America’s brain-rotting socialism debate
The rising influence of democratic socialists like AOC and Zohran Mamdani, and the fervent defense of free markets by Republicans in response, have reopened an old question: what is the…
Britain has a leadership fetish
What is it with Britain and the word “leadership” these days? We have had seven prime ministers in 10 years — four of whom were unelected, one of whom won…
The summer of Idiossey
I’m so late to this party that it’s possible that there is nothing left to drink and no one to talk to but since I’ve come all this way I’ll…
The case for de-escalation with Russia
John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, surely did not secretly fly all the way to Moscow last week merely to warn the Russians not to attack a Nato country. There is…
Hell is other Leftists
To most people on the Right, “the Left” forms a coherent, unified bloc that out there to revive wokeness, only now with socialist characteristics. Yet the Left is far from…
Britain’s common-sense crisis
In her classic 1974 monograph Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, the anthropologist Juliet du Boulay offers a telling vignette. A peasant woman is readying loukoumi, or Turkish delight, before…
Inside the new Afghanistan
The arrivals terminal of Kabul International Airport is cleaved by gender. Coalition forces rebuilt the airport during the occupation of Afghanistan, and it retains its modern style. But the Taliban…
How Tarot re-enchanted my life
I spent a major slab of my summer slowly and luxuriantly reading a huge, dense, and astounding book. Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism was first published…
Have you corrected your racist robot?
Last week, while vacationing in Lisbon, I found myself striking up a conversation at the hotel bar with a middle-aged couple who spoke English with a distinctly American accent (which…
Not now, Scots Nats!
“No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. No man has the right to say to his country, “Thus far shalt thou go…