The Social World

Category: Life

Down with exclamation points!

Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation points and it’s been difficult. Exclamation points are girly because they’re a way of taking the sting out of what you say; they make any pronouncement seem more tentative, less serious. They’re the equivalent of a disarming smile, a marker that says: “No offense!” You add them to the end of a sentence to prevent anyone thinking you’re being bossy or critical. They’re an economical form of non-confrontation.

Women use them far more than men. Almost 20 years ago, a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that women used nearly three-quarters of the exclamation marks in electronic messages, but it identified the tic as “markers of friendly interaction.” As far as I can work out, nothing has changed since. Reviewing, gloomily, my own record of “Hope that helps!” or “Yes please!” I find this is less to do with enthusiasm than with a desire to please, or at least a desire not to seem pushy. I’ve just sent someone a message saying, “Get ahead of the herd” (I meant, “Just get on with it”) and I’ve had to stop myself putting in an exclamation mark to take the sting out of being bossy. Now he probably does think I’m bossy. Then I ask myself whether the silverback males I know use punctuation the same way and the answer is: nope.

Kisses, or Xs, serve something of the same purpose, with the difference that women mostly use them with other women. Xs are another marker of non-aggression. They say: friend, I come in peace, even though I may be complaining or telling you what to do. It’s a bit like how younger people use the Australian uplift at the end of sentences, turning every statement into a question. It’s a way of avoiding seeming dogmatic or assertive – but that’s generational rather than gendered.

One friend has beaten me to austere punctuation. “Nowadays when I write to men,” she says, “I am brief, unapologetic and focused on the message. This is a recent thing. I realized that for as long as I have been writing to other people, I had thought I needed to charm them. I thought this was what everyone wanted. They don’t, particularly men.” She’s now binary in her communications: entirely dispassionate or psychotically overnuanced.

There is a place for charm in written social intercourse in which punctuation plays a role, but part of the problem of contemporary interaction is that our categories are now blurred. We write to our bank manager (if we’ve got one) with the same easy informality as to a close friend. We’ve gone from “Dear Madam” to “Hi Melanie” (a very tetchy message to me from a police press office began that way), and we sign off with “Cheers” in both contexts, which means we use with colleagues or superiors the same sort of formula we’d use socially. It’s the democratization of communication, and it’s confusing. Perhaps we should stop being ingratiating – exclamation points and kisses are just that – and go for plainness if that’s what’s needed. “Please” and “thank you” work well – though again, it’s all about nuance.

As for the other trick to ensure you don’t sound dogmatic, ellipses, I wonder if they’re gendered too. These are deep waters…

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

December 2, 2025
What’s so fresh about ‘fresh hell?’

“What fresh hell can this be?” Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase?

The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837) for a parallel: “He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet. ‘What now, what now?’ said the old man – “What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?’”

I’ve been doing what counts, for me, as research. In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens uses fresh twice as frequently as he does in Great Expectations 24 years later. In Pickwick, fresh is used three to one in the sense of “new” – a fresh bottle of wine or a fresh pipe of tobacco. To use new would have been less unambiguous, for the wine was not new and nor was the pipe; it was another helping of the same thing.

In Great Expectations, fresh is used predominantly in the “fresh air” sense, with the exception of fresh bandages and with the terror fresh upon me (where it is an adverb). But the old man in Pickwick didn’t think of fresh misery as a set phrase. Nor did the author of a sentence in an American newspaper in 1873 when he wrote: “Such a course in Rapides will simply organize a fresh hell here.”

The dictionary rightly expresses caution when considering early uses of gold star, for example, in the sense of a thing “awarded as a prize or in recognition of an achievement, especially good work or behavior by a young schoolchild.” This it finds from 1886, but it discounts a citation from 1661, “a snowy Mantle which gold Stars did deck,” because that does not represent a fixed collocation.

I’m not convinced that the OED needed a new entry for fresh hell. It may most often be used now as an echo of Parker, but a dictionary of English is not a dictionary of quotations.

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

December 2, 2025
Lane Kiffin did the right thing

Sports media can’t stop complaining about Louisiana State University’s new head football coach, Lane Kiffin. A cliché tells us what’s really going on here: they hate him cause they ain’t him.

Kiffin spent the last five years resurrecting Ole Miss’s once-mediocre football program. The Rebels are currently 11-1, ranked sixth in the AP poll and have almost certainly secured a playoff spot. But that didn’t stop Kiffin this morning from getting on a plane bound for the swampy fields of Baton Rouge, home of the most attractive coaching vacancy in a year filled with big openings.

“After a lot of prayer and time spent with family, I made the difficult decision to accept the head coaching position at LSU,” Kiffin said in a statement. “I was hoping to complete a historic six-season run with this year’s team by leading Ole Miss through the playoffs, capitalizing on the team’s incredible success and their commitment to finish strong, and investing everything into a playoff run with guardrails in place to protect the program in any areas of concern.”

That request to coach through the end of the season, according to Kiffin, was turned down by Ole Miss. Kiffin maintains that players wanted him to stay on as well, which means that the only real losers in this business transaction are, unfortunately, the student athletes. Congratulations, Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter, you played yourself.

But social media and sports-media talking heads can’t stop talking about how much of a “villain” Kiffin is. That’s what the lead article on ESPN’s website this morning called him. He’s going down “Victim Lane” and is a “problem child,” we’re told. Really?

What about the exorbitantly wealthy NCAA system that makes it so easy to skirt contracts and to buyout a coach when he has an off year? Never mind the absurd recruiting rules that basically forced Lane to make a decision this week so that next year’s players would know who their head coach is going to be.

Should Kiffin have stayed at an otherwise-shabby program that valued him less than LSU? Why shouldn’t he try to live up to his college-football potential by going to a bigger program that clearly sees him as worth more money? Why is everyone pretending like they would nobly turn down a $100 million contract in favor of less money and baked goods from happy boosters?

Throughout his career, 50-year-old Kiffin has never been the media darling. Polarizing, scandal-plagued, and a bit hot-headed: that’s Lane Kiffin. LSU knows this and still decided to hire him based on talent and his wins on the field across multiple organizations. There were puff pieces galore when the man was the shiny beacon of success in Mississippi this season. The week he makes his big decisions? On a podcast earlier this week, well before Kiffin had made his announcement, Ole Miss reporter Ben Garrett had eloquent words to describe the coach: “You can’t turn a hoe into a housewife. Hoes don’t act right.” Setting aside the outright misogyny – gee, I wonder why the man might want to leave.

There’s a valuable lesson here: success won’t shield you from the shrillest scolds. No matter how many wins you have, no matter how brilliant you are, the less successful people in the world will chirp away. So good for Lane Kiffin for going with what’s best for his family. Who knows – in a few seasons, we may well see him dancing in the White House, talking up the benefits of hot yoga, as he’s wont to do. In the meantime, pay attention to which voices are screaming the loudest about how evil he is; they might be revealing more about their own character than Kiffin’s.

December 1, 2025
Charleston notebook: following an English country band through the Holy City

My impression of Charleston, a city I’ve been visiting since my late teens, is that it is oddly more European than American. Real Charlestonians, they say, have more in common with their cousins across the pond than with their compatriots in America’s big cities. I’ve found that to be true.

I’m here for the birthday of one such real Charlestonian, my friend Toto. A former White House staffer, Toto now works in the private sector, but he is destined for a return to politics – his great grand uncle was an accomplished South Carolina statesman and Toto, as he puts it, “feels a deep sense of purpose and mission to ensure South Carolina continues to be the greatest state in union”.

As it happens, a dozen European friends are also in town, following an English country band called Alan Power and the Take Twos. Hailing from Frome, Somerset, Alan and the band, known to friends as The Cowboys, have made a name for themselves by commuting to London every Thursday and Friday to play the city’s hottest venue, the Fat Badger. Dressed in Stetsons, boots and western suits, they blaze through country classics and some original numbers for an adoring fanbase that includes Margot Robbie and Olivia Rodrigo. Charleston is the first stop on their debut tour of the American South – what the boys in tow are calling “the Redneck Riviera Tour.” They won’t come across many rednecks in Charleston or their next stop Savannah, but they are sure to run into some trouble further south.

Toto’s celebrations begin with cake and champagne at an antebellum mansion in Charleston’s historic quarter, known as South of Broad – a delightful maze of cobblestone streets and alleyways hung with Spanish moss and magnolia. Sometimes called the Holy City for the spires that dot its skyline, “Charles Town” (named after the “Merry Monarch,” King Charles II) is also famed for its unholier elements and consistently ranks among America’s drunkest cities. The birthday bar crawl begins at O’Malley’s and ends at The Blind Tiger, with one member of the group being repeatedly ejected for severe inebriation. Having myself made a promising start to the evening by striking up a conversation with four charming College of Charleston seniors, I end my night alone in the parking lot of Southern Belle, a strip club north of town, where, graciously, they don’t serve alcohol past 2 a.m.

“Twixt cup and lip is many a slip” goes the old English proverb. Well, for whatever reason, the band’s first gig the following evening is cancelled at the last minute. But thanks to Toto’s friend Beau, we have a backup venue – his backyard. The invite goes out far and wide: members of the television show Southern Charm, every college girl met the night before, some politicos – even a senior cabinet member. But the response is lukewarm, and in the end, my friend resorts to sending out a sort of severe weather alert message saying BRUNO MARS DOING A SURPRISE SET IN SOMEONE’S BACKYARD. This does the trick with the college girls, though not with the cabinet member.

Neighbors curious about the commotion trickle in as the Cowboys launch into “Dead Flowers” and “Angel From Montgomery.” After thirty minutes, the cops arrive and politely ask them to go acoustic. A crowd of about 50 now huddles around the band making requests, “Country Roads!” “Wagon Wheel!” Elderly couples two-step under a sunken moon. A Charleston dame volunteers her house for the after-party with bottomless supplies of bourbon and cigarettes, proving Southern hospitality is no myth.

The next day we lunch at Leon’s, the city’s best spot for fried chicken. Here I’m introduced by my friend Byron to the michelada, a spicy beer cocktail which does all the heavy lifting of a Bloody Mary without feeling like a meal.

Leon’s Fine Poultry & Oyster Shop. Charleston’s best spot for fried chicken (Peter Frank Edwards)

That evening, the power cuts while we’re drinking at Henry’s, a favorite college tavern. Candles are lit; beers are on the house; the mood is conspiratorial. This is meant to be an “off-night” for the band but a guitar appears and someone suggests Burns Alley, a watering hole down an alleyway on Meeting Street. There are five people at the bar when we walk in. The bartender, bemused by cowboys with English accents, says, “Sure you can play, just make sure you’re done by 2 a.m.” Within half an hour, the place is heaving.

On Sunday the boys skip town, crossing the Ashley River in a convoy of cars and pickup trucks emblazoned with “Socialism Sucks” stickers. Some don MAGA hats for the full effect. By the time they cross into Georgia, news has already reached Savannah that British are coming.

I nurse my hangover at Sunday lunch with Toto’s family at the Yacht Club, before returning to my hotel, the Spectator Hotel (can you believe it?), to pack my bags. The Spectator Hotel is a five-star boutique hotel located right in the heart of town, steps from the French Quarter. It prides itself as the only hotel in the state with butlers. My butler, Chuck, is a real charm, an Anglophile who speaks wistfully of his youth in the “old country.” The hotel’s prohibition style bar is among the city’s best places to sip a cocktail.

The twenties inspired Speakeasy Bar at The Spectator Hotel, Charleston (The Spectator Hotel)

I return to New York as the boys plough South; Spinal Tap fast becoming Sherman’s March. Back at my desk in Manhattan, a shell of my former self, I live for updates from the road, like this one from Byron:

Destin, Florida, once fancied itself the “world’s luckiest fishing village.” What began, in the early 20th century, as a genteel fishing outpost has mutated – somewhere between Reagan and Kid Rock – into the so-called Redneck Riviera. It’s Florida as imagined by someone who thought “elegant” meant a ceiling fan and frozen daiquiri. There’s something almost tragic: the Edenic landscape debased by its own popularity. Still, there’s a democratic beauty to Destin’s descent. It’s Florida with the filters off – part paradise, part parking lot, and wholly American in its refusal to be embarrassed by the clash.

“O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening perfumed South!” cried Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. “O to be a Virginian! O to be a Carolinian!” Here’s hoping Toto accomplishes his mission and South Carolina continues to be the greatest state in the union.

Rooms at The Spectator Hotel begin at $269. For more information, visit: www.thespectatorhotel.com

November 25, 2025
The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types:

Dr. Strangelove (The theorist)

The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors. There might be room in the bunker.

Commander Mandrake (The visiting British correspondent)

Efficient. Relatively polite. A cultural anthropologist. Always calling the Uber, assembling the troops for the next pub – I mean, bar – and ordering a round of Guinness for the table. He’s here on duty to report on DC’s pomp and circumstance, endlessly teasing Americans about their earnestness while secretly searching for the nearest Waffle House. Washington isn’t that different from Westminster. It’s just a little more self-serious.

Jack D. Ripper (MAHA’s strongest soldier)

Walk into any bar on Capitol Hill and you’ll find a handful of these guys talking about what estrogenized water is doing to testosterone levels. What the great feminization is doing to the workplace. How the male essence must be preserved. Most likely to be a 40-year-old bachelor with the Red Scare podcast in his Hinge profile as an in-group signal to the based women of Washington. In fact, there may be more Jack D. Rippers in DC right now than at any other time in history. It’s a marvel Kubrick predicted their arrival back in the 1960s.

President Muffley (The earnest liberal)

Still believes in democracy and – bless his heart – due process. Reads the Atlantic like a moral instruction manual. Wants to be good. Wringing his hands at the degradation of decency, biding his time until the inevitable turning of the tides. In the meantime, he tends to his ficus plant and carefully curated coffee bar while stating “cautious optimism” over things that are already engulfed in flames. May have swung closer to the center since the last election, but still can’t quite stomach the rest of it. You’re faintly fond of him, in spite of the cloud of doom trailing his every word.

Major Kong (Defense tech enthusiast)

He works for Palantir or Anduril or something even more secret adjacent to the Department of War. Bicoastal (SF/DC) and proud of it. Certain that the average IQ is higher in the Bay, but Washington is where the decisions get made, so he begrudgingly keeps a Dupont apartment to schmooze with the shot-callers. You get a sense that he’d ride the drones he’s developing into the sunset if the job asked for it.

Colonel Bat Guano (The staffer)

Overworked. Pale. Nervous. Vibrating on Celsius and Zyn. He books the flights, he writes the speeches, he quietly holds the republic together with duct tape and WD-40 while everyone else is tweeting about it. Chain smokes like a ghost who died at inbox zero. When he says it’s been a “busy week,” he means he’s been sleeping on the floor of a congressional office for four days. The midnight oil never seems to run out. By the time he finally crashes, the other party might be in charge.

The War Room (The groupchat)

Where all decisions are made – or at least endlessly litigated. Less geopolitical influence than NATO, more emotional instability than a freshman dorm. All gossip, vice-signaling and purity-testing. Here you’ll find the middle managers of MAGA: men so high on their small-pond power they excommunicate anyone who threatens their crumb of relevance. If you ever find yourself added to one of their threads, don’t panic. Mute, pour yourself a drink and remember that empires fall, but receipts last forever.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
How Trader Joe’s became a way of life

A young woman recently approached me as I stood outside Trader Joe’s on the corner of 93rd Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m visiting from the UK and I’m just wondering if there’s anything worth seeing around here.”

This is not an unusual occurrence. It’s always tourist season in New York. People come for the cherry blossoms in Central Park, for the magic of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and for the vague hope of running into Timothée Chalamet at a downtown brunch place. They even come in the sweltering heat of summer when I, personally, would rather be anywhere else – ideally somewhere without the pungent smell of hot garbage and misplaced ambition.

But what struck me that morning was where this particular encounter took place. The Upper West Side, while perfectly charming in a “has a Duane Reade and emotional stability” kind of way, is not exactly a destination. It’s residential, practical, adult. The public schools are fine. It’s where you move, if you can afford it, once you’ve given up on pretending to enjoy warehouse parties in Bushwick. Sure, the American Museum of Natural History is nearby, but I doubted that a fossil collection and a beautifully preserved taxidermy otter were what this young woman was after.

“What brings you to this neighborhood?” I asked politely. She smiled, then lifted the object of her pilgrimage: a crisp new Trader Joe’s tote bag, price tag still attached, logo blazing red and proud. “Everyone back home wants one,” she said.

Let me back up. For the uninitiated, Trader Joe’s, despite what I naively believed when I first moved to New York in 2020, is not merely a grocery store. It’s a way of life. It’s a belief system. It’s a kind of secular religion with frozen orange chicken as communion. New Yorkers generally fall into two camps: those who speak reverently of the $3.49 pork and ginger soup dumplings that have “literally changed their lives” and those who – actually, I have no idea what the second group eats. Probably sadness. And maybe overpriced soup from Whole Foods.

I’ve long since made peace with the zealotry of local devotees. I’m also not saying I don’t belong to that class of converts. I can neither confirm nor deny that I’ve turned misty-eyed over the return of the butternut squash ravioli. I’ve been more than a spectator in full-blown theological debates over which seasonal candle – or which thick and chunky salsa – is the best.

There are Facebook groups, with membership numbers exceeding the populations of small nations, in which people exchange freezer-hack recipes as though decoding scripture. I know someone who once stood in line for 40 minutes because they had a premonition that the “everything but the bagel” seasoning might sell out. That’s not shopping; it’s prophecy.But what’s new – and frankly a little alarming even for me – is the globalization of this devotion. The Trader Joe’s tote bag has escaped its natural habitat. It’s gone international. I’ve heard it’s being slung over shoulders in Paris, Milan and Tokyo – worn not as a grocery accessory but as a cultural artifact, like an Andy Warhol print… but you can fill it with pre-washed broccoli florets. I saw one in London’s Knightsbridge this summer. And now I was standing opposite a young woman of maybe 20 who should’ve been taking a selfie in the line for lunch at Balthazar or flirting with a dreamy barista in the East Village, but who was instead basking in the smug glow of having scored the ultimate token of nouveau Americana.

Dwelling on all of this, I’ve decided I’ve just got to hand it to the California brand that, for all of its countercultural charm, is actually owned by the multinational discount supermarket Aldi. (Womp, womp.) Trader Joe’s has perfected the art of marketing faux frugality: a corporate giant clad in a Hawaiian shirt and the illusion of moral superiority. It’s capitalism’s coziest costume. Only Trader Joe’s could sell you an aesthetic of thrift while quietly printing money off seasonal hummus.

What really amazes me, though, is the reach of all this. Somehow, a brand with just over 600 stores – and not a single one outside of the United States – has managed to convince people who’ve never set foot in its aisles that its tote bag is the global badge of insider cool. The bag doesn’t just hold groceries, it holds belonging.

Now, sure, you could call this a pathetic indictment of the human condition and further evidence that consumerism is alive and well, but I take a different view. I’m impressed. In a world of tech companies harvesting our data and pharmaceutical companies leveraging our insecurities for profit, Trader Joe’s has managed to build an empire out of whimsy and frozen fish sticks. It doesn’t manipulate us with fear or addiction, just promises us a good deal and a delicious dinner. And if the price of that illusion is $2.99 and standing in a long (but actually quite fast-moving) line at the check-out, then so be it. Maybe – just maybe – this is the most honest hustle in America.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
The anti-Masonic roots of the Republican party

I suppose the big anniversary event of the coming new year is the semi-quincentennial of the American Revolution. I’m all for celebrating revolution and secession but spare a good thought for the bicentennial we’ll be celebrating hereabouts in 2026: that of the Morgan Affair, featuring betrayal, a possible murder, an enduring mystery and a political eruption whose ejecta would one day help form the Republican party.

I’m writing this while sitting on the polished granite bench in the Batavia Cemetery dedicated to my late friend and swimming teacher Catherine Roth, grande dame, who waged a righteously “wrothful” battle against the urban renewers who razed and ruined so much of downtown Batavia, New York, in the 1960s and 1970s. (Greatest Generation my ass!)

Through the bare boughs of the towering maples, I espy the cenotaph honoring our town’s most famous drunk, Captain William Morgan, who was no more a captain than Harland Sanders was a colonel. Nor was he the eponym of the sorority-girl rum. Rather, Morgan was an apostate member of the Masonic Order who was – or was he? – kidnapped by Masons, furious that he had revealed their rituals, and drowned in the Niagara River in 1826, thereby setting off a ferocious reaction against “secret societies” and begetting the Anti-Masonic party, the first third party in American political history.

William Morgan was one of those ne’er-do-wells whom Fate or Providence elect to martyrdom. (Or, if the cynical Masons are correct, sham martyrdom of the Jim Morrison-lounged-around-Paris-for-the-next-50-years variety.)

Morgan, a footloose stonemason (ironically), had been initiated into the LeRoy, New York, chapter of the ancient fraternal order in 1825. He moved the following year to nearby Batavia, whose more fastidious Masonic chapter rejected the application of a man they regarded as an indolent blowhard. Plotting revenge, Morgan vowed to expose the inner workings of Masonry. For this the renegade was kidnapped and on September 11 – there’s that date again – he disappeared.

Morgan’s book, Freemasonry Exposed and Explained, described the order’s sadomasochistic-flavored initiation rites (the votive’s naked breast is spiked with the point of a compass) and lurid punishments for vocal apostasy: “To have my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the roots and my body buried in the rough sands of the sea at low water-mark.” Ouch!

“Like wildfire” doesn’t begin to capture the incendiary public response to Morgan’s alleged murder. Masonry was arraigned as an elitist, possibly Satanic entity bent on subverting the republic. After all, its tentacles reached throughout the ruling class: New York Governor DeWitt Clinton was a Mason, as were numerous Founders, among them George Washington and Ben Franklin.

Within a year, Anti-Masons were being elected to the New York State Assembly. By 1830, the party had sent members to Congress and captured the governorship of Vermont. In my home of rural Genesee County, Anti-Masons held every countywide office from 1827-33. The party’s 1832 presidential candidate, William Wirt, even carried Vermont. (That Wirt was a Mason suggests the complications to come.)

As will happen, the more picturesque and flamboyant Anti-Masons – who were wont to refer to Masonry as “the Beast with seven heads and ten horns” – were displaced by scheming politicos. The party was taken over by the wily political operators Thurlow Weed and William Seward, later leading lights in the Republican party, who essentially purged the Anti-Masonic party of anti-Masonry, replacing the purpose embedded in its very name with a dirigiste agenda of internal improvements and a national bank.

The party did leave us some truly rousing campaign songs. One of my favorites begins, “The Freemen bring the monster/ Before the public place it/ And though it scowl with phiz most foul/ Will Anti-Masons face it.” Another concludes, “Tis Morgan whose blood still proclaims from the ground/ That life is in peril where Masonry’s found.” Talk about demonizing one’s foes! (As historian Lee Benson wrote, understatedly, “Anti-Masons tended not to believe in venial sins.”)

So what did it all mean? American Masonry was decimated, especially in the Northeast, though it would eventually return as an inoffensive civic-minded organization, sponsor of Little League teams and blood drives and the like. William Morgan’s body was never found. Perhaps he slept with the fishes, though to this day Masons insist that he escaped and found refuge in Canada or the Caribbean. His memory lives here, though, embodied in the cenotaph upon which I gaze.

Finally, we can’t forget Morgan’s fetching young wife, Lucinda, who evidently had a thing for notorious Upstate New Yorkers. She later became one of Mormonism founder Joseph Smith’s plural wives. Smith, too, was murdered. That gal was bad, bad luck.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

An adage dating at least from my adolescence: “You either use it or lose it.” This bit of folk wisdom, which refers principally – or so I understand – to the male procreative organ, has always been considered so obvious as to hardly need stating. Thus the recent discovery that the same principle goes for another human organ – the brain – should not surprise anyone.

The fields of science and pedagogy are agreed, for now at least, that humans who shut down their minds, temporarily but with increasing frequency, and substitute artificial intelligence for them, end by weakening their mental capabilities in the areas of cognition, memory and attention span; put more bluntly, they make themselves progressively stupider by a physical and psychic process that the least intellectual of what used to be called “jocks” would have had no difficulty understanding, owing to their own regimen of physical training and endurance.

Nevertheless, it is a finding that the digital geniuses of Silicon Valley apparently failed to anticipate; or perhaps they did so decades ago but pressed ahead in the expectation that the dumber the human race, the more money it would be eager to shell out for their magical mental crutches as an evolutionary replacement for its primitive cerebellum, cerebrum and brain stem.

Cynical of them, of course, but entirely logical and far-seeing; prophetical, even. Virtually every invention since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution has been what came eventually to be called a labor-saving device. The steam locomotive made travel over distance infinitely more comfortable and less demanding than travel by coach and horses. The automobile did the same for travel by horseback. Machinery replaced factory laborers with machine operators. Household gadgetry freed housewives from most physical labor save that of pushing buttons, while leaving them the lion’s part of the day to watch soap operas, go shopping, gossip and have clandestine affairs with the postman.

It remained only for that most strenuous and unpleasant type of labor, deeply resented by all but the most minuscule portion of humanity – that of the mental kind, also known as thinking – to be made redundant. Now, with the advent of AI, this final Everest standing in the way of the fullest realization of human bliss is, it appears, about to be summited and the flag representing the ultimate stage of industrial and scientific progress planted and unfurled to wave on the alpine winds. Its emblem will depict a fly on a can of garbage on a background of bilious yellow.

Marx knew what he was about two centuries ago when he defined “workers” as physical laborers, thus intimating that all who make their living by intellectual occupations are society’s drones, members of a pan-cultural Drones’ Club established to exploit the heroic, self-sacrificing “working classes” dedicated to performing civilization’s most strenuous, exhausting and unpleasant tasks. For Marxists, physical labor is by far the most noble type of work, highly deserving of grateful recognition in terms of status and financial reward by the rest of society. (I knew a fellow student at Columbia who argued that a subway driver should make more money than a medical doctor or corporate executive, his job being presumably less pleasant than theirs, though tastes vary of course.)

The truth is that the opposite is really the case. Compared with the intellectual classes, the laboring masses, who, being unacquainted with the rigors of mental, professional and artistic engagement – that of the mind and of the imagination – do not know what truly arduous work is. The heroic worker rises early in the morning, punches the clock when he gets to the work site, and again when he leaves it, having put in exactly the hours his boss – and his union – specify. He goes from the workplace straight to home, or to his bar, or to his sport, never gets a call from the boss after hours, and needs never give his job a thought until the alarm clock sounds again in the morning. The mental requirements of his job are, typically, nil compared with those imposed by the learned professions, and even by business.

Granted, a substantial proportion of so-called intellectual work today – in the colleges and universities, in the media, in “entertainment,” and even in the so-called arts – is simply counterfeit work: vacuous, silly, irresponsible and often immoral, requiring little if any talent, effort, or real intelligence to accomplish. Compared to it, the honest labor of an electrician, a carpenter, a commercial fisherman, a cowhand, a roughneck (I know – I’ve worked in the oilpatch), or a lumberjack has a plain and simple heroism about it, in particular where it involves the physical skill and danger that artificial intelligence can never replace.

Still, the fact remains that for the vast majority of people, manual work is preferable to (being mentally less painful than) work of the intellectual sort, without which the great and complex systems of human imagination, invention and organization that create and perpetuate the jobs that the laboring class depends upon would not exist.

Artificial intelligence need not affect the blue-collar workforce much, if at all, save to the extent that it replaces human brawn and physical skill with computers and ChatGPT. But it could have devastating consequences for the educated – the so-called intellectual – class by encouraging it to atrophy its oh-so-superior brains by relying on AI to do its work for it; work that only the human brains that created it can, in the final analysis, intelligently do. Intelligence is the engine that has always made the world go round, and always will be – human intelligence, that is, not its artificial substitute.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
Anne of Green Gables perfected the kitchen mishap

There’s something wickedly entertaining in reading about other people’s kitchen debacles, whether actual or fictional. They’re just so relatable. The jelly that won’t jell in Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives is cruelly hilarious, but the best culinary catastrophe in classic fiction, for my money, is in Anne of Green Gables.

Stylish guests, including the upper-crust Mrs. Chester Ross, are dining at Green Gables and our ebullient Anne is on her very best behavior. All goes well until Marilla arrives with the pudding and a pitcher of pudding sauce.

On spotting the pudding sauce, our heroine’s eyes grow wide and terrified. In awful technicolor, recent events replay before her: how days ago, instructed to cover the sauce in the pantry, she forgot; how the next morning, remembering, she came back, only to find floating in it a mouse which had raided its last larder. How, horrified, she fished out the deceased with a spoon, disposed of the corpse and gave the spoon a thorough scrubbing, but forgot all about the contaminated sauce – until the fateful moment when Marilla carries it in, warmed up, to serve their ritzy guests with the dessert.

Throwing caution to the wind, Anne rises in her place and shrieks before the assembled company, “Marilla, you mustn’t use that pudding sauce. There was a mouse drowned in it. I forgot to tell you before.”

The silence that descends is punctuated only by the look Mrs. Chester Ross gives Anne and the fiery complexion of Marilla, whisking away the pudding sauce.

The joy of this vignette is that it goes beyond a simple food flop into the realm of social irony. We don’t just have a mishap; we get to be onlookers as several different kinds of mishap occur in quick succession, under the horrified and ritzy nose of Mrs. Chester Ross. Why this situation, doubtless excruciating for its main actors, should be so entertaining for everyone else, remains one of the little mysteries of human nature.

In late-Victorian Prince Edward Island, creatures in the food are a decided solecism. “Are you sure there ain’t a spider in that cream jug, Kate?” inquires the catty Cousin Ernestine in Anne of Windy Poplars. “I’m afraid I saw one when you poured my cup.” “We never have spiders in our cream jugs,” is the ominous response, and the kitchen door slams. How different from the social setting aboard ship with Patrick O’Brien in the Georgian era, where the lesser of two weevils, emerging from the crumbs of the captain’s meal, is appreciated and praised.

Better-known in Anne of Green Gables is the disaster of the liniment cake. Anne, eager to impress the new minister’s wife who’s coming to tea, bakes a vanilla layer cake that is, to all external appearances, a showstopper.

Unseen in the background, however, Fate is quietly slipping lead into the boxing gloves (not my own expression; P.G. Wodehouse’s). The vanilla jar from which Anne poured the cake’s flavoring had been refilled with anodyne liniment, a vile-tasting herbal remedy. Anyone who’s been convinced to try Buckley’s Syrups (advertised as “the taste people love to hate”) will probably sympathize with the feelings of the poor minister’s wife, adjured to try a slice as Anne had made it especially for her. She can’t keep a poker face and the truth comes out, to Anne’s extreme embarrassment.

Despite these scarring incidents, people generally eat like kings in the Anne series. It’s all such comfort food, too. They’re constantly roasting chickens, fetching strawberry pies out of the pantry, and coming home of a winter’s evening to the smell of roasting ham and buttered toast.

Anne’s first taste of ice cream comes at the Sunday School picnic. They make the dessert right there and then in the old-fashioned, pre-electricity way, with the sweetened cream in a tin liner, placed in a bucket of salted ice and churned by hand until frozen. “Sublime,” is Anne’s review.

Though nowhere in Prince Edward Island can be called far from the sea, the delight of freshly caught fish only comes up in Book 5, after she marries Gilbert, now a doctor, and moves to a fishing town. The highlight of their first meal is the sea trout given to them by Captain Jim. “They’re fresh as trout can be, Mistress Blythe. Two hours ago they were swimming in the Glen Pond.”

Anne outgrows her trials with baking; her chocolate cake recipe is to become the envy of her best friend Diana, who guiltily sneaks slice after slice as they picnic together, slimming regime notwithstanding.

Anne is also fortunate in securing the culinary services of her loyal housekeeper Susan Baker, who knows her way around a mixing bowl, feathering “an orange-frosted cake with coconut” without a second thought and who fills the pages of the later Anne books with monkeyface cookies, gold-and-silver cake, jam roly-poly, stuffed leg of lamb and apple crunch pie.

In L.M. Montgomery’s world, the good eat well and like it; the bad do neither. Aunt Mary Maria, the nightmare guest who comes to visit and never leaves in Anne of Ingleside, is entirely unappreciative of the culinary delights proffered for her enjoyment and does her best to ruin everyone else’s enjoyment as well.

At Christmas dinner, her running commentary is as follows: “White meat only, please. (James, eat your soup quietly.) Ah, you are not the carver your father was, Gilbert. He could give everyone the bit she liked best. (Twins, older people would like a chance now and then to get a word in edgewise. I was brought up by the rule that children should be seen and not heard.) No, thank you, Gilbert, no salad for me. I don’t eat raw food. Yes, Annie, I’ll take a little pudding. Mince pies are entirely too indigestible.”

This frightful relative stays on for months and months, appreciating nothing yet dropping dark hints about selling her home and moving in with them forever. Politeness prevents Anne and Gilbert from showing a blood relation the door.

In the end, it’s a birthday cake that finally drives out their unbidden guest. Enraged by the 55 candles revealing her age to the party guests, Aunt Mary Maria packs up and stalks out, “forgiving everybody with her last breath.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
The tragedy of France’s palm oil croissants

Occasionally, a French person reveals – without any malice or superciliousness – that they run on an alternative operating system from us Brits. And on an entirely different motherboard from our American cousins.

Over the years of gathering supporting anecdotes, a surprising theme has emerged: butter. Take my first visit to Paris, more than 30 years ago. I innocently asked for butter with my croissant. Simple answer: “Non.” Naturally, I remonstrated. The waiter retorted: “A croissant eeez butter!”

And, in fairness, he had a point. Upon biting into said viennoiserie, I had to concede: it was nothing like the dry grocery store versions I was used to. Moments later, a small pot of raspberry confiture was graciously placed on my table. (To this day, it remains the best service I’ve ever received in Paris.)

Fast-forward 20 years. I’m in rural Brittany, ordering a ham and cheese baguette. This time, the young woman behind the counter asked if I’d like butter. “Mais bien sûr!” Clearly irritated by my overconfidence, she spread it thinly, added the fillings, and was about to wrap when I piped up with a final request. Mayonnaise? “But you already ’av butter!” Her revulsion was palpable.

Still smarting from my Paris humiliation decades earlier, I instinctively dug in. After all, I knew what I wanted. Butter and mayonnaise are hardly strangers in a sandwich – and I happen to be an expert in my own taste. She resentfully slopped some on, gratis. I asked for mayo on my wife’s sandwich too, if only to normalize it.

When we moved to France permanently, we rented a tiny house in the center of a small Catalan town. Our British landlord drew our attention to the croissantière just around the corner. Assuming this was a veritable French term for “croissant specialist” (it isn’t), I investigated the next morning. The croissants did not disappoint – still warm, they transported me back to that Parisian revelation. So naturally, I returned the next day. And the next…

“You’ll get fat,” the croissant-maker’s wife warned, deadpan, as she handed over the bag. I looked up, expecting a smile. There was none. I tried to hide my offense, but her comment bounced around my head for days. It wasn’t just the bluntness – it was the complete lack of commercial instinct. In the UK or US, such patronage would earn you loyalty points and a branded tote bag. In France, you receive an aesthetic warning.

Ashamed but still addicted, I tried to ration myself. Mercifully, a few years later, we moved to a nearby village with its own boulangerie. A fresh start. The next morning, brimming with anticipation, I bit into my new dealer’s wares. Gone was the delicate shatter of buttery lamination. Absent was the fragrant plume of warm dairy. What I tasted was more like… wax. Hydrogenated, seed-oil-infused wax. It stopped me mid-bite.

I soon learned the truth. Many bakeries, faced with high butter prices and early mornings, have outsourced croissant production to industrial suppliers. These “croissants in waiting” arrive frozen and full of margarine. A croissant pur beurre can contain up to 30 percent real butter by weight. The industrial kind? Next to nothing. But thanks to the slippery language of au beurre versus pur beurre, no one’s technically lying. Roquefort has a charter. Camembert has a lawyer. The croissant? No such protection.

I now conduct covert pastry runs to our neighboring town. I smuggle them home in unmarked bags, slipping them past my own boulangerie like a man hiding dinner receipts from his wife – except the mistress is covered in egg wash.

It’s tragic, considering the way the French can deify food, to witness them quietly debase it. The croissant, that most sacred of breakfast icons, is now often a margarine-infused counterfeit.

Frédéric Roy, a Nice-based baker, has tried to sound the alarm. His campaign to label industrial pastries has gained traction, but little legal weight. Meanwhile, “butter blend” croissants made with palm oil and diacetyl are increasingly sold as au beurre – just without the taste or conscience.

Healthwise, it’s a grim spectrum. On one end, the artisanal croissant – a golden coronary wrapped in charm. On the other, the industrial version: trans fat-free, yes, but with all the digestibility of a scented candle.

If you want to evaluate the prosperity of any French neighborhood, buy the most expensive croissant you can find. It will tell you the real story.

And perhaps that’s the truest measure of where France now finds itself: a country still wrapped in the golden flake of tradition, but filled more and more with something else entirely. The croissant was once a luxury. Then it became a daily pleasure. Now it’s a performance – ersatz, over-rehearsed and mostly margarine.

A rich pastry for a country that can no longer afford the substance, but insists on maintaining the form.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025