Culture

Margaret Thatcher, Villain?

Featured image From the London Times: Margaret Thatcher has been listed as a “contemporary villain” alongside Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden in a display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The former Conservative prime minister is named as one of several “unpopular public figures” in the exhibition on British humour through the ages. Thatcher served as Prime Minister for nearly 12 years, the longest such tenure in British history. A casual »

Artists Try to Ban Israelis

Featured image The Venice Biennale is one of the world’s biggest art shows. The show has a national focus: Held since 1895 and considered the world’s top art event, the Venice Biennale, which starts in April, gives nations the chance to show off their best artists at national pavilions. That is the hook for pro-mass muder artists to try to boot Israel out: A petition to kick Israel out of the Venice »

How Wimpy Are Our Kids?

Featured image This picture of kids on a playground in 1912 popped up on my Instagram feed: It got me thinking: if you encouraged that sort of activity today, someone would call the police. No one would consider it safe for kids to play that way, and when it comes to children, safety–or “safety”–is the supreme value. I have been working, on and off, on a memoir about what it was like »

Edward Jay Epstein, RIP

Featured image Last week I declared Edward Jay Esptein’s Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe my book of the year. I followed up with Ed by email, asking him how he was doing and telling him I wanted to visit him in New York. Ed responded that he was “just recovering from [his] first bout of covid” and asked how I was doing. I am »

Cotton’s Commentary

Featured image Senator Tom Cotton was the guest of honor at Commentary’s annual roast this past November 12. That means he was the roastee. In the January issue editor John Podhoretz turns over the space reserved for his monthly editorial on the issue’s first page (and in this case a few more) to Senator Cotton’s Guest Commentary (“Now More Than Ever”) — his remarkable speech paying tribute to Commentary at the roast. »

There’s something about film noir

Featured image Before Eddie Muller took over the Saturday night/Sunday morning niche on TCM with his Noir Alley, I was only familiar with a few classics of film noir such as Double Indemnity (directed by Billy Wilder, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (directed by Tay Garnett, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner). Whoever loves well-made movies with a kick must love those films. Following Muller’s »

Ye is sorry: A footnote

Featured image Commenting on the “apology” tendered by the rapper formerly known as Kanye West for causing “unintended outbursts,” I quoted the text verbatim. I also drew on Christopher Kuo’s New York Times story reporting on the denial of anti-Semitism reflected in the title track of his forthcoming compact disc Vultures. On the album’s title track, the Times reports, “Ye raps that he cannot be antisemitic because he had sex with a »

Ye is sorry

Featured image I first tuned in to the anti-Semitic ravings of Kanye West or Ye in his October 2022 interview with Tucker Carlson. In the part of the interview Tucker chose to air, Jared Kushner’s promotion of peace between Israel and Arabs in the Abraham Accords was disparaged as self-interested in an evocative fashion. “I just think it was to make money,” Ye said. “Is that too heavy-handed to put on this »

Woman of the Year

Featured image I am not sure how many Taylor Swift concerts my three daughters, combined, have gone to. At least six or seven, I think, and my wife has chaperoned them at most if not all, since these were when the girls were quite a bit younger. So I have been aware of Taylor Swift for a long time. Swift is now the number one figure in global popular culture. Long an »

Why Are Young People So Frightened?

Featured image The mental health crisis among America’s young people is well documented and frequently commented upon. The New York Post reports on a recent psychological study: Gen Z perceives the world to be more dangerous than any previous generation in modern history, according to a new study. *** “Despite risk analysis research demonstrating that we live in one of the safest times ever, Gen Z experiences a disparity in risk assessment »

Deader Than a Doornail

Featured image A long time ago, in a freshman English class, my professor realized that no one in the class understood the significance of the phrase “ecce homo.” He was taken aback for a moment, and then said: “Oh well. The culture is dead.” I was shaken by that at the time, but if classical cultural was dead decades ago, modern culture, such as it was, is following rapidly in its wake. »

Want Healthy Kids? Go Right

Featured image Reality is what you already know. Data is when someone puts numbers to reality. Like, for example, this Institute for Family Studies/Gallup survey, via Breitbart: Children of conservative parents are more likely to have good mental health compared to children of liberal parents, according to a new Institute for Family Studies (IFS) and Gallup research brief published Thursday. “As it happens, being raised by liberal parents is a much larger »

A Feminist Heroine?

Featured image I wrote here and here about Susanna Gibson, a Democratic candidate for the Virginia House who, it turns out, live-streamed sex with her husband on the porn site Chaturbate, for money. One might think that this revelation would doom a legislative campaign, but no: Gibson has gone on offense, and the Associated Press reports that she is gaining support, especially among feminists: A Democratic Virginia legislative candidate whose race was »

Christmas in July

Featured image A few years back the films of Preston Sturges were released in a seven-disc boxed set that included four Sturges films on DVD for the first time. The late Terry Teachout revisited Sturges’s films in connection with his consideration of the vagaries of Sturges’s reputation in “Whatever happened to Preston Sturges,” one of his many excellent Commentary essays. The DVD collection includes Christmas in July, a movie having nothing to »

A Day at the Fair

Featured image Over the years, I have chronicled on this site my visits to the Minnesota State Fair, one of America’s great spectacles. I have photographed seed art, butter sculptures, and much more. In years gone by, I did radio broadcasts from the Fair. And for the last two years, my organization, American Experiment, has had a booth at the Fair for one Saturday. We have a prime location near the Grandstand. »

Phronkly speaking

Featured image Is it something I said? A faithful reader drew my attention to the effusions of former frequent Power Line commenter Phronk Burrito: Perhaps you’ve seen these comments by Phronk Burrito and are just overlooking them: 1. He calls commenters here and other conservatives “filth” — a word search turned up 18 instances within the last month. – You know what filth, you have this in reverse. It doesn’t matter who »

I Can Call Spirits From the Vasty Deep

Featured image The Walker Art Center is a modern art museum in Minneapolis. Alpha News reports that the Walker has just hosted a family-friendly demon summoning event: The Walker Art Center held a pagan ritual geared toward families last weekend, with a performance called “Lilit the Empathic Demon.” “Demons have a bad reputation, but maybe we’re just not very good at getting to know them,” an event description reads. The event, which »