’s equivalent of fraternities and sororities, as Naomi Schaefer Riley reports elsewhere in this issue. The university has its reasons, most notably a contentious claim that the clubs foster a culture…

Even the most devoted Baker Street Irregular or Baker Street Babe must have trouble keeping up with the frenetic celebration of Sherlock Holmes and his creator Arthur Conan Doyle—the movies and TV series, the volumes of letters and diaries, the special editions of the canonical stories, the…

Evidently the state of American moviemaking has regressed to the point where all low- to mid-budget movies made at the periphery of the mainstream must be either triumphs or failures, as though all it takes to make an artistically significant film is merely an artistic vision. A Ghost Story,…

As somebody who makes a living, in part, by writing history, I have a confession against interest: I am not a big fan of biographies. My main problem is the constant interruption of narrative flow. Real life moves along multiple tracks simultaneously, but a biographer can only discuss one item at a…

In July 2016, Roger Federer looked like he might be calling time on his illustrious career. He was 34, old for an athlete and especially so for tennis, a game in which Federer was at his best in his mid- to late 20s. His knee gave out on him in the semifinals of Wimbledon, and he announced that he…

The Big Sick is a movie about a struggling comedian from a Pakistani family and his graduate-student waif of a girlfriend. They break up. She gets a mysterious infection and is put in a medically induced coma. He must deal with her parents, who are angry with him for the way he treated her, and his…

The latest version of the Senate GOP’s bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare was pronounced dead the evening of Monday, July 17, when Utah senator Mike Lee and Kansas senator Jerry Moran announced their opposition, bringing the number of “no” votes to at least four. In a Senate that…

Donald Trump is angry and frustrated with the federal investigation into Russian meddling in our election. In his view, the inquiry doesn’t just call into question the legitimacy of his election. Now he feels his own family is a target and under siege. Trump blames the highest-ranking members of…

On Friday, July 17, 2015, Donald Trump called me at the offices of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. He wanted to tell me that even though I’d been critical of him, and indeed though I had said I couldn’t imagine supporting him for president, he thought I’d been fairer and more open-minded about him than some…

Dreams of a Northwest Passage connecting America to Asia tantalized empire builders from the earliest days of New World exploration. But after the Napoleonic Wars, the British turned this fascination into an obsession. Sending out the fleet to explore new trade routes kept the Royal Navy busy and…

Minneapolis

The online title of an op-ed in the New York Times recently caught our attention: “Racism Is Everywhere, So Why Not Move South?” The observation that the American South isn’t the backward place frequently portrayed by our entertainment industry is not a new one. Nor are appalling expressions of…

I’m a man who uses a tea bag twice, and tells himself that the tea often tastes better on the second use of the bag. I go out of my way to buy gas for my car at a station where it is usually 20 to 35 cents a gallon less than at a much closer station. When I discover red grapes or tangerines at a…

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 December 2016, President Obama signed into law the 21st Century Cures Act, which contained a laundry list of regulatory reforms and new funding. One of the most controversial sections wasn’t about cancer, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, or drug prices. It was about Lyme disease.

Jim Acosta, senior White House correspondent for CNN, has acquired a certain renown lately for his habitual, and carefully staged, verbal confrontations in the White House press room with President Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer. You could make the argument that both Spicer and Acosta, in…

When John Coltrane died 50 years ago this July, the New York Times wrote that he “was considered one of the most gifted modern jazz musicians of this decade.” It was a reserved, careful judgment​—​was considered not was; of this decade not of all time. In the years since, the qualifiers have all…

The latest threat to the American workforce has arrived, and it’s on four hooves.

New York

As we go to press, Donald Trump is visiting Paris. His visit can’t help but remind us of a famous trip to Paris by an American over three-quarters of a century ago. That American businessman, Rick Blaine, had little in common with Donald Trump—except perhaps a propensity to brand businesses with…

Donald Trump hates the Iran nuclear deal. Brokered by the Obama administration and officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement has the stated purpose of preventing Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability. But the president believes the deal gave Iran…

In the past 15 years, no fewer than seven movies have featured the character of Peter Parker, the Queens teenager who obtains powers from a radioactive spider bite. Tobey Maguire starred in three of them from 2002 to 2007; Andrew Garfield starred in two from 2012 to 2014; and after appearing in a…

It took some time, but here we are. After decades of minimizing the menace posed by Russia—recall Barack Obama’s gibe, in response to Mitt Romney’s suggestion that Russia was our greatest geopolitical threat, that the 1980s had called and wanted their foreign policy back—American liberals are…

The president-elect’s narrow victory at the end of a volatile campaign quickly led to efforts at planning a meeting of the American and Russian leaders. Relations between the two countries had deteriorated badly, not to say spectacularly, in the last year of the previous administration, amidst…

There was nothing normal about the July 7 meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin during the G20 summit in Hamburg. The mere scheduling of this friendly chat handed Putin a PR victory, which the Kremlin-controlled media exploited gleefully. Not only was the Russian dictator not isolated or…

Josh Hawley is a rarity in politics. Elected attorney general of Missouri last November, he’s held that office for five months. Yet he’s already under extraordinary pressure from Republicans to run for the Senate in 2018.

Automobiles, pop songs, and movies form a golden braid as eternal as the one that binds Gödel, Escher, and Bach. In 1980, the writer-director Paul Schrader released American Gigolo, whose first three minutes mostly feature shots of Richard Gere driving a black Mercedes convertible along the Pacific…

Supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music, a master comparable in greatness of stature with Aristotle in philosophy and Leonardo da Vinci in art. No overstatement whatsoever attaches to this, the opening of the entry for Johann Sebastian Bach in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. So vast and…

He was, by any strict measure, not the best ever to play his game. That would be Jack Nicklaus or, maybe, Tiger Woods. Perhaps Ben Hogan. Or Bobby Jones. But you could certainly make the argument that Arnold Palmer was the greatest ever for the game. And it isn’t even close. No other golfer has…

Sizzling steaks, burgers on the grill, bratwurst with a dollop of spicy mustard—what’s not to like?

Moonshine always reminds me of the time the great P. J. O’Rourke got hold of a jug of the stuff in college and it caused him to be struck blind. It seems that O’Rourke and some of his buddies in Ohio went down into Kentucky looking for moonshine to bring back for a party that night. He drank from…

In the 1962 D-Day ensemble The Longest Day, an aging Henry Fonda plays the small but important role of General Ted Roosevelt Jr. General Roosevelt, three decades older than the troops he is leading, hides his cane in order to persuade his superiors to allow his participation in the invasion, then…

When President Obama’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities finally stepped down from his post in late May—four months after President Trump took office—he explained his reasoning to the New York Times. “I think it’s getting to be a time that’s appropriate for me to step aside,”…

The French director François Truffaut, who conducted a famous series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, said afterward that he had found him to be a “neurotic” and “fearful” and “deeply vulnerable” man, but this was precisely what had made him an “artist of anxiety.”

My wife looked at her phone and uttered an expletive. I didn’t know why. Maybe we had failed to pay a bill or maybe Cynthia had forgotten to do something related to work. We’re both high-strung, and I wished for the millionth time that stress wasn’t so contagious, that it didn’t pass so easily from…

Maybe the welfare of Indian kids should come before the interests of tribal governments. That seems to be the conclusion of the Arizona Supreme Court last week, which allowed a child born to a member of the Gila River Indian Community in 2014 to be adopted by non-native parents.

At Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the Army chief of staff, General Mark Milley, recently handed out for the first time certificates of graduation to recruits who completed basic training. Thankfully, they stopped short of giving recruits medals for learning to march and orienteering badges for…

The prolific children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952) began her most famous work, Goodnight Moon, by describing how In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a red balloon. This 1947 classic has sold 27 million copies and, along with such other bestsellers as The Runaway…

Years ago the popular sociologist Vance Packard told me that he hated to have one of his books paired with another in a review. “All a review like that ever says is, ‘This book is better than that one,’ ” he complained, “and you can’t use a quote like that in an ad.”

On May 29, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a law creating a statewide regulatory framework governing ridesharing services. The impetus for the law was clear—overriding the city of Austin’s onerous ordinances that prompted the sector’s leaders, Uber and Lyft, to stop operating in the state capital…

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise and fellow Republican lawmakers, there has understandably been a debate about the tenor of our political discourse. Is it too nasty? Does heated rhetoric incite violence? Do we all need to tone down the hyperbole?

Among Israelis and Palestin­ians, there’s little optimism about renewed American efforts to negotiate a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. In Ramallah and Jerusalem, officials, journalists, and policy analysts have watched as industrious U.S. activity in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama…

In my time at Jesus College, Oxford (1956-58), I must have passed Eric Kennington’s evocative bust of T. E. Lawrence scores of times. It stood in the college lodge, on Turl Street, and portrayed a famous alumnus who had led an early life as an archaeologist before he became a British officer and…

Joe Scarborough isn’t just a onetime congressman turned cable-TV talker, nor even just a handsome face. No, he is a rock ’n’ roller, a singer, a guitarist, and a (more than) prolific songwriter. He is—if the publicity hoo-ha accompanying his new extended-play recording is to be believed—“this…

George W. Bush has been painting for several years now, but has only recently become an artist. His first paintings, mostly of world leaders, were remarkably well received, even by an art establishment that had hardly been friendly to his administration. And yet, although those early paintings were…

With its adversarial structure and set procedural rules, the trial can be a perfect dramatic vehicle, offering the strategy and suspense of a sports event alongside the seriousness of life and death. The Big Trial subgenre of American fiction dates back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s…

Once upon a time, it didn’t matter if a clock tower in Spoleto kept time slightly differently than a tower in Assisi and far differently than one in Rome. In Why Time Flies we read about the experts in Greenwich who run data from 80 labs around the world into an algorithm that favors the more…

"In my opinion,” wrote Admiral Lord Charles Beresford to Leo Maxse, the editor of the British conservative magazine National Review, in April 1915, “Churchill is a serious danger to the State. After Antwerp, and now the Dardanelles, the Government really ought to get rid of him.” Six months later,…

Timothy S. Huebner has produced a valuable study of American constitutionalism, a study that could do enormous good if people read it. Gracefully written, it is also lengthy and scholarly, which means that readers must possess two qualities—patience and intellectual candor—to appreciate the…

In DC Confidential, New York Law School professor David Schoenbrod describes how Congress degenerated from a responsible legislature, one that took responsibility for difficult decisions, to a body continually looking to dodge blame. The book is an absolute delight. Schoenbrod begins with an…

"Fostering kids is not an easy thing to do,” Christi Dreier of Round Rock, Texas, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Dreier and her partner have fostered several children and adopted three of them. Complaining about a bill that recently passed the Texas house of representatives, she explained,…

Do we need another biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald? Since Arthur Mizener's inaugural one of 1951, there have been a number of successors including Andrew Turnbull's (1962) and, most commandingly, Matthew Bruccoli's "standard" one of 1981. This new one by David S. Brown concentrates, as the blurb…

Public radio doesn't quite know what it wants us to think about the anti-addiction medicine Vivitrol.

More than eight years after they finished the new Yankee Stadium, I still get confused when I climb out of the subway at 161st and River Ave. Whoa—where did it go? The lot that used to hold the ballpark is empty. The stadium, I forget every time I visit the Bronx, is across the street. It's like a…