Opinion

Some kinds of creativity are harder to capture on camera than others. Eureka moments are fairly easy to present in music or occasionally in art. Architecture can have its napkin sketch epiphanies, but the fundamental requirement of the profession is then to tweak these dreams to hold up floors and keep out rain, a process […]

Nuns, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote in her historical novel The Corner That Held Them, set in a 14th-century English convent, are “beings who are, in any case, much less interesting when seen from above than when studied sideways.” The nun at the center of Australian writer Charlotte Wood’s new novel, the 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted Stone […]

Although always popular, revisionist history is an area fraught with pitfalls. This is because, fundamentally, most historians are not idiots, and the standard version of history is more often than not broadly correct. Archives may be opened, errors corrected, and characters added to the storyline, but truly revolutionary reinterpretations, at least sane ones, are uncommon. […]

Bram Stoker’s Dracula begins with an unsettling journey. As Jonathan Harker crosses the Danube River, he remarks ominously, “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions […]

One would think that after an election in which Democrats were thoroughly trounced on the matter of illegal immigration, their party might be looking for an opportunity to show it is capable of delivering law and order. However, that is not the case in Los Angeles, where Mayor Karen Bass, fresh off letting entire neighborhoods burn […]

The grownups in charge of the Democratic Party have made their share of errors and canoodled with extremists on all sorts of matters. However, in one regard, they’ve been pretty successful in keeping their party kind of normal: speaking about marriage and family as if they are good things. This has taken some effort by […]

I don’t think anybody quite understands what President Donald Trump is proposing in Gaza. At its most idealized form, anyway. Think of the territory reframed as a kind of Dubai. A sparkling, sprawling, high-rise fusion-mix of resort, conference center, Ferrari dealership, off-shore banking haven, yacht marina, and hotel spa. Gazans get rehoused while the futuristic […]

The Democratic Party is adrift in a second Trump era with little idea of where to go from here. That means Democratic governors have been left to come up with their own “resistance” messaging, and the results just keep getting weirder. Democratic governors are trying to boost their “resistance” bona fides by opposing President Donald […]

If you want to watch a video that perfectly captures how hopelessly out of touch the modern Democratic Party is with 99% of the nation, you couldn’t do better than the one-minute, 30-second video posted on X by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) earlier this month. Staring into the camera, Huffman announces he is about to […]

President Donald Trump is back at the White House, so politics are back at awards shows. Accepting an award for “global impact” at the Grammys over the weekend, singer Alicia Keys alluded to the president’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the federal government. “This is not the time to shut down […]

Fire. Brimstone. Locusts. Plagues. Expensive avocados and Mexican beer.  This was to be the fallout from President Donald Trump’s imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada. It was going to be the end of the world as we know it, and people in the country wouldn’t be able to afford guacamole for the Super Bowl. That […]

A man was murdered in Sweden last week by Islamists. What was the response of the authorities? To make it harder for people such as him to get on the wrong side of the extremists in the first place. Salwan Momika, an Iraqi Christian asylum-seeker, was shot in an apartment in Stockholm after he burned […]