Opinion

If I could buttonhole you for a moment, fellow citizen, to lament a general concern that may seem rather secondary amid the shrill noise of other pressing concerns. Have you also noticed it, the painful degradation of our cultural standards?  How awfully elite that sounds! How cheese-tastingly, pearl-clutchingly, museum-board precious. Especially in a time of […]

Democrats have landed a few punches on President Donald Trump. But these may help him, not them. One was his withdrawal of a memo about his order to freeze some spending. Democrats diligently frightened the public by falsely suggesting this would cut Medicaid payments and other money flows mandated by law. Oppositional bureaucrats apparently also […]

There are certain films that look incredible — on paper. Those films are often put on the “Black List,” a register of the most-loved unproduced screenplays in Hollywood as determined by a survey of Hollywood machers. (Think the Associated Press and Coaches’ college football polls, but for people who earnestly say, “Let’s do lunch.”) Flight […]

On a cold January morning on the Boulevard de Sébastopol in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris, four young African men in puffer coats are posted hoods-up at the four corners of the crossroads with the Boulevard Saint-Martin. Sentries for drug dealers, they scan the commuters emerging from the Métro and the McDonald’s, watch the alternating […]

If you live in California and want something to be done on time and within its budget, well, you should probably try doing it somewhere other than California. California has become a model of doing things as slowly and expensive as possible, and no issue so seemingly simple is immune from this. Rob Pyers, the […]

Eighty years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt uttered one of the most absurd lines in a presidential inaugural address, assuring the war-weary nation that “the great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward.” In fact, history has no sides or direction, and societies can both improve and decay. With mismanagement […]

Few TV offerings are trickier than what screenwriters call a “puzzle box” in its second season. Free of the inaugural run’s expository constraints, such a program can map exciting new territory but risks losing sight of its native shores. Characters once consigned to the background can step forward, but whether audiences will like them is […]

Many historians date the (Second) Red Scare to 75 years ago this year. On Feb. 9, 1950, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy made his first anti-communist speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, now often known as the “Enemies From Within” speech. Days before, on Jan. 26, Rep. Richard M. Nixon had reported to the House on “The […]

If the word “union” conjures up an image of a man in a hard hat reporting for duty to an assembly line, your understanding of how organized labor has evolved over the past 50 years is a little out of date. The typical union worker today, according to the latest report from the Bureau of […]

The Democratic Party and its allies in news media and the executive branch of the federal government are celebrating the White House Office of Management and Budget rescinding a memorandum intended to align federal spending with President Donald Trump’s executive orders. But the celebrations are likely to prove short-lived. Trump’s effort to halt federal spending […]

When you get older, your life naturally splits into separate social compartments. You have your family compartment and your work compartment. Your friends are segmented into separate categories: old friends, college friends, and forgot-how-we-became-friends friends. That sort of thing.  Most of us keep all of these social silos in separate group text chats. That’s the […]

The classics are having a moment. Not that they’ve ever fallen fully out of favor. But like any enduring cultural staple (Shakespeare, beards, long hairstyles) their fortunes wax and wane. Right now, they’re rising. Christopher Nolan announced that his next film, the follow-up to the blockbuster Oscar-winner Oppenheimer, will be an adaptation of the Odyssey. […]

For my entire conscious life, being a fan of the team known sequentially as the Redskins, the Washington Football Team, or the Commanders was cosmic punishment. Being a supporter of this team meant meditating on what communal sin or inner flaw one’s investment of time and emotion was paying for. Each failed season raised the […]

Every time I open X, I’m greeted by a troth of gender war slop. Every day, it’s the same reheated arguments about “body count,” also known as the number of sexual partners, or whether a coffee shop is an appropriate first date. Sometimes, if I’m especially lucky, someone will blame the world’s declining birth rate […]