FROM THE MAGAZINE

May 2024

Spectator Editorial

Is the West ready to face the challenges of advancing technology?

The rest of the world is playing with a different rulebook

By Spectator Editorial

From the Magazine

Diary

Liz Truss’s American book tour

‘The media presence at CPAC showed where the future of broadcasting lies’

By Liz Truss

From the Magazine

Politics

The rise of reverse gaslighting

The deep, the unavoidable, question is where this train of insanity ends

By Roger Kimball

From the Magazine

Internet

How ‘woke’ hierarchy created an upper-class underclass

Our self-styled betters have neither raised us up toward a more perfect meritocracy nor led us triumphantly into a classless paradise

By Spencer A. Klavan

From the Magazine

China

The fight to curtail TikTok’s US influence

The danger of the app’s mind-altering effects is far more immediate than those of nicotine, drugs and alcohol

By Ben Domenech

From the Magazine

Science & Tech

Scientists’ strange offering to the final frontier

We used to name the stars after Greek gods. Now we shoot nudes and dead boomers into the great unknown

By Shane Cashman

From the Magazine

Family

PSA: have kids young!

If anyone is sexist, it’s Mother Nature

By Bridget Phetasy

From the Magazine

Health

Reflections on two decades of yoga

Any time I want to, I can unroll my mat and deploy time-honored methods to slow down my breathing, calm my mind

By Neal Pollack

From the Magazine

Science & Tech

Who knew that electric vehicles might require electricity?

We’re all being victimized by denial, wishful thinking, dogmatism rather than idealism and rank incompetence

By Lionel Shriver

From the Magazine

Politics

Reflecting on Trumpism in Pittsburgh

His extremism is likely to push Biden over the finish line

By Jacob Heilbrunn

From the Magazine

Middle East

Israel and the making of nations

The country is a test case for the survival of nationalism everywhere

By Daniel McCarthy

From the Magazine

Middle East

Inside the real Israel

In a country with real conflict, no one has time for culture wars

By Josh Kaplan

From the Magazine

Education

Did the Athenians come up with no-platforming?

In democratic Athens (fifth century BC), free speech in the citizens’ assembly and the courts was called isêgoria, meaning ‘equality of speaking’

By Peter Jones

From the Magazine

International

Why do neoliberals get let off the Iraq War hook?

There are prominent liberal hawks who have somehow escaped condemnation for helping promote the invasion

By John R. MacArthur

From the Magazine

International

Modern-day slavery in Mauritania

The country is one of America’s staunchest allies in the war on terror and the world’s most enslaved nation

By Geoff Hill

From the Magazine

Europe

Jordan Bardella, nouveau Napoleon?

The National Rally president is talked about as the future of the French right

By Gavin Mortimer

From the Magazine

Business

In praise of Yuengling

What is it about this beer that’s made it stand the test of time?

By Teresa Mull

From the Magazine

Internet

X and the return of the social-media sandbox

Until a competitor amasses the platform’s kind of clout, the wannabe censors will be stuck hearing opinions for which they once tried to get people banned

By Stephen L. Miller

From the Magazine

Books + Arts

Book Review

The wild times on the late, great John Belushi’s most famous film

Daniel de Visé’s entertaining — if that is the right word — canter through Belushi and Aykroyd’s lives and times covers a fair number of bases

By D.J. Taylor

From the Magazine

Book Review

The ups and downs of the long road toward workplace parity

Josie Cox has persuasively documented the steady but halting progress that women have made in the workplace

By Michael M. Rosen

From the Magazine

Books

The talented Evan S. Connell

He might be the greatest American novelist you’ve never heard of

By Oliver Soden

From the Magazine

Book Review

Danny Lyon’s quixotic, bare-all memoir is superb

The celebrated American photojournalist and filmmaker is little known around the world

By Paul Levy

From the Magazine

Book Review

Gabriel García Márquez’s posthumously published novel is unconvincing

Until August has a curiously half-baked feel, as if it’s a souvenir of a great man’s legacy rather than a work in itself

By Amelia Butler-Gallie

From the Magazine

Book Review

A revelatory account of the post-war exploits of the House of Windsor

Alexander Larman’s Power and Glory is a tale of survival

By Christopher Sandford

From the Magazine

Film

Christopher Nolan, creator of worlds

The filmmaker has Hollywood at his feet

By Alexander Larman

From the Magazine

Exhibitions

A cultural summer in the city

New York is great in summer, but the art scene can sometimes be fleeting

By Calla Di Pietro

From the Magazine

Theater

An Enemy of the People is hit-or-miss

The language itself — and the on-the-nose themes that Amy Herzog has unsubtly emphasized — feel like they could be sourced directly from Twitter/X

By Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

From the Magazine

Art

Sotheby’s latest gamble

The storied auction house is making a major change to its fee structure. What will it mean for the art world’s future?

By William Newton

From the Magazine

Life

Life

The VR and AR arms race

Virtual worlds contain very real gold mines

By Ross Anderson

From the Magazine

Life

Must we ‘be safe?’

It’s depressing this entire country finds it acceptable to part ways on a chipper note of menace

By Chadwick Moore

From the Magazine

London Life

The death of good conversation

Ours is an age that prefers the battle of ideas and opinions rather than pleasure of discovering the mysteries of another person

By Cosmo Landesman

From the Magazine

American Life

The story of Vince Maney

That’s all he played, one single game, and it took him almost a century to get credit for it

By Bill Kauffman

From the Magazine

Prejudices

A canyon caper

Overhead the Milky Way was beginning to show, faintly emergent from the celestial depths, the existential wastes of eternity

By Chilton Williamson, Jr.

From the Magazine

Place

Place

Bringing back rhinos in Pakistan

A foundation set up by my grandfather is trying to reintroduce the greater one-horned rhinoceros to its ancient heartland

By Orson Fry

From the Magazine

Place

The marvels of Niseko village

Après skiing in Japan, nothing else will really compare

By Lara Prendergast

From the Magazine

Food and Drink

Food

Bar-hopping, Venetian style

The wine and spritzes flow all day in Venice’s bàcari — traditional, low-key taverns — while bitesize, freshly — made cicchetti provide sustenance

By Estella Shardlow

From the Magazine

Drink

The grapes of wealth

The world of wine collecting is deliberately opaque

By Kathleen Willcox

From the Magazine

Drink

The magic of Charleston’s Gin Joint

I have never stopped by without trying the wildest combinations in an effort to create a challenge

By Ben Domenech

From the Magazine

Style

How now, Hausfrau?

Meet Missy Baldino and her Austrian-style housedresses

By Calla Jones Corner

From the Magazine

Drink

The espresso martini is the best cocktail template

How to customize a classic

By Ross Anderson

From the Magazine

Food

How good is cod liver oil for mental health?

It is beginning to cross over from fable into the realm of scientific fact

By Hannah Moore

From the Magazine

Drink

The blessing of a good wine shop

There is a world of wine out there

By Roger Kimball

From the Magazine

And Finally

And Finally

Just how good is apple cider vinegar?

When a product claims to cure diabetes, cut your belly fat, clear your skin and minimize or prevent cancer, I get a little suspicious

By Zak Asgard

From the Magazine

And Finally

Is retrofitting really ‘retro?’

I am quite retro. I like looking at the past. My husband is almost entirely so. He lives in it

By Dot Wordsworth

From the Magazine