The Scrapbook

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.

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…

Is anyone fit to host the Oscars?

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…

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…

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…

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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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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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…

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.

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…

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:

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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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…

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.

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…

We suspect some of our readers are pretty well tired of reading about the Kavanaugh confirmation fight. So are we. Allow us to press your patience one more time. This week a friend of The Scrapbook passed along a nearly 20-year-old article from the New York Times, and we thought perhaps our readers…

The work of ruining sports continues apace. The Atlantic last week announced the hiring of Jemele Hill, a “wonderfully talented journalist who is famous for her acute commentary, fearless writing and encyclopedic knowledge of sports,” the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, said in a press…

For as long as The Scrapbook can remember, we’ve watched impressive Republicans run for the Senate in New Jersey and flop. No Republican has won a Senate seat in the Garden State since Clifford Case was re-elected in 1972.

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…

We’ve been to some electrifying concerts in our day, but The Scrapbook is holding out little hope for a 13-city tour the entertainment firm Live Nation announced this week: “An Evening with President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

As if bureaucracies weren’t complicated enough. The New York Times reports that beginning next year, New York City will give people the option of identifying themselves on their birth certificates not only as “male” or “female,” but also as “X.” New Yorkers such as Charlie Arrowood (who, we are…

French politician Marine Le Pen is a great fan of Vladimir Putin, a social progressive, and leader of a political party that from time to time flirts with the anti-Semitic right—she’s not a woman with whom we can ordinarily sympathize. Still, she has a talent for stirring European elites in ways…

A barroom tussle? Drinking beer on a weeknight? That’s nothing. How about the time the 19-year-old wrote a theater review in which he lamented the cast of “perma-smile actresses whose only qualifications seem to be their phenomenally large breasts and tight buttocks.” What sort of vile misogynistic…

Many news organizations have disgraced themselves over these last few weeks in the unlovely quest for peccadillos in Brett Kavanaugh’s youth, but the New York Times has outshone the rest. A story on October 2 brought us finally to the point of self-parody. The lede was breathtaking in its…

Ralph Taylor, owner of the Orion Insurance Group in Lynnwood, Washington, is decidedly white. Several years ago, though, he took a DNA ancestry test that determined he was only 90 percent Caucasian. He was also, according to the ancestry test, 6 percent “indigenous American” and 4 percent…

Given our inveterate mocking of the New York Times, we’d be remiss if we didn’t draw attention to an incisive op-ed published in the paper’s September 20 edition by the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins. The headline: “The Liberalism of the Religious Right.”

Readers of The Scrapbook will remember New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, author of some of the most widely praised and dumbest columns ever written. Quindlen stepped down from the Times in 1995 in order to pursue a career as a writer of sentimental novels, and it has to be said she’s done…

Officials in Fairfax County, Va., recently wondered why so few college students take advantage of the county’s absentee ballot program, so they did what government officials normally do when they encounter a perplexing question: They convened a “focus group.” That’s a fancy-sounding way of saying:…

The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.” So thundered a Washington Post report on August 29. There’s just one problem: It isn’t…

Robert Francis O’Rourke is running against Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. You may know the challenger better by the name Beto O’Rourke. The Scrapbook is generally reluctant to bring up the names and nicknames of public figures (after what Idaho senator Mike Crapo must have endured in middle school, he’ll…

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, aka the richest guy alive, recently announced plans to donate $2 billion to create a network of preschools. “The child will be the customer,” says Bezos. Maybe we’re old-fashioned, but the idea of pupils as “customers” doesn’t lead us to believe that Bezos has a firm…

On Tuesday, September 11, as Hurricane Florence lumbered through the Atlantic toward the Carolinas, we received a text from a Weekly Standard colleague asking how long it would take for the hurricane to become political. Somebody would blame Trump or the GOP for something—it was just a matter of…

The Scrapbook has never been to South Yorkshire, England, but we are eager to go. The place is evidently so free of crime that the police have nothing to do but make sure people aren’t jerks to each other. The South Yorkshire Police recently advised residents on the subject of “hate crimes”: “In…

Last week, Barack Obama finally did what Democratic activists had been desperately hoping he would do—he reproached his successor ahead of the midterm election. It was a long, discursive oration, as Obama’s orations usually are, and it contained lots of impromptu gibes and derisive harrumphs that…

Antiquarian-minded visitors to Georgetown may have heard of the Halcyon House, a mansion on Prospect Street. The majestic Federal-style structure was built in the 1780s by Benjamin Stoddert, the first secretary of the Navy, and dramatically expanded in the 1900s by Albert Clemens, the nephew of…

Antiquarian-minded visitors to Georgetown may have heard of the Halcyon House, a mansion on Prospect Street. The majestic Federal-style structure was built in the 1780s by Benjamin Stoddert, the first secretary of the Navy, and dramatically expanded in the 1900s by Albert Clemens, the nephew of…

The spectacle of protesters jumping out of their chairs at regular intervals to shout incoherent slogans during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings did not lend itself to the view that those who oppose the judge’s confirmation are especially clearheaded in their beliefs. Their antics, if we may speak…

In our latter years The Scrapbook has become rather a sucker for books about Ronald Reagan. We own a couple of shelves of them and admit to enjoying even the mediocre ones, so highly do we esteem the modern era’s greatest president.

On August 30, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an unsigned editorial criticizing an editorial the same paper ran a century before. The offending piece: “Jass and Jassism,” a denunciation of jazz music published in 1918. “Why is the jass music, and, therefore, the jass band?” New Orleans’s paper…

We live in an age of hyper-trivial faux-controversies, almost all of them generated (if we speak just a little uncharitably) by overeducated progressives and left-wing politicos. If you follow politics on Twitter, you’ll encounter so many of these moronic spats that you may be tempted to despair of…

Virginia GOP Senate nominee Corey Stewart is one of Donald Trump’s most consistent and fervent supporters. The native Minnesotan is known for his sympathy for conspiracy theories and for his flirtations with the “alt right.” Conservatives in Virginia have watched with amazement as Stewart cheers…

Sally Rooney is a young Marxist novelist from Ireland, the author of Conversations with Friends, a celebrated debut novel. She has just published a second novel, Normal People, and already it’s a bestseller. Both are being adapted for the big screen. Rooney is among the most successful millennial…

Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, has signed a deal with Nike in which he will appear in some of the company’s “Just Do It” advertisements. Kaepernick of course pioneered the practice of protesting racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem. The…

This spring, not long after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, the Department of Education released a report showing that during the 2015-2016 school year there were an astounding 240 school shootings. The figure has been repeated endlessly by gun control activists and…

On the topic of studies and premature deaths, a new report from the British medical journal the Lancet says that no amount of alcohol is safe for your overall health. Worldwide, alcohol increases the risk of premature death for both men and women and is responsible for a full tenth of all deaths.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist neophyte who won a New York Democratic congressional primary in June, is young and attractive and has a compelling personal story. She likes to remind the public of her working-class roots, and rightly so. “The restaurant I used to work at is closing its…

Hearings on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh are set to begin in early September, so expect several rounds of breathless revelations about the man’s past. Consider an AP story this week headlined “At Yale, Kavanaugh Stayed Out of Debates at a Time of Many.” The story’s lead: “It was the 1980s…

Great news for lovers of cardboard animals. Boxes of Nabisco animal crackers will no longer feature images of cartoon animals in circus cages. Beginning this week, the animals will appear roaming free: The zebra, elephant, lion, giraffe, and gorilla have escaped their cages and are enjoying…

In the runup to the passage of last year’s tax reform bill, readers may recall, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers predicted that 10,000 people would die every year as a direct result of the bill’s passage. He had in mind the bill’s provision repealing the individual insurance mandate…

The death of Sir Vidia Naipaul on August 11 will generate plenty of retrospective monographs and essays, most of them rightly laudatory, some of them less so. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, the descendant of Indian immigrants. In his teens he won a government scholarship to study abroad, and he…

The Scrapbook picks on the New York Times quite a lot. Maybe too much. But it’s hard not to. We so often find fatuous and preposterous material that we simply cannot help passing it along to our readers. One such item appeared in the August 16 edition of the paper—or so we thought. Headlined…

The young poets who stand out have helped make race and sexuality and gender the red-hot centers of current poetry, and they push past as many boundaries as they can. They strain to think anew about selfhood and group membership. Drawing on eclectic traditions, they mine the complexity latent in…

The Scrapbook spent its August break last week tuning out the news and turning to a pile of books we’ve been meaning to read—from the old (Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South and Gringos, which we enthusiastically and unreservedly recommend) to the new, our friend Irwin Stelzer’s fascinating peek…

The French have made lots of important contributions to America. No one denies this. The Statue of Liberty. Lafayette. Tony Parker. French fries—though these were possibly ripped off from Belgium.

A July 27 game between the Houston Astros and the Texas Rangers featured a few minutes of pointless delight. Chris White, a Marine veteran, made the unusual decision to remove his trousers and shirt, brandish his Stars-and-Stripes-themed underwear—silkies is the military term—and sprint across the…

Is The Scrapbook the only one who’s grown weary of the word team used where it doesn’t belong—outside the world of sports? For a year or two after Olympic teams were called Team USA or Team France, it was cute to refer to your company or office as “team” this or that. Then politicians got in on the…

In Europe and North America, museums just can’t win. It takes wealthy people and large corporations to keep them operating, but left-wing artists and intellectuals don’t like wealthy people and large companies.

Election season is upon us, and you know what that means—idiotic trickery dreamed up by campaign hacks and political consultants.

The fact-checking industry has grown tremendously in recent years, and mostly for good reason. Half-truths, outrageous rumors, and outright fabrications are common enough without the Internet. They are ubiquitous online. When fact-checking is well done (by, for instance, Glenn Kessler at the…

Washington is full of people who make self-assured pronouncements about what will happen next week or next year. We often caution against this tendency, thinking as we do of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s argument to his aides for picking the unscrupulous Lyndon Johnson as his running…

In early July, the Nation magazine published a 14-line poem, “How-To,” by Anders Carlson-Wee. The Scrapbook holds rather old-school opinions on the matter of poetic form, and we found it hard to scan “How-To.” Still, the poem’s language is incisive, it has a distinctive rhythm, and it ends with a…

Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, now much in the news as the president’s legal counsel, recently gained attention (as if he needed more) by tweeting a single word: You

Another prolix online headline recently caught our attention, this one at the Fix, the Washington Post’s popular politics blog: “This may be the biggest shoe to drop from the Trump-Michael Cohen tape.” The piece argued that the subpoena of Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg is likely an…

The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is proving a hard thing for liberals and progressives to counter. The man’s qualifications are nearly unparalleled; he is highly regarded by judges and law professors at elite institutions; and so far the efforts to find unflattering…

What do most people do when they see a naked or nearly naked person in public? Most probably experience a moment of shock, point and laugh, call the police, or all of the above. Ask Eric Stagno. After seeing him parade around naked in a Planet Fitness gym doing “yoga-like” exercises, alarmed gym…

Rob Rogers, cartoonist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for 25 years, was recently fired. Rogers was known for drawing acerbically satirical cartoons about Donald Trump. It follows, at least in the minds of the #resistance, that he was fired because he was anti-Trump. The Scrapbook knows about this…

One of the annoyances of modern life is the way in which highly technical studies in medical journals are reported in the media as though their practical relevance were immediate. Journalists who don’t grasp the nuances of the study’s conclusions and qualifications report that white wine may cause…

The left-wing organization MoveOn subjected itself to ridicule this week by posting a message to its social media accounts: “Low wages are violence. Knowingly letting people suffer is violence. It must end.” The attached graphic had to do with the minimum wage, which the staff at MoveOn in their…

Daily Show host Trevor Noah has expressed the novel view that France’s recent victory in the World Cup is an “African victory,” since most of the players on the team are of African descent. This didn’t go over well with the French ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, who wrote a terse…

“‘Having a vagina doesn’t make a woman,’ she said in an interview. ‘Even if many people don’t want to see me as a woman . . .’ ” (“Aiming for Miss Universe, and Transgender Rights,” New York Times, July 14).

By historical standards, security and quality of life in 21st-century America are remarkably high. We may be on a slow decline, but the journey to the bottom is a very long one. And despite daily predictions of doom, Donald Trump has yet to turn the country into a hellscape where the few citizens…

For more than a year and a half now, hundreds of intellectuals and historians and commentators have written books and articles and delivered lectures on the origins and meaning of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. A foreign observer could be forgiven for thinking every writer on politics and culture in…

The Scrapbook is now at the middle station of life, and for as long as we can remember, bright people have been devising clever ways to get kids to read books. “Educational” television programs that encourage reading, ad campaigns promoting book-reading, kids’ books full of flatulent humor, book…

An op-ed in the New York Times on July 14 caught our attention: “We Pick a Party, Then a Church.” The author, Michele Margolis, an assistant professor of political science at Penn, contends that the common assumption about religious and political affiliations in America—that party affiliations are…

"How will you cover 2018 without the repeat of the 2016 errors and continue on with what I have read as really strong journalism since 2017? . . .

It’s July. The news tends to be less momentous than at other times. The Scrapbook understands that. But the media’s sudden fixation on individual acts of “protest” has us wishing for more stories about kids giving back to the community and celebrities saying dumb things.

One of the tragedies of American life, as we’ve had occasion to lament in these pages before, is the slow decline of local journalism. The Internet and social media seem to meet many people’s need to stay connected to their communities, news organizations are widely reviled by a polarized public,…

The line between politics and entertainment grows blurrier with each passing hour. Consider: As the battle over President Trump’s second Supreme Court nomination began to take shape, millions of conservatives in search of expert analysis tuned into . . . Tomi Lahren.

With the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy and nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to take his place, liberal academics and commentators are panicked, so sure are they that a more conservative Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. Believing as we do that Roe was a moral and constitutional…

In this month’s GQ magazine is a long essay we knew we shouldn’t read, but we couldn’t help ourselves: “Jimmy Carter for Higher Office in ’18,” by Michael Paterniti.

We were saddened this week to learn of the death of Donald Hall, one of the great formalist poets to arise in the second half of the 20th century. Hall wrote scores of works. He was a talented playwright, a superb memoirist, and an omnicompetent anthologist.

“And thanks to my groomer and stylist, Marvin ‘Marv the Barb’ Church, the world’s best barber, and Ms. Carolyn Brown, who squires me in a marvelous manner. I’m grateful to the remarkable group of artists and activists who sat for interviews for this book, including Harry Belafonte (thanks for the…

Sexism, however we define it, is still a problem. And we reckon it always will be, in a fallen world. Still, a great variety of metrics show that women in America are now doing better than men in an impressive range of areas, from educational achievement to career success. But we’ve tended to…

Readers of the Wall Street Journal’s Review section may remember an explosive essay that ran in its pages in 2011: “Darkness Too Visible,” by the paper’s children’s books columnist, Meghan Cox Gurdon. In that essay, Gurdon surveyed an array of popular books published in what’s called the YA…

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Few heroes of the past can escape the censure of today’s bigotry police. Every week, it seems, brings news that some heretofore revered figure said or wrote something we enlightened postmoderns consider untoward, obliging us to qualify any subsequent expressions of admiration.

In April, PBS announced that it will reboot Firing Line, the long-running public affairs television program hosted by William F. Buckley. The new show will be hosted by the libertarian-conservative commentator Margaret Hoover. We wish the endeavor well, although we wonder why Firing Line with…

The World Cup is well underway in Russia, and that country’s authorities have given “assurances” to visiting nations that their fans will be safe from what in Britain are termed “football hooligans.” The Russians have a “blacklist” of known hooligans, according to the BBC, and can assure foreign…

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Like hundreds of other media outlets, Vox.com sent reporters to cover President Donald Trump’s summit with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore. On June 13, Vox’s foreign editor Yochi Dreazen wrote a piece headlined, “The big winner of the Trump-Kim summit? China.” Dreazen’s analysis was…

Readers who’ve spent time before city or county councils may know how lawless these bodies can sometimes be. Many hold “public” meetings without announcing the time or place, disregard laws on raising taxes and the appropriation of public money, hide the details of procurement contracts and…

While much of America learned this week that Washington, D.C., has a professional hockey team, The Scrapbook was reminded that San Diego still has a Major League Baseball team. At the Braves-Padres game at Petco Park, caught on video that quickly became social-media famous, Braves outfielder Ender…

There was gnashing of teeth last week when it emerged that the Trump administration had seized the emails and phone records of New York Times national security reporter Ali Watkins in an investigation of former Senate Intelligence Committee aide James A. Wolfe. Wolfe had been leaking like a busted…

Far be it from The Scrapbook to judge the philanthropic impulses of the extremely wealthy, but the recent announcement of a $20 million gift to the City University of New York struck us as a bit rich. The money, which will fund the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, was the gift of Craig Newmark,…

We’ve read some dumb and substandard political pieces in our day—we may even have generated some—but a June 10 piece in the Washington Post is a strong contender for Dumbest Op-Ed Ever Written. The article, by Suzanna Danuta Walters—according to her byline a “professor of sociology and director of…

Things have gotten bad in California. So bad, in fact, as the New York Times recently reported, that some not insignificant number of San Franciscans are actually thinking of . . . voting Republican. The streets are filthy, crime is on the uptick, and government services are in decline. Add to that…

Any assessment of Anthony Bourdain’s life, his suicide notwithstanding, is likely to be tinged with jealousy. We suppose someone had to get paid to be a world traveler and bon vivant, but did Bourdain have to be so good at it? At a minimum, few people have a constitution that can alternately…

In March The Scrapbook introduced readers to the Boxer Prize—a very special literary award given to famous authors, typically celebrity or politician authors, whose fictional heroes bear a striking resemblance to their creators. We call it the Boxer Prize in recognition of former California senator…

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When we saw the headline in the New York Times—“Howard Schultz to Step Down as Starbucks Executive Chairman”—we mistakenly assumed Schultz’s decision to retire had something to do with the recent ruckus over racism. In mid-April, remember, a Starbucks franchise in Philadelphia was accused of racial…

"I was assigned female at birth, but as I got older I felt less and less feminine. I am not someone who always knew I was transgender. I knew it only when the body I loved—my androgynous child’s body—turned into something unmistakably female. I got breasts. And suddenly . . . ” (“When Neither Male…

It’s difficult to quantify how upset progressive America was in the wake of Donald Trump’s winning the presidential election, but one reliable measure of that anguish is $7.3 million. That’s how much money 161,000 Americans donated to the Green party presidential candidate after she promised to…

The Scrapbook has complained at least once in recent days about center-left news media using the terms “the right” and “conservatives” in highly tendentious ways.

Since the invention of videotape, law enforcement across the developed world has fallen prey to the same folly: If you install enough security cameras, criminals won’t do bad things because they’ll know the cops are watching. The trouble with that view is that it ain’t so, as anybody who’s spent…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who famously and without evidence claimed Native American ancestry and thus minority status in her pre-Senate days—and whom Donald Trump still calls “Pocahontas”—now wants badly to put the whole controversy to rest. Who wouldn’t? Our advice would be to ignore the past and…

Social media are full of people who, under the impression that their political fulminations are witty, spend much of their days collecting likes and retweets from the hordes of barking-seal partisans. And so it was that Yvonne Mason, a retired English teacher in South Carolina, wrote a letter…

The Scrapbook remembers the days before social media and the Internet, and they weren’t marked by civility and well-informed dialogue. Even so, when someone in the pre-Internet era responded in print to an article or essay, he or she had usually read the article. Nowadays you just read the…

Like Paul Newman’s chain gang in Cool Hand Luke, Starbucks is suffering from a failure to communicate. First, of course, was the Philadelphia branch manager who had two African-American men arrested on the grounds they were loitering (they weren’t). Then, in a burst of enthusiasm and contrition,…

Liberals and progressives sometimes complain that Republicans win more elections, and they do. But cheer up, lefties—you’ve got a lock on the nation’s elite colleges. The thought occurred to us when we read through Homogeneous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty, a new…

Hillary Clinton seems to have made her choice of post-political career: incessant unfunny whining. Consider her address to Yale University’s graduating class of 2018.

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A recent New York Times piece took aim at Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (and occasional TWS contributor). A lot of Beltway policymakers are upset at Dubowitz, mainly for his scathing criticisms of the Iran nuclear deal over the last several years but also for the…

Hollywood is notorious for taking certain ideas to unpleasant extremes: CGI in Star Wars movies, saccharine romantic comedy tropes, the Fast and Furious franchise. But in our current #MeToo moment, activists intent on remaking the world in a more female-friendly image have gone beyond outing…

Longtime readers of the Washington Post, among whom The Scrapbook numbers itself, will be familiar with the Post’s quaint custom of observing anniversaries and holidays with what might be called counterintuitive stories. For example, on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (2,403…

Last month, after two men were asked to leave a Philadelphia Starbucks on the grounds that they were loitering, the Starbucks Corporation announced that it would close more than 8,000 stores for a day in order to impose “unconscious bias training” on its employees. (Readers contemplating the wisdom…

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The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the organization that licenses EU television broadcasts and hosts the annual Eurovision Song Contest, has terminated its contract with a Chinese broadcasting company. The company, Mango TV, cut one of the songs from the contest’s broadcast—the gay-themed…

What will Jeff Bezos do with his fortune? The Amazon chief has amassed around $130 billion, and there’s really no practical way to spend more than a fraction of it. “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” Bezos said…

This week we learned, via BuzzFeed, about a new trend in weddings: bouncy castles. A wedding company has opened an initially successful line of wedding-themed inflatable trampolines. Photos depict shoeless groomsmen and bridesmaids bouncing and giggling like first-graders at a birthday bash.

We learned this week from the Harvard Business Review of a study alleging that mild intoxication can enhance “creative thinking.” “You often hear of great writers, artists, and composers who claim that alcohol enhanced their creativity, or people who say their ideas are better after a few drinks,”…

Once Utah high-schooler Keziah Daum tweeted several charming pictures of herself on prom night, it was just a matter of time until the grievance and outrage industry found out about it. When it did find out it dealt with her in the usual way. Miss Daum’s offense? Her outfit: a high-necked,…

From the London Daily Telegraph: Schools in Britain are removing their analogue clocks from examination halls because students can’t read them. “Teachers are now installing digital devices after pupils sitting their GCSE and A-level exams complained that they were struggling to read the correct…

The New York Post reports that Rosie O’Donnell, the former actress and talk show host who’s now best known for erratic behavior, has been breaking the law. It seems that she’s given a total of $5,400 over the legal limit to five different Democratic congressional candidates. Federal Election…

Every once in a while, as you work your dreary way through the Washington Post, a strange thing happens: You notice something! It can be refreshing but also, just as often, puzzling.

A tip of The Scrapbook homburg to our friend Michael Ramirez, whose dazzling cartoons grace this section every week. Michael, a two-time Pulitzer winner, has added to his laurels by winning first place in the National Headliner Awards contest this year for editorial cartoons. We’re very proud of…

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On April 26, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, threatened to organize protests against President Trump on Twitter: “If he comes to London, President Trump will experience an open and diverse city that has always chosen unity over division and hope over fear.” He’ll also see, the mayor boasted, that…

Kids used to goof off by playing video games instead of doing their homework. Today, Junior might want to hone those gaming skills—some colleges are now trying to recruit “athletes” in what are euphemistically called “e-sports.”

Big news from the publishing world. As print journals search for ways to adapt to evolving attitudes and new technologies, the New York Times Magazine has taken a bold step. The Times Magazine has been edited since 2014 by Jake Silverstein, formerly editor of the Texas Monthly, who upon joining the…

Break into journalism’s top tier with the Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowship, which provides nine months’ experience with the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section in New York, beginning this fall. Fellows receive pay of $5,000 per month through our good friends at the Fund for American Studies. To…

"Rachel Weisz is glowing. That’s not unusual. I’ve interviewed her before and seen her at movie and theater parties, and she’s always glowing. I know that if you ask the hazel-eyed, raven-haired 48-year-old how she gets more beautiful every year, defying Hollywood’s propensity to push actresses in…

The above-named Alfie Evans was the subject of a curious work of analysis in the Washington Post on April 28. The headline: “How Alfie Evans Became the Latest Weapon in the Conservative Attack on Universal Health Care.” The piece, by Ben Zdencanovic, purports to explain that conservatives have long…

It wasn’t with shock but with relief that The Scrapbook greeted the news that a Washington tradition is coming to an end: “After nearly 15 years, The Hill is bidding a beautiful bye-bye to its annual 50 Most Beautiful list.”

Journalists in the mainstream media often sound as though they have no idea why anybody would entertain skepticism about the news media. The term “media bias” is, to them, a ruse. Complaints about “fake news” are evidence of stupidity or delusion.

"When the audience of more than 300 began to clap and howl, Madeleine K. Albright entered the Georgetown University auditorium. She waved. She winked. The clapping grew louder, especially from young women in the room. They smiled giddily, checked to make sure their phones were on silent and opened…

Readers may remember Fearless Girl, the 50-inch-tall bronze statue of an intrepid young girl, placed in front of the famous Charging Bull sculpture in Lower Manhattan. The girl, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced, will be moved to a new location nearby—in front of the New York…

Most Americans can name only one local politician from Washington, D.C., and that happens to be the city’s “mayor for life” Marion Barry, famously busted in 1990 for smoking crack in an FBI sting operation (“bitch set me up!”). In March, the city unveiled a bronze statue to Barry on Pennsylvania…

The Pulitzer Prize recipients were announced on April 16, and there were few surprises. The awards for journalism were unobjectionable (although we wonder how many more Pulitzers the New York Times and Washington Post really need). It was the Pulitzer for music that grabbed the most attention: It…

It occurs to us that we don’t read much anymore about outlaw motorcycle gangs. A few decades ago, when The Scrapbook was young, movies and television and newspapers teemed with fearful reports about the Hells Angels, the Outlaws, and the Pagans. We wonder what became of the original “1 percenters.”…

"Let’s just cut to the chase: There’s not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician this year, or any year soon, than Beyoncé’s headlining set at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on Saturday night. It was rich with history,…

Since the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s and the idealization of rebellion for its own sake, it’s been awfully hard for young people to rebel. How are you supposed to be a rebel or a maverick when everybody else is one too? The Scrapbook solved this problem, as a university student on a…

If the Hells Angels have softened somewhat, others are toughening up—and we bless them for it. A school district in Erie, Pennsylvania, faced with the increasing frequency of school shootings, has passed out baseball bats to its teachers. That strikes us as a neat compromise between, on the one…

Once upon a time, before the advent of Google and WebMD, medical information was dispensed by medical professionals in doctor’s offices. These were dark times, at least if you believe fans of the infamous “women’s health bible,” Our Bodies, Ourselves.

It’s the defining mark of left-liberal crime policy: Deal mainly with the tools, not the people who use them. Hence American liberals’ obsession with gun control. Of course, there are more guns than people in the United States—upwards of 300 million, in fact—and so any attempt to regulate their…

Didn’t you hear? The libertarian billionaire Charles Koch recently declared his support for the Communist leader of China over the leader of his own country! We learned it from a tweet by Lou Dobbs: “Outrageous Oligarch: Billionaire Charles Koch Admits He’s Working for China instead of America, for…

The Scrapbook is old enough to remember when socialism was popular the first time. It went out of fashion when even liberal intellectuals noticed that it produced only misery wherever it was tried, but now it’s popular again. An avowed socialist captured the hearts of young voters in 2016 (and…

A new book recently caught our attention: It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics by David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University in Chicago. We weren't aware that Democrats needed the advice of the title, having…

On March 29, California superior court judge Elihu Berle ruled that most coffee sold in the Golden State will have to bear a warning label stating that it may increase the likelihood of cancer. Roasted coffee contains traces of the carcinogen acrylamide, and so Californians, if the ruling stands,…

To the editor:

"Long before Fun Home (2006)—perhaps the greatest, most consequential graphic memoir since Art Spiegelman's Maus—Alison Bechdel published a comic strip following the entanglements of a group of queer women living in the Midwest. The comics were funny, sexy and very frank—"half op-ed column and half…

In the era of gesture politics, when political discourse consists of an endless sequence of symbolic protests and counterprotests, there are few winners. The shouting and sign-waving protesters look bitter and sanctimonious, the objects of their disgust are obliged to defend themselves against…

On March 18, the top-ranked Amazon item was a brand-new children’s book titled A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo. The book is credited to the late-night TV host John Oliver’s show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, so we assume Oliver is the author. It’s a “children’s picture book about a Very…

Many young people in the wealthy nations of Europe and North America, having been taught by their elders to equate morality with risk-free virtue-signaling, have plenty of strong opinions about injustice and oppression, but the will to do anything about it often seems lacking.

In 2005, as readers may remember, Democratic senator Barbara Boxer published a novel, A Time to Run. The book was a flop, largely owing to its confusing plot, sick-makingly sentimental prose, and the obviously self-serving tone of the whole story. The story’s protagonist, Ellen Fischer, is an…

"While many transgender artists have achieved significant success in music, including Teddy Geiger (who has written for One Direction and James Blunt) and Sophie (a recording artist who has produced songs for Madonna and Vince Staples), Ms. Petras’s character falls closer than any before her to…

When companies change their names, it often means that the business wants to shed an old, negative image and replace it with something more in tune with modern sensibilities. Hence Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, gave itself the much less tobacco-y name Altria, and Kentucky Fried Chicken’s new,…

What is it about former Democratic presidents that they can’t leave the arena? They leave, then come back, then go quiet for a while, and just when you think you’ve gotten rid of them they spring back into the headlines again. Jimmy Carter set the example here. For nearly four decades the man’s…

New from the publishing industry: Crimson Romance, Simon & Schuster’s “diverse romance” imprint, recently announced on Twitter that it will close. The Book Riot blog reports: “The Ripped Bodice, a Los Angeles romance bookstore whose owners recently published a report on the state of diversity in…

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Temple University professor of psychology Laurence Steinberg argues that “the federal voting age in the United States should be lowered from 18 to 16.” The bulk of Steinberg’s piece is devoted to explaining why teenagers aren’t the empty-headed narcissistic…

"It's easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this…

From Bryan Curtis, editor-at-large of the sports website The Ringer, The Scrapbook learned of an unusual passage in the acknowledgments section of William Vollmann’s 2009 book Imperial. In addition to the litany of people who were helpful came this: “The San Diego County Water Authority was rudely…

The Scrapbook has plenty of prejudices but no official position, pro or con, on tattoos. We sometimes wonder if their explosive popularity over the last two decades evinces the angst of a declining middle class, but the appearance of tattoos on one’s skin doesn’t signify the quality of one’s…

The question of who deserves an obituary has long vexed editors at newspapers and magazines. Should they limit themselves to the most well-known public figures or dig deep into the less well-known but often fascinating lives of the hoi polloi? Do you cover the lives of the notoriously awful as well…

The Washington Post recently reported a “sharp reversal” in the expected graduation rates for Washington, D.C., public schools after heading upwards in recent years. Only “42 percent of seniors attending traditional public schools are on track to graduate.” What happened? Mainly, it seems,…

The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have sparked a major reconsideration of appropriate behavior between the sexes, both inside the workplace and outside of it. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before tech entrepreneurs, the geniuses who brought you Soylent food substitute and the Yelp-for-people…

It shouldn’t be either newsworthy or controversial to discover that college students are learning about the work of Aristophanes, studying the Peloponnesian War, or analyzing Aristotelian notions of happiness. But this is 2018, when college administrators often seem more focused on the subtle…

Washington, D.C., should have listened to Marion Barry. The late four-time mayor of the nation’s capital may have made problematic lifestyle choices—even if the you-know-what did set him up—but give him this: He was 100 percent correct about the city’s streetcar boondoggle.

Publishers have long supported specialty imprints that feature particular kinds of books: There are imprints that promote conservative books, such as Sentinel at Penguin Random House and Threshold at Simon & Schuster, and imprints that promote genres like romance (Flirt at Random House) and cooking…

For a few weeks now, Nashville mayor Megan Barry has been embroiled in quite the sex scandal. It seems Barry has been engaged in an affair with the police sergeant who was the head of her security detail. (Both are married.) For an added layer of unseemliness, Barry seems to have taken a lot of…

By acclamation the Art Institute of Chicago is already one of the great museums of the world, but earlier this month it laid hands on a work that its director called a “transformative acquisition.” The work is by the absurdist painter-provocateur-conman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The New York…

A few months ago in these pages, our Ethan Epstein rhapsodized about his alma mater, Reed College (“My Old School,” November 10). He praised its rigorous academics and one particular course, the decades-old mandatory freshman humanities class that covers ancient Greece, Rome, and the Bible. Because…

The Scrapbook takes a fairly dim view of the field known as “economic development.” We’re not opposed to governments facilitating economic growth when they can, but there are very few things government can do, proactively, to spur economic activity—though we can think of many, many things…

Our collective descent into ignorance is alarming enough on its own, but when you combine it with a reinvigorated sense of political correctness, the result is a level of outrage that seems to neatly correlate with general stupidity. And so it was when Jeff Sessions spoke to the National Sheriffs’…