Foreign Policy
Israel’s tragic blunder
The 9/11 terrorist attacks, which left more than 3,000 Americans dead, were a surprise primarily because of “failures of imagination,” the final report of the 9/11 Commission…
December 12, 2023
Foreign Policy
A miserable journey through the history of poetry with Jeremy Corbyn, Europe’s most successful racist politician
Jeremy Corbyn led Britain’s Labour Party from 2015 to 2019. Len McCluskey was, until 2022, the leader of Unite, Britain’s wealthiest and most influential trade union. Together,…
Magazine - Life & Arts
Reviewed: Becoming Ella Fitzgerald by Judith Tick
A century of jazz has produced many great singers. Few have ever represented or defined the genre quite like Ella Fitzgerald, often called the “First Lady of…
Beltway Confidential
Woke books, broke publishers
Since the early aughts, book publishers’ profits have tanked. In raw numbers, they have remained almost exactly the same: U.S. book industry revenues were $25.3 billion in…
Magazine - Life & Arts
Pointless poses as poignant in Saltburn
I was writer-director Emerald Fennell’s target audience for Saltburn: a British Gen Zer that takes great pleasure in sneering at upper-class Oxford types and loves anything vacuous.…
Magazine - Life & Arts
A youth in Nazi Germany
For years, Walter Kempowski (1929-2007), one of Germany’s most popular and most celebrated writers from the second half of the 20th century, was an unknown quantity in…
Magazine - Life & Arts
Hulu’s Obituary and the macabre politics of urban condescension
In a 1993 short story by Tobias Wolff, an obit columnist loses his job when one of his subjects turns up alive. Though Obituary, Hulu’s blacker than…
Magazine - Life & Arts
Christmas in the Guard
Many Decembers ago, I proudly served in the 834th Engineer Company, based in a small armory in the middle of Davenport, Iowa. December was great because it…
Magazine - Your Land
The frazzled and exhausted fence-sitter
A fence is not a natural place to sit, whether chain link or picket. The metaphor of “fence-sitting” has long connoted something improper, or at least unfitting.…
Magazine - Obituary
Norman Lear, 1922-2023
Norman Lear, the famed television producer of such hit ’70s sitcoms as All in the Family and The Jeffersons, as well as the founder of the left-wing…