“He ran two or three times, he never got above 1%,” Donald Trump said of Joe Biden in 2019. “And then Obama came along and took him off the trash heap, and he became the vice president.” It was an amusing way to insult the former vice president at the time — perhaps less so […]

There are many things to dread about the 2024 election. The primary reason is that fully 70% of the public agrees it does not want a race between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. But another problem with the 2024 race seems likely to be the absence of good comedy. Sure, there are […]

“Winston Churchill appeared to me,” Charles De Gaulle wrote in 1959, “from one end of the drama to the other, as the great champion of a great enterprise and the great artist of a great history.” Churchill was not only the author, both literally and figuratively, of a great history, but he has also been […]

Lawrence of Arabia: My Journey in Search of T.E. Lawrence is the first biography I’ve read in which the author explains what it’s like to kill a man: “I had often shot at people hundreds of yards away — vague shapes behind rocks who were busy firing back — but never before had I seen […]

Colorblindness, not the ophthalmological condition but the notion of aspiring to treat people as individuals, without regard to their race, has taken a beating these past few years. Prominent left-wing thinkers such as Ibram X. Kendi, and “anti-racist” training sessions based on their work, have painted this ideal as nothing more than a way of […]

The George W. Bush era is back, at least in some cultural sense. On retail playlists in America’s hipper precincts, the top 40 hits of the 1980s and 1990s are replaced by indie rock from the halcyon days of Pitchfork. The vapid, hot-person romantic comedy sits perched once more atop the box office. Waistlines have […]

What is the plot of Expats, Amazon’s flawed but intriguing new Hong Kong-set limited series? It depends on whom you ask. For the NPR crowd, the show plumbs the “lived experiences” of wealthy foreigners and their servants, meanwhile considering how “feminism [can] undermine issues of race and class,” as creator Lulu Wang recently told the […]

Bear Cave, in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, bills itself as a “man store,” selling great items for men who don’t consider masculinity to be toxic. I bought a few civilian-issue field rations there: chili-mac, penne with vegetable sausage crumbles, and cheese tortellini. I thought about the strange culture surrounding military field rations, beginning with the name: […]

You would think the Nevada State Education Association, the state’s teachers union, would be concerned about raising literacy rates, improving academic outcomes, and generally being good teachers. Instead, the union’s affiliated super PAC is spending its financial resources on suing the state of Nevada for striking a deal with the Oakland Athletics to build a […]

More than 60 women have had their phones and sometimes purses snatched by thieves on mopeds in recent weeks in New York City. Just last week, the New York City Police Department released surveillance video of a 52-year-old woman being dragged violently by thieves on a scooter as they robbed her of her bag, phone, […]