That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, which illustrates how a president’s delay in making a Supreme Court pick can create a perilous limbo.
The soap-opera sideshow currently roiling elite media involves journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza, a formerly engaged Washington, D.C., power couple whose breakup has produced dueling, late-breaking memoirs. Nuzzi, who was infamously axed by New York magazine after she allegedly conducted a digital affair with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., resurfaced […]
President Donald Trump, following the GOP’s November off-year election shellacking and a minor but sustained dip in his approval ratings, has been quick to reprioritize the cost-of-living conundrum. It’s a matter that originally delivered him a second term, after former President Joe Biden‘s four years in office. “The Biden administration started the affordability crisis,” Trump […]
Bare feet. Bad breath. Boisterous conversations and body odor. When you fly, you run the risk of a memorable experience, to say the least. And it’s not just thanks to your close proximity to other passengers. We’re all getting ruder, too. The Transportation Department reports that “since 2019, the [Federal Aviation Administration] has seen a […]
From Presidents Franklin Roosevelt through John F. Kennedy, the Democratic Party projected patriotic confidence, fully comfortable celebrating America’s greatness alongside Republicans. But around 2014, coinciding with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, that began to change. Democrats now routinely tell pollsters they are not proud of their country and that other nations are […]
In June, after Zohran Mamdani somehow bulldozed through the New York Democratic mayoral primary and seized the nomination, I was walking through my neighborhood — I live just north of Manhattan — when a friend saw me and deadpanned: “So when Mayor Mamdani makes the buses free, can we ride them on Shabbos?” This was classic […]
The Democrats’ latest con job is blaming President Donald Trump for former President Joe Biden’s legacy inflation and claiming that Zohran Mamdani-style socialism will solve the “affordability problem” rather than make it far worse. If the Ocasio-Cortez-Sanders-Jeffries crowd gets away with this propaganda, the next “red wave” to wash over America will be a Marxist-controlled Congress […]
KYIV, Ukraine — Nobody can agree on an acceptable peace in Ukraine. Should Russia be allowed to keep the lands it took by force? Should Ukraine be allowed to join NATO? What sort of security guarantee is sufficient? What sort is reasonable? Deeper questions undergird these. What sort of future is possible for Ukraine? And […]
An American friend described modern Britain to me as “a health service with a nuclear deterrent.” This is unfair. Modern Britain is a health service with a nuclear deterrent, and also the BBC. President Donald Trump‘s threat to sue Britain’s state broadcaster for $1 billion for its “reckless disregard for the truth” could, if carried out, mean […]
The first time Nayara Andrejczyk fired a gun, she fell in love. It was a revolver, handed to her at a Pennsylvania range after years of quiet fascination — years spent in Brazil, where guns were the domain of criminals, police, or politicians, often overlapping categories. “It was like the forbidden fruit,” she said. “In […]
In all the words that have been devoted to the films of Stanley Kubrick, I do not know whether any writer has invoked Gustave Flaubert’s famous injunction to “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Yet no 20th-century artist, writer, filmmaker, composer, or otherwise, […]
A while back, I told you about my friend David Pingenot, who, in the late 1960s, left his small Iowa farm town seeking a wider view of the world by enlisting in the Navy. I talked to him again recently, and he laughed even before he started telling me this story. He told me, “This […]
For Americans of a certain age and income bracket, Europe is synonymous with Rick Steves, a one-man travel impresario whose guidebooks and tour groups have introduced the continent to thousands of newcomers. Before he became his own brand, Steves was just another scruffy backpacker abroad, an experience he recounts in On the Hippie Trail, a […]
Books on the politics of literary works can go wrong in at least two ways: They can reduce the significance of a literary work to the politics of its author or time (and great works are always about more than mere politics), or they can read today’s politics back into the original work, saddling authors […]
Peter Matthiessen was a towering figure in 20th-century American letters. He was a naturalist, environmentalist, Zen Buddhist priest, teacher, world traveler, CIA agent, and a mystic. He was one of the first writers to be concerned about the extinction of animal species, the care of the environment, and man’s exploitation of indigenous people. His efforts […]
