The Social World

Category: Life

  • The National Football League goes international

    On a beautifully gray Madrid afternoon, a group of prominent executives and representatives of America’s most popular sports league gathered to discuss how to divide up the world. There were repeated references to shared values, community engagement, cultural appreciation and “cross-border connection through competition.” The many well-dressed attendees nodded along, doubtlessly hearing each of these totemic invocations for what they really mean – money, in unimaginable sums, and the National Football League’s bold plan to take over the planet.

    This season the NFL has played seven international games. Madrid, São Paulo, Dublin and Berlin each hosted one fixture. London got three. In the coming year, the league will expand even more, with games in South America and a first-time trip to Australia. The ultimate vision is to export the shield, with each team playing at least one international game a season. This would equate to a level of growth once thought absurd by analysts who saw pro football as an exclusively North American phenomenon and dismissed forays overseas as the stuff of preseason exhibition. The leader of today’s league wants to prove them wrong.

    This ambitious project is the dream of the NFL’s divisive and powerful commissioner: Roger Goodell, the 66-year-old quarter-zip aficionado, who started off as an intern at the league’s New York headquarters in 1982 and never looked back. Goodell’s role in America is to be hated. Alone among the league’s executives, he is recognized and routinely booed by fans whose gripes are manifold. After Goodell passed down a heavy penalty for the New England Patriots’ Deflategate scandal, die-hard fan Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports flooded the opening night game with towels and T-shirts emblazoned with a caricature of Goodell bearing a bright red clown nose. But Goodell still got the pleasure of watching Kansas City win.

    In Madrid, Goodell is ubiquitous at the league’s events, but you can tell the crowds here are more unfamiliar with his reputation. As he rounded the field at the massive and impressive Bernabéu Stadium, home to Real Madrid, the boos from the crowd were smattering and outnumbered by respectable applause. He is a stern corporate face on a mission. A vast American flag is spread across the field, followed by a bellowing rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” It is a brazen demonstration of soft power. We will come into your city and in the space of a week take over everything, everywhere. You won’t just like it. You will beg for its return.

    There’s no mystery why. For Madrid businesses, the NFL is great news. City officials estimated that a single game brought roughly $200 million to the local economy, doubling expectations, with hotels at 90 percent capacity and restaurants crammed. The league picks its international travel teams carefully, and here they were wise enough to deem the Miami Dolphins the host team; the Dolphins have a large number of Spanish-speaking fans with connections to the old world. They took to the city naturally, with a massive fan experience at the Plaza de España, three giant inflatable dolphins, fan events at restaurants and bars and Instagram-friendly tours.

    Less impressive was the presence of the Washington Commanders, albeit another capital city with plenty of direct flights to Madrid. Still, they traveled – the game’s total attendance topped 78,000, though some fans seemed rather unclear as to whether to expect paella or tacos on arrival to Madrid. But they were the exceptions.

    There is still skepticism about Goodell’s ambitious global undertaking in some corners of the league and sports media. For American audiences, football is the unchallenged king. Every streaming service wants the league, and most have gotten a piece of it. In a typical year, the NFL accounts for 97 of the top 100 broadcasts (the only exceptions being election night, the Oscars and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – which is itself a pre-game show for more NFL).

    The commissioner’s recent floating of an international edition of the Super Bowl was roundly condemned by fans and commentators who want to see the championship exclusively hosted in the United States. But the backlash to the headlines ignored the context of Goodell’s remark: he was teasing the possibility of an international franchise – or perhaps more than one.

    The feasibility of such expansion has practical limits. Franchises have already had to navigate the logistics of short weeks and juggling player injuries with flights across the Atlantic – some West Coast teams such as the Los Angeles Rams have come up with novel solutions such as staying on Eastern time to avoid jet lag. But the real solution could come from technology.

    According to the Wall Street Journal, NFL executives traveled this year to witness a test flight in the California desert presenting the XB-1 –  “the first civilian jet to break the sound barrier since the Concorde.” Boom Technology chief executive Blake Scholl says the new plane would cut travel time to Europe in half, enabling not just team travel but perhaps a whole new NFL division overseas. Some league insiders believe the expansion plan can realistically be achieved within the next decade. “It’s inevitable,” Scholl told the Journal. “The only reason they aren’t already is the speed of travel.”

    For Goodell and the massively wealthy corporate groups he represents, the sound barrier is no barrier at all to what is, for them, an expression of global manifest destiny. And as the cultural footprint of the US has declined, with Hollywood putting out fewer and fewer hits that resonate globally every year, it stands to reason something must replace it. The owners, streamers, advertising partners and a network of billion-dollar brands see it purely as a question of money, of expanding beyond the already saturated and financially tapped-out market of the American audience.

    For Goodell, who as a college kid wrote a letter to every franchise to get the NFL internship that then became the first line of his résumé, the aim seems to be something greater. He wants to be the commissioner who conquered the world.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Why DC loves to hate Partiful

    Why DC loves to hate Partiful

    If you’re under 50, you may have noticed that Partiful has quietly annexed the American social calendar over the past year or two. The event-planning app, founded by former Palantir employees, began as another Silicon Valley toy, but it didn’t stay regional for long. Its loud dashboard aesthetic spread quickly through the Bay Area and then achieved escape velocity in Washington, DC. I wouldn’t be surprised if the strong cultural current between tech and defense is what created near-perfect conditions for a social revival in nerd world.

    While I understand a bit of snobbery over the aesthetics, I’ve been surprised by the constant performative disdain I’ve observed accompanying its rise. Everywhere I go, I hear people say they “hate” Partiful. I watch otherwise socially adept adults roll their eyes at the indignity of being invited to yet another birthday karaoke or themed dinner through an app, of all things, as if the rest of their lives aren’t already dictated by Outlook and Slack.

    Receiving a Partiful link is akin to a minor social injury, a digital affront to imagined analog elegance. This is nothing more than user error, in my view. Partiful’s origins do give it an undeniable tinge of dorkiness, but only the constitutionally weak would let that get in the way of a good time.

    Sure, the format is corny. The animated sparkles, the tie-dye backgrounds, the GIFs. But in a society where birth rates are in a nosedive, no one’s heard of sex before and social skills are degrading by the minute, I am more than happy to turn a blind eye to a few lurid colors and kitschy animations in service of prosocial behavior.

    Infact, I’d go as far as to say that my social diary has never been busier thanks to the efficient plug-in between Partiful and my iPhone calendar. I know exactly when everything is happening and I am rarely at risk of double-booking myself, which is more than I can say for the pre-Partiful days when RSVPs were a veritable archaeological dig through texts, DMs and half-remembered conversations.

    Indeed, it may be the only app that’s as effective at getting people to log off as it is at getting people to use it. For the socially blessed, perhaps the garishness of it all is a true burden – not all of us are well-connected enough to enjoy a constant whisper-network of parties, or handwritten calling cards from a generous host.

    For the rest of us, the mere fact that someone went out of their way to invite you to something, even through a candy-colored interface, is hardly an indignity. If being invited to a party is the worst thing that has happened to you this month, I congratulate you on your charmed life.

    The main complaint I hear beyond the superficial is that the app feels “too public.” The guest list is visible. The RSVPs are visible. People can see you were invited. They can see you RSVP’d “maybe” and then never updated your status. Knowing who is attending an event supposedly ruins the mystery of running into an exciting stranger or, more thrillingly, an unwelcome ex. But this transparency only offends those who relied on ambiguity to maintain their mystique. Some of us know how to withhold, wherever we go.

    Another accusation: the app’s design encourages people to RSVP just to see who else is coming, which allegedly leads to inflated guest lists full of ambiguous spectators. While I’ll admit that this is gauche, it does reflect a fact of human nature. People have always wanted to know who will be at a party before deciding to attend. Partiful simply removed the need for back-channel interrogation and gossip-triangle logistics. Tacky as this may be, millennials have no right to be so snooty about it, given the fact that their long-forgotten Facebook events had the same feature.

    If you read between the lines you’ll notice that DC in particular loves Partiful because it flattens status games while simultaneously revealing them. The everyday social life of the city, the informal gatherings of the civil servants and hard-drinking journalists, becomes a semi-public ledger of who’s hosting, who’s being invited and who’s orbiting which micro-scene.

    In a city where professional life and social life blur, where a dinner can double as a networking event and a house party can function as a quasi-policy salon, this level of transparency is intoxicating. People here love data, for good or ill, and Partiful gives them plenty of it.

    Partiful exploits Washington’s weakness for structure, but in my view, the exploitation is a net positive and benefits all stakeholders. It makes it easier for hosts to gather people, easier for newcomers to break in, and easier for the city’s chronically Type-A residents to remember that fun is a scheduling problem more than a metaphysical one. The app has created a small renaissance in casual hosting: backyard dinners, themed cocktail nights, going-away parties, last-minute potlucks.

    I’ve been to five-person movie nights and 500-person galas because of it. It has lowered the barrier to entry for throwing something together. It has reminded people that to enjoy a party, you have to log off and actually attend it.

    If some find this embarrassing, so be it. But it’s hard not to admire an app that has done more for community-building than a decade of think-tank happy hours. DC may scoff at Partiful, but it also cannot stop using it. And maybe that’s the clearest sign of all that the app is here to stay.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The diner test

    The diner test

    Some people say you become a real New Yorker when you’ve lived in this city for ten years – when you’ve complained your way through ten Arctic winters, ten swamp-thick summers, ten Halloweens that made you question the human psyche and ten consecutive mornings trapped behind barricades courtesy of Marathon Sunday.

    Respectfully, I disagree. In my opinion, you become a real New Yorker when you’ve mastered the delicate, near-mystical art of going to a diner.

    I know what you’re thinking: she’s doing that painfully American thing where everything’s hyperbole. Surely it can’t be that hard to slide into the cracked vinyl booth of some generically named establishment; to inhale a plate of eggs and coffee; to pay your check; and then to burst into the bustling streets of Midtown, blinking into the sun-cut smog and wishing you’d had just one more cup of the all-you-can-drink rocket-fuel brew.

    But no. Absolutely not. To “diner” properly in New York is to submit to a civic ritual, equal parts choreography, anthropology and spiritual test, the successful execution of which grants you provisional membership of the city’s secret society of the perpetually caffeinated.

    The first step is choosing where to go. It must be authentic but not performative. The charm has to be accidental and earned. If somewhere is trying to be a vibe, it’s disqualified. You’re looking for the perfect equilibrium of grime and hygiene – enough oiliness to reassure you that no one will judge your appearance (which might range from “pajamas” to “whatever you were wearing when you fell asleep on the couch”) but not so much patina of yesterday’s steak and fries that you find yourself trying to remember when you last got vaccinated. There are bonus points if it’s close enough to become your regular spot, but not so regular that the waitstaff feel inclined to reveal something deeply personal about your eating habits when your parents visit. That’s unnecessary.

    Next, how to order. This is where amateurs reliably falter. Diners are not for the customization class. Assuming you’ve chosen your place wisely, it won’t be the sort of institution in which your dressing might come on the side. Your server won’t smile and nod slowly and sympathetically if you want to sub feta for cheddar – but only if it’s organic. Diners are temples of decisiveness. You must know what you want before you sit down and you must be fluent in the sacred language of egg-ordering.

    “Two eggs over easy, whole wheat, hash browns.” That’s it. No dissertations. No negotiations. No hesitations. And for the love of all that is holy, now is not the time to mention your dairy sensitivities. The milk in that coffee has been around longer than your digestive issues.

    Finally, the devouring. When your plate arrives, be polite. Don’t be effusive. This isn’t grandma’s house. Request ketchup or hot sauce only when the server is already within your gravitational field – and ask for everything at once. These people have tables to turn, omelettes to flip and a sixth sense for customers who look like they’re high-maintenance. Don’t be that person.

    If you’ve had two free coffee refills, the server has asked “Anything else?” twice, and you’re still sitting comfortably, you’ve blown it. You’ve overstayed your welcome. Back to square one for you and your green card application. This is not brunch. This is a transaction. Tip well, in cash if you can. Then leave. And – take it from me – don’t use the bathroom unless you really must.

    It took me five years to master all of this. Five years of trial, error, humiliation and trying to pronounce “water” in such a way that Tony from Queens doesn’t look at me as if I were speaking Latin. But now? Now I have a personal roster of three great diners I frequent regularly: Tom’s in Morningside Heights (the Seinfeld place but, astonishingly, not a tourist trap), City Diner on the Upper West Side and the Waverly Diner in Greenwich Village. At each, I know my order. I pay with purpose and, when I remember, with cash. I leave when it’s time and somewhere along the way, I even got my greasy paws on that sacred green card. And I think that’s when it hit me. Maybe being a New Yorker isn’t about longevity at all. Maybe it’s not about the number of months you’ve overpaid rent or scampered all the way to the Upper East Side on Thanksgiving morning because, yes, you’ve forgotten, once again, to pre-order the pumpkin pie. Maybe it’s about learning the rhythms of a place that will never slow down for you, but will always, and miraculously, have a booth open when you need it.

    A diner is New York stripped of pretense. It’s fast, it’s flawed, it’s efficient and it’s endlessly alive with the glorious eccentricities of the people who have dwelled here for both generations and mere minutes. Learn to survive in this little microcosm of twisted charm and perhaps you’ve unlocked the secret to surviving the city itself.

    Because in a town where everything changes, the diner doesn’t. It’s a gentle glitch in a city in which relentless forward motion is the default. It’s as reliably unfashionable as it is immortal. And if you can find comfort there – even at 3 a.m. under fluorescent lights, when you’re questioning your most irreversible life choices – then congratulations: honey, I think you might just be home.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Hurricane season in Cuba

    A cold front blew in off the Florida Straits, sending waves over Havana’s famous corniche, the Malecón, and announcing what has traditionally been the end of the hurricane season. After 13 named storms, it seems as if the 2025 season finale was Hurricane Melissa, a humdinger. She paused south of Jamaica, getting herself into a lather, before killing 32 on that lovely island and causing at least $7 billion of damage.

    Fortunately for Cuba to the north, Jamaica’s mountains plucked the murder from Melissa’s eye – but she still cut a devastating trail through this bigger island’s eastern reaches a day or so later.

    As Cuba’s communist leadership donned military fatigues and began its traditional mobilization for such events, my phone lit up with messages from friends around the world. They had seen images of the vast, spiraling cloud, top-lit by lightning and imagined apocalypse.

    But we, unlike many, were fine. Hurricanes are surprisingly localized. You really have to be within 50 miles of the eye to feel the full force and Cuba is huge, the same length as California. And its government is good at the immediate stuff. No fatalities were reported on the island.

    But I appreciated the concern. If a Cuban city does take a direct hit, it will be calamitous. Storms that pass 50 miles away from you might be OK, but in the eye of the storm, even in well-prepared countries, the suffering can be terrible.

    I’ve been sideswiped a couple of times, which was frightening enough. But pros such as my friend Patrick, who as a CNN correspondent is forever stepping into the path of tempests with names like Beryl or Dorian, says emerging after a direct hit is terrible. “You are greeted by scenes of damage so extensive as to be otherworldly,” he says. “Cars flung into trees, houses cleaved from their foundations, trees stripped of every leaf.”

    Cuba’s long-term financial woes mean the island’s beautiful old cities are falling down, even in clement weather. Habaneros tend to walk in the middle of the street because of the danger of falling masonry. Last month, an entire house collapsed in the old town, killing a mother and son.

    Any hurricane, let alone one the size of Melissa, would probably annihilate a Cuban city. Which would be a pity. Cuba’s capital has been a storied wonder for five centuries; a recent visitor reminded me that Norman Lewis once called Havana “the most beautiful city of the Americas.” A big storm has the power to bring that story to an end, along with untold lives.

    So, we depend on luck. In summer I obsessively watch the National Hurricane Center’s website, tracking storms forming off Cape Verde which grow stronger as they head west. It feels like being a pin in a bowling alley, watching the ball coming down the lane and praying it will miss.

    Cubans have developed a whole slew of coping mechanisms. First they turn to the sainted Dr. José Rubiera on the news. For many years the director of the National Forecasting Center, his mustachioed cool acts like a balm as he rationally describes a storm’s possible paths.

    If a hurricane begins to get close, the Cuban authorities declare an estado mayor de la defensa civil and show off the advantage of being an authoritarian regime. In Jamaica in October, people refused to flee. One resident of Port Royal was quoted as saying the last time she took to a shelter, “females weren’t safe and to top it off, people stole our stuff.” In Cuba, by contrast, the residents had no choice. Some 735,000 people were moved whether they liked it or not. But they were safer.

    Here in Havana, when hurricanes approach, an eerie calm takes over. People sweep their roofs of junk and stones or anything else that might shatter windows. Queues form for bread, often to the last minute. I once ran to the bakery with my brother-in-law as electricity transformers exploded above our heads. “Do we really need a loaf this much?” I remember shouting.

    Afterwards, the unafflicted gather aid for the stricken. And then it’s the long road back once everyone has forgotten. My colleague Eileen recently returned with a convoy to the areas affected by Melissa. She tells me of a dam overflowing, washing away houses and livestock, of misery piled on misery.

    Without money to rebuild, Cuba now carries the scars of past storms. One of my favorite places on the island is a village called Isabela de Sagua. In 2017, Hurricane Irma passed by, a terrible storm because she never touched land but instead sent the sea inland all along the coast. Isabela was all but washed away. There’s a restaurant there I like where boats arrive under sail (there isn’t a lot of gasoline at the moment) to unload fish, crab, oysters and lobster. The food costs pennies and tastes sublime. It feels like the restaurant at the end of the world.

    But putting aside my suspect love for trauma tourism, that’s not great, is it? Such stoic tenacity from residents is not really enough. One day a hurricane is going to prove Cuba’s authorities inadequate. Nonetheless, for now, and until June next year, I will be able to sleep soundly, certain my family is not going to be wiped out by a storm with a silly name.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The rural reality

    I was never a “real” rider. My parents were serious riders. My sister was too – she showed at national level. But by the time I came along, the youngest child by 20 years, no one had the energy for proper lessons, let alone the time it takes to seriously compete. Yet somehow, I’m the one who wound up with the family horse farm in New York’s Hudson Valley.

    My family’s involvement with horses goes back almost 80 years. My dad, a Bronx boy raised on Bonanza and Lone Ranger, grew up riding on summer vacation at a Borscht Belt resort. His love of horses shifted him from Jewish cowboy to showjumper and he eventually took over the equestrian center he learned to ride at. For more than 30 years, he bought, sold, boarded and trained horses in every discipline. He even met my mom when she came upstate to buy a horse; naturally, he ripped her off.

    The Borscht Belt is long dead and the business shifted and drastically downsized in the 2000s. It was a tough move. As a teenager, I remember rushing to unload dozens of horses as the resort abruptly closed, and we relocated to our 15-horse farm seemingly overnight. Business waned, my parents lost steam, and that would have been that for the family farm – if I hadn’t partied my way through college. I graduated with a low GPA and no job options. I did, however, have a little money saved up and some friends in Belgium with a small farm like ours.

    Belgian warmbloods come in a few variations, but all share similar characteristics. Warmbloods are a selectively bred mix between cold- and hot-blooded horses, the former quiet work horses like Clydesdales, the latter spirited breeds like Thoroughbreds. The mix of explosive speed and strength makes them ideal candidates for show jumping at the highest level. And while a green and unpedigreed foal may be quite common in the Belgian countryside, they’re highly sought-after in the US.

    If you think going through customs is a pain in the ass, just imagine what it’s like for a horse. International transport requires significant documentation, veterinary work and mandatory mosquito-free quarantine.

    Covid, of course, shut most of this down. The political world became my new day job and the business went back to its roots as a small, hands-off boarding operation, with some former clients keeping their horses with me full time. It pays the bills.

    More importantly, however, it keeps me rooted in community in a way that most DC transplants don’t understand. Owning any small business keeps one connected to the “real world” – the concerns that politicos discuss, debate and regulate, but often have little connection to or stake in.

    But having a rural horse farm that caters to largely upscale (but not ultra-wealthy) clients puts me in a unique position.

    On the one hand, I’m embedded in working-class America. The “locals” – staff, neighbors and friends upstate – are at the forefront of a new coalition that’s been the backbone of America First for nearly a decade. On the other hand, my clients – often New Yorkers with successful businesses – root me in a world where the bulk of American wealth still lies. It’s not hedge-fund managers or tech overlords who monopolize American social tastes and spending, but those with unglamorous regional businesses.

    For me, it’s easy to flip between the blue-collar worker and the country-home crowd and relate to either. Despite their stark differences, their fates are intrinsically linked.

    When the left complains about “white privilege,” it suggests a dismantling of these two distinct US social groups: a working-class, dependent and rudderless, and the destruction of bourgeois wealth reserves in order to pay for it. It’s not so much about redistributing wealth but punishing those who resist this new cultural order. But without these very independent, very American classes, America itself ceases to be.

    Many in my generation agree with this sentiment but still have no desire to resist it. It’s not just that they don’t want to go to trade school; no matter the industry, they don’t want anything to do with their parents’ businesses. But is a rootless, rent-poor, corporate life in a luxury Manhattan studio really all that much better? It’s pointless to feel that you’re above your childhood circumstances. While I grew up alienated from the family business, I applied the basic knowledge and familiarity of my upbringing with a little effort and did well. I learned as I went and carved my own path. The great thing about America is that you can, too. You can take over your parents’ farm – or local law firm – and make it your own: reimagine it, tailor it and build a life very much different, even better, than your parents’. And that’s the real spirit of life in the country.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • How to make an unforgettable Christmas dinner

    How to make an unforgettable Christmas dinner

    In the early 1970s, celebrity chef Jacques Pépin and his wife bought a dilapidated house in the Catskills so they could go skiing on the weekends. It was a real fixer-upper. Groups of friends would come up from New York City and pitch in on the renovation effort, and Pépin would serve dinner at the end of the day. These weekends were so much fun Pépin decided to memorialize them by hand-lettering and painting special menus.

    How Pépin convinced his friends to let him sit in the kitchen sketching petits poissons and heads of broccoli while they slaved away at framing and drywalling his winter getaway is, admittedly, mysterious. Settling in to hand-paint a menu before getting down the pots and cooking a five-star meal doesn’t square well with the image of the DIY weekend warrior leading the charge on home renovations. Clearly, the man was both a culinary genius and a master of persuasion.

    And his menus were utterly charming. They grew into a family tradition, where the menu for every special occasion was illustrated, lettered in Pépin’s elegant, curly script and preserved for posterity in the family archives. (They were, eventually, published in book form.) In addition to the list of courses, some had space for les invités, where the guests could sign and leave comments. Sometimes labels from the wine they’d enjoyed would be stuck on as well.

    He made menus for outside events too, for instance a Christmas menu for a dinner cooked at Stone Acres Farm in Stonington, Connecticut, in 2016, with the courses listed in black ink and the wines in green. What a feast it was. They began with gougères, goose liver pâté and Stonington scallops. Then they followed soup and grilled Noank oysters with crémant from Savoie and Guy Larmandier Champagne. The pièce de résistance was roast goose with gravy and potatoes in goose fat, accompanied by Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Dessert was an apple tarte tatin paired with Sauternes. Not too shabby.

    You might be tempted to dismiss Pépin’s handmade menus as a charming but irrelevant hobby, a sort of chef’s journal. But this would be to overlook the man’s genius. His menus are infused with perhaps the most important ingredient of all, something without which Christmas dinner is doomed: a sense of occasion. Like a wedding, Christmas is a milestone of sorts. Like a wedding, the very concept of Christmas dinner is burdened with expectations, fears and emotions. It demands ceremony and tradition, but also liveliness and warmth. How can this occasion, this time in history, this particular guest list, this family and this place be woven into one unforgettable evening – hopefully without burning down the house?

    Handmade menus alone won’t do it, though they’ll help. It takes a master strategy, and the one I propose is straight from the wedding handbook: your outfit (or in this case your dinner), should include something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.

    Something old – that’s easy. Christmas is all about time-honored culinary traditions: stuffed birds, roast boar (as I had once at a beautiful Christmas in Germany), tourtière in Québec, oysters on the half shell gulped down by the French, figgy pudding served up à l’Escoffier in a blaze of brandified glory. Something old puts you in touch with all ages past through the shadowy line-up of ancestors and ever-so-greats, all celebrating Christmas after Christmas, handing it on all the way to us.

    But Christmas isn’t only about generations past. It’s also about the future: a fresh start, the birth of the baby Jesus, here to take on the world, live, die and reign forever. So the second element of a good Christmas menu is something new, adventurous and exciting. Time for crown roast of lamb, a terrifying cheese that looks like a brain, roasted brussels sprouts on a giant stalk which you can stand up on a platter in the likeness of a Christmas tree (or piece of medieval weaponry), trays of rich little sea urchins, the foie gras of the ocean.

    Thirdly, something borrowed. When it comes to weddings, you borrow your grandmother’s necklace, your best friend’s hair clip or your sister’s shoes (if your sister lets you borrow her shoes, she doesn’t actually want them back, does she? Asking for a friend). It’s the same at Christmas: serve your grandmother’s shortbread, your best friend’s Caesar salad and shamelessly steal your sister’s recipe for mistletoe martinis.

    Last but not least: something blue. It needn’t be food (though Stilton is always an option); it can be in the decor, a trick of light, a mood. Christmas isn’t all red and gold and green. Just ask Elvis: “I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.” Poignancy is part of the day, so they knew in medieval times; their carols were happy, but sometimes startlingly sad: “In sorrow endeth every love but thine, at the last.” Like salt, a pinch of Christmas sadness rounds and deepens the flavors of the day, counteracting the bitter and elevating the sweet.

    Blue doesn’t only stand for sorrow. It also represents the precious and the good. When a bride wears “something blue,” it is supposed to mean purity and love. In medieval times, blue pigment from the lapis lazuli stone was the rarest and most expensive color – which is why it was used for depictions of the Mother of God.

    So when you settle down this festive season in a corner of your hectic, wrapping-paper-strewn home, like Pépin mid-construction, to paint little watercolor fish and garlands on to your festive dinner menu, don’t forget to work some blue into the pattern. Without the lady in blue, there is no Christmas; without Christmas, there is no Christianity – and without Christianity, it’s a cold, lonely night, with nothing between you and the wolves.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Four Twenty Five’s wine list is better than most

    I was recently invited by friends to a small birthday fête at Four Twenty Five, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s latest New York restaurant at (wouldn’t you know it) 425 Park Avenue. It was, as Bertie Wooster might have put it, oojah-cum-spiff, a worthy companion to the Terrace and Nougatine, those other famed New York refectories by Jean-Georges.

    I won’t bore you with the victuals, which were so far from boring themselves that it would take more than a column just to enumerate those toothsome morsels. Instead, let me mention a couple of the wines we enjoyed, noting for posterity that the wine list at Four Twenty Five is one of the most extensive and thoughtfully selected in New York City. I hope to have occasion to make a thorough study in the years to come.

    We started with a 2023 Alzinger Grüner Veltliner “Federspiel” from the Ried Mühlpoint vineyard, one of Alzinger’s best spots. It is a dry, light-bodied wine of about 11.5-12 percent alcohol. The year afforded a bright, sunny growing season and this is a bright and sunny wine, sophisticated but not fussy. Incidentally, the term “Federspiel” comes from falconry and refers to the bait used to lure the bird homeward. The vineyard lies on the clay and gneiss-bedded slope of the Steinertal in Wachau, Austria.

    Readers with long memories will know that the Austrian wine industry almost disappeared in the decade following the 1985 diethylene glycol scandal. Attentive quality control analysts discovered that several Austrian wineries were lacing their potations with what amounted to anti-freeze, which made the wines taste sweeter and rounder. The juice found its way to the German market and some was illegally blended with German wine. The discovery of the adulteration cratered the Austrian wine industry for a decade, but now it is back in a big way.

    Indeed, grüner veltliner, the most widely planted grape in Austria, has for some years been one of the trendier whites, and for good reason. It is notably food-friendly, complex, subtly aromatic but clean, its distinctive spiciness coming from rotundone, the peppery tasting chemical compound that is also present in syrah. I have no idea how much Jean-Georges is charging for a bottle of this grüner from the Alzinger winery since I was in the happy position of being a guest on this occasion. Out in the wild, two Andrew Jacksons ought to snag you one.

    For our main course we moved on to a wine from the Arbois appellation in Jura, the wine growing region between Burgundy and Switzerland. “Very distinctive and unusual wines”: that’s how every description of wine from the Jura begins, and rightly so. The most famous are vins jaune, fermented, as is sherry, under a flor of yeast.

    We had a 2020 Savagnin “Amphore” from Bénédicte and Stéphane Tissot (about $100 retail). The Tissots age this wine for five months in clay amphora, a process similar to that used in the production of Georgian wine, and then in large wooden casks called demi-muid. The result is a bright orange, cloudy wine that is reticulated with hints of stone fruit, black tea and cider. It is, as one commentator noted, “powerful stuff,” and not just because of its high acidity and 14.5 percent alcohol. Distinctive. Delicious. Delightful. I did not know at the time, but it turns out that DNA analysis recently revealed that grüner veltliner is a natural crossing of the savagnin grape and an obscure Austrian variety from the Burgenland region of eastern Austria, so our evening’s wine consumption had hidden interconnections.

    Grüner veltliner. Savagnin. Here’s another grape you will be hearing more about: clairette blanc. It’s prominent in many Provençal whites (you’ll also find it in wines from the Rhône and Languedoc). We’ve had occasion to sample the rosé from Domaine du Bagnol before. The white from this storied vineyard from around the ancient fishing village of Cassis is a blend of clairette blanc, ugni blanc (also called trebbiano), and roussanne. It sells for about $30. Like its Cassis neighbor Clos Sainte Magdeleine, another winner, it is a subtle, quietly aromatic wine that grows and blossoms on the palate. Cassis has been home to the vine since Greek sailors from Phocaea arrived in the 6th century BC. The wine writer and importer Kermit Lynch calls it “an earthly paradise.” When you book a trip, let me know if you require an unpaid travel companion.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Why winter is the best time for a barbecue

    Why winter is the best time for a barbecue

    Summer is usually associated with outdoor cooking which is a perfectly reasonable association. But standing over a hot grill or smoker when the mercury is rising is not the most pleasant of activities. Whatever you are cooking becomes seasoned with droplets of sweat.

    Another oft-overlooked issue, particularly when it comes to smoking meats, is that temperature regulation of the cooking apparatus can be difficult when the ambient heat surrounding it is working in synergy with the heat inside it. While I have a friend who does competition cooking and isn’t a stranger to winning (he pushes his smoker up to 300°F) most of us lack the requisite skill for smoking a pork shoulder or brisket at that heat and pulling out a tender product at the end. Summer is absolutely the wrong time to get out the smoker. Winter is absolutely the right one.

    It is true that the ambient temperature works in the opposite direction in winter, sometimes making it slightly more difficult to bring the smoker up to the desirable temperature of 225°F. But simply add some extra fuel and, voilà, problem solved. There is also very little likelihood of you adding sweat to the seasoning blend.

    When it comes to what you smoke and how you season it, that’s a matter of personal preference. While debates over regional styles are fun, the beauty of smoked meat is its versatility. Season it with just salt and pepper. Season with salt, pepper and garlic. Go for a rub with sugar, cumin, chili powder and various other candidates from the spice cabinet. Use a mustard binder. Try a sriracha one. Don’t use a binder at all. Whatever route you choose, you will find people willing to engage in friendly dialogue about your technique.

    These are great guidelines, but they are not written in stone. The US government tells us to cook our chicken to 165, but more experienced pitmasters know that 175-185 is better for dark cuts as it gives things more time to soften and render into the meat, making it succulent and tender. For shoulders and briskets, 204 degrees or so is the magic number, but what you’re really looking for is probe tender. This is not something that words can describe: it can only be learned from experience. In short, though, it’s not exactly what the screen on the digital thermometer reads, it’s how much resistance you feel while inserting it.

    This result is also much easier to achieve when your smoker and the sun aren’t working in sinister harmony. In cooler weather, the heat from the smoker even gives the chef a bit of warmth during the process – useful when the cooking can stretch on for many hours, especially if you hit “the stall.” For those unfamiliar with the stall, it’s the point at which moisture evaporating from the meat begins to counteract the smoker’s heat, causing the internal temperature to hover stubbornly around 175 degrees. And sometimes it stays there for hours.

    Of course, you can combat this with the Texas Crutch – wrapping your meat in butcher paper or foil when it hits 175 and then getting it up to probe tender. That does sometimes over-moisten the crust that forms, known as the bark. So while the Texas Crutch is not as controversial as spice rubs and binders, using one will create more opportunity to engage in friendly debate with fellow enthusiasts. But the point is that it works. And since it’s your meat, you do you. Just make sure to let the meat rest before serving.

    A final point to make is that when smoking during the summer, you will need a hot shower afterwards to get the smell of the smoke bath off you. A hot shower during the summer just doesn’t hit the way it does when it’s cold outside, baby. Summer is not your friend, not your primetime, not the season in which you can totally shine.

    So my advice is this: do not be afraid to reserve summer for steaks seared in a cast iron pan in the comfort of your air-conditioned kitchen. Save the serious outdoor sessions for a time when you need a coat – and the condensation of your breath in the air matches the gentle whisps wafting from the smoker.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • When it comes to bourbon, provenance matters

    My wife Amber and I returned home, to the heart of where it all began for me – the Bluegrass. A day at the races at Keeneland felt like stepping into a painting: the autumn sun catching the coats of the Thoroughbreds, the crowd humming with excitement. The next night, we watched on as the Kentucky Wildcats nearly toppled Texas under the lights at Kroger Field, the air electric with hope.

    But it was afterward, on the backroads, that Kentucky spoke loudest. Horses grazed behind old stone fences; the sweet, yeasty scent of mash rolled out of the distilleries that dot the countryside. In those quiet miles, I remembered how deeply I love this place and how fiercely I’ll defend her bounty, both her people and her goods.

    I was moved to write a kind of manifesto: my brief guide to enjoying bourbon and to honoring the hands and heritage that make it worthy of its name.

    The distillers and distributors must be Kentucky-based and preferably family-owned and operated. The true keepers of bourbon’s soul are Heaven Hill, Willett Distillery, Buffalo Trace and Brown-Forman.

    Heaven Hill deserves special distinction. Founded in 1935 by the Shapira family, it remains the largest independent, family-owned distillery in Kentucky, a rarity in an industry now dominated by global corporations. Heaven Hill’s portfolio stands as proof that family stewardship still produces greatness: Elijah Craig, Henry McKenna, Evan Williams, Old Fitzgerald and their old-line cousins J.T.S. Brown, J.W. Dant and T.W. Samuels. These are bourbons tied not to marketing departments, but to lineage, craftsmanship and the families who built Kentucky’s bourbon tradition.

    Willett Distillery, another Bardstown treasure, continues to bottle authenticity through generations of the Willett family and its labels such as Johnny Drum, Willett Reserve, Noah’s Mill and Rowan Creek testify to an unbroken commitment to small-batch excellence.

    Buffalo Trace, owned by the New Orleans-based Sazerac Company, bridges Kentucky’s bluegrass roots with Louisiana’s river heritage – it was Kentucky bourbon’s first export market after all. Its masterpieces are Colonel E.H. Taylor, Eagle Rare, Blanton’s, Weller and the revered Pappy Van Winkle line.

    They remind us of the deep cultural kinship between Kentucky and New Orleans: two regions bound by history, hospitality and whiskey. Few partnerships capture that spirit better than Buffalo Trace and the Van Winkle family, whose shared devotion to time, patience and provenance makes their bourbon nearly mythic.

    Brown-Forman, though publicly traded, remains a family-controlled Kentucky institution. Through Woodford Reserve, Old Forester and their variants, the Brown family continues to guard a century-old tradition that still bears their name.

    And finally, a note of caution. Never drink from Beam Suntory. Though some of its labels may once have been personal favorites, its Japanese ownership and Chicago headquarters place it far from the hills, people and heritage that define true bourbon.

    However hard the sacrifice, one must forgo Basil Hayden, Maker’s Mark, Baker’s, Booker’s and Knob Creek in favor of the families and distilleries who remain faithful to Kentucky’s soil, culture and craft.

    In bourbon, as in life, provenance matters. Drink from those who still make it, not those who merely market it.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Inside the gruesome world of the ‘human safari’

    Inside the gruesome world of the ‘human safari’

    “People don’t actually do that, right?” my publisher asked nervously. “No one actually goes on a human safari, do they?”

    Eight years ago, I didn’t know for sure. There had certainly been rumors for years that wealthy foreigners were traveling to conflict zones to kill civilians at random. Gradually I had concluded that some people were indeed heading off to complete their bucket list of horrors.

    In my novel To The Lions, I placed the “human safari” in a fictional refugee camp in southern Libya. Concrete proof, however, was almost impossible to find.

    Several times during my years as an investigative journalist, I heard stories about nightmarish things going on in places where law and order had collapsed. As part of my job, I visited refugee camps close to the Syrian border and in southern Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees have fled over years of conflict.

    Anyone who has spent time in refugee camps knows that human trafficking is almost routine. If someone isn’t worried about trafficking a preteen girl into a brothel, it’s not an enormous leap to assume that they might be open to enabling other forms of abuse. Slowly, depressingly, I started to realize that if you really wanted to – and, importantly, you had the cash – human safaris were indeed possible.

    And now evidence is finally starting to emerge. Prosecutors in Milan have just opened an investigation into Italians who allegedly visited Sarajevo during the Bosnian war in the 1990s to shoot at people trapped in the besieged city. Early on in that war, the main street running into Sarajevo became known as “Sniper Alley.” Thousands of people were killed there over a four-year period. Now prosecutors believe some of these deaths occurred because rich foreigners allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army to escort them to the hills above Sarajevo to shoot and kill citizens.

    The prosecution in Milan doesn’t surprise me. When societies collapse, some people will go out and do exactly what they want. While I was reporting in Libya shortly before Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011, I watched excitable young men drive very expensive cars extremely fast along the seafront. They’d always wanted to do it, they said cheerfully, and now they could. A few days later they all ran out of gasoline and that was that.

    But what would you do if there was no risk of being caught? Some people want to kill. And in our globalized world, I believe that some of those people jump on a plane and head off to those collapsed societies in order to embark on the worst sort of tourism.

    The rumors were almost impossible to prove. The people who went on human safaris weren’t going to talk. Those in their sights – some of the most vulnerable people in the world – had no way of knowing what was going on until it was too late. Even if they had their suspicions, they had no one to tell. The rumors continued to emerge in odd places. While I was chasing Somali pirates around the Indian Ocean with the British Navy, the Royal Marines took several captives. It hadn’t been the most equal battle – a US Navy ship on one side of the tiny pirate ship, a British ship on the other and a Lynx helicopter firing rows of bullets straight over the pirate ship’s bow – but the pirates themselves were heavily armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

    In the aftermath of the arrests, I went out to the tiny pirate ship with the Marines and spoke to the captives. Most of them were uncommunicative. One pirate – who memorably had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot – was rather more chatty. He soon realized I was a journalist and attempted to spark up conversation with me first in fluent Italian and then in fluent German. He couldn’t speak English, but we eventually established that we could both speak French.

    After we had discussed the pirate’s cousin (who lived in Manchester), and he had suggested that we get married – a proposal I had to turn down – we moved on to stories he had heard about Russians prowling around the Red Sea attacking Somali pirates. These people, he insisted, were not Russian armed forces. They weren’t mercenaries hired by shipping magnates, either. These were people on expensive, glamorous yachts who wanted to kill someone – anyone. They were there for fun, the pirate said, and it was clear that no expense had been spared.

    As my would-be fiancé pointed out, absolutely no one was going to care if a Somali pirate was killed. Out on the high seas, no one would ever even know. And if anyone did find out, they might conclude that the pirate had got what he deserved.

    It is this gray area – where people manage to convince themselves that they’re meting out “justice” – that I suspect drives some “human safaris.” It is easy to find videos on social media of vigilantes claiming to have gunned down illegal immigrants who are attempting to cross the US/Mexico border. Heavily armed groups of civilians routinely patrol the border areas.

    “We were going out huntin’,” Bryan C. Perry, of Clarksville, Tennessee, announced on TikTok as he set out his plans to head down to the border in 2022. And he was going to “shoot to kill.” If you’re off to kill someone and you’re clearly going to enjoy it, where exactly is the line? Perry is now serving several life sentences.

    The late critic A.A. Gill faced a storm of complaints after he admitted that he had shot a baboon to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.” He was open in his curiosity, at least. Some people are fascinated by the idea of killing. They want to know how it feels to kill a man, a woman or a child. And in some parts of the world, they can satisfy that urge – and absolutely no one will stop them.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.