An air of triumph surrounded D.C. Council member Trayon White after a judge declared a mistrial Monday in his federal bribery case, while some of his council colleagues have spoken up about the ethics violations revealed during his legal saga.
After a 2023-2024 school year that can only be described as an “annus horribilis,” Harvard has taken a major step in shoring up its institutional reputation with an announcement that it will no longer weigh in on issues outside the university. In a recent letter to the Harvard University community, interim President Alan Garber and […]
For years, purist fans of traditional New Orleans jazz have worried their favorite music is a dying art form. Oh, sure, something like trad jazz, loud and frenetic with a side helping of street funk, might be played for many more years in tourist trap clubs. But the real thing, the small-group ensembles with syncopated […]
I grew up in a wonderful small Iowa farm town. My friend Nicole Tilley lived on the edge of town by the highway. Perhaps she used to look down that road, wondering how far it could take her, because upon graduating high school, she rushed off to the U.S. Navy. It’s easy to imagine the […]
In late 1977, in the days before he suborned mass suicide in a Guyanese jungle, the Rev. Jim Jones tried to buoy the sagging spirits of his 900-plus homesick parishioners with a series of celebrity guest appearances, patched into the Jonestown encampment through a dodgy phone connection and an even dodgier PA system. Before migrating […]
California Democrats do a good job of never learning from their own mistakes when mismanaging their state. Why would they bother learning from the mistakes of other states when running face-first into the same walls? California Democrats are pushing ahead with their plan to ban multiuse plastic bags at grocery stores after previously banning single-use […]
There is a character in the Charles Portis novel The Dog of the South who follows a meticulous method anytime he orders a beer. He moistens each corner of the cocktail napkin it’s served with to anchor it to the bar. That way, the napkin doesn’t come up with the mug when he takes a […]
Unlike the countless men whose careers were killed in the fury of the #MeToo movement, Morgan Spurlock didn’t just deny he had committed serial sex abuse and misconduct, he embraced the reality that he was “a part of the problem,” canceling himself in a shocking 2017 blog post in which he confessed to harassing subordinates […]
In the Mad Max franchise he established in 1979 and continues to the present day, Australian filmmaker George Miller has demonstrated a rare command of movement across vast spaces. Arguably, no director — not even masters of the form like William Friedkin or John Frankenheimer — has wrung more sheer kinesis out of his chase […]
Some nerds in Silicon Valley decided years ago that dating needed to be reshaped so as to remove the risk of rejection. Now, in 2024, a norm is taking root that flirting is a microaggression if not sexual harassment. As a result, young men, afraid that approaching someone of the opposite sex in real life […]
Frantz Fanon, the intellectual patron saint of violent national resistance movements, is among the authors most likely to be quoted on a sign held up at the protests that have recently taken up so many headlines. In the new book The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, London Review of Books editor Adam […]
“No one will tell you that the Civil War began in Hartford, Connecticut. … But if you want to explain how ordinary democratic practices led to fratricidal war, how political conflicts became military ones, and why the war came in 1861 rather than 1850, or 1820, or 1619, Hartford may be a wise place to start,” […]
London. The next British general election will be held on the Fourth of July. The date means nothing in Britain. It isn’t a day of mourning for the loss of the American colonies. No one reflects on how King George III might have done it differently if he’d listened to Edmund Burke. No one suggests […]
There’s a lot of money and some activist passion on the Left behind prosecutors who value mercy over vengeance, but most of the energy on that side these days is behind locking up the “bad people.” Alvin Bragg ran for district attorney on the promise of prosecuting former President Donald Trump — and won. Think […]
