The Social World

Category: Culture

  • RIP Rob Reiner

    RIP Rob Reiner

    The death of the director and actor Rob Reiner in violent and unexplained circumstances is one of the most horrific and surprising stories to have emerged from Hollywood in living memory. One of the reasons why its elites live in areas such as Reiner’s exclusive neighborhood of Brentwood in California is precisely so that they will not be subject to the possibility of random violence in a way that less wealthy Americans face daily. Yet if news reports are to be believed, Reiner and his wife Michele were the victims of intrafamilial strife: a situation that all the gated walls and security cameras in the world could not ameliorate.

    It is particularly ironic that Reiner met such a horrible end, stabbed to death in his own home, because the vast majority of the films that he made, especially earlier in his career, were infused with a sense of all-American joyfulness and hope that made him, for a while, a filmmaker talked off in the same breath as Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg. Son of Hollywood royalty Carl Reiner, he began his career as an actor, most notably in the role of Meathead in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. It made him a household name, but also contributed to a sense of Reiner as a dumb, good-natured left-winger: he once remarked that “I could win the Nobel Prize and they’d write ‘Meathead wins the Nobel Prize.’”

    It was in part in an attempt to escape from this straitjacket of typecasting that Reiner switched from acting to directing – although he continued to appear onscreen throughout his career, both in his own films and in those of others – and the first picture that he made was a particular triumph, in the form of 1984’s rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. With a script that was co-written by Reiner along with its stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, it resulted in endless quotable lines – not least the description of an amp that “goes up to eleven” – and Reiner’s own performance as the hapless documentary maker Marty Di Bergi demonstrated his ability to play both warmth and uselessness on screen with great skill.

    The film’s modest success led to a new and hugely successful second wind for Reiner, whose first seven films as a director represent one of the most interesting and accomplished runs of form that any 20th-century filmmaker ever managed. He excelled at romantic comedies, which included the John Cusack vehicle The Sure Thing and, of course, the peerless When Harry Met Sally, but his varied repertoire included everything from Stephen King horror (Misery) and swashbuckling meta-comedy (The Princess Bride) to all-American military courtroom drama (A Few Good Men). Another King adaptation, the coming-of-age drama Stand By Me, is commonly regarded as one of the seminal films of the Eighties, and his pictures made huge amounts of money at the box office.

    Although Reiner never won an Oscar – he was nominated for producing A Few Good Men – and was probably, ironically enough, too versatile a talent to be seen as a true auteur, it was once a dependable badge of quality to see A Rob Reiner Film. He was also a skillful producer of high-end cinema through his Castle Rock production company, which was responsible for such modern-day classics as In The Line of Fire, The Shawshank Redemption and the loopy Malice, in which the Aaron Sorkin-doctored script allowed Alec Baldwin to declare, histrionically, “You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something. I AM GOD!”

    Any suggestion that Reiner had traded his soul to anyone – be it a deity or a devil – to achieve success came crashing down with his first megaflop, the Bruce Willis family comedy North, which attracted bemused reviews and repulsed audiences. He rebounded with the Sorkin-scripted The American President, a slick, assured piece of entertainment that inadvertently led to The West Wing, but his directorial career never reached the same heights again. Instead, for the next three decades, he either made undemanding comedies or soft-focus issue dramas that played to his status as one of Hollywood’s premier liberal filmmakers.

    The major exception was 2015’s Being Charlie, an unusually gritty drama about addiction and familial conflict that was explicitly autobiographical; it was co-written by his son Nick and was based on his life as an addict, as well as dealing with his strained relationship with his successful, distant father. The film was both a commercial and critical flop, and most journalists observed that there was a tension, both on and off-screen, between Reiner’s attempts to bring about reconciliation and a real-life happy ending for his troubled son, and Nick himself, who had clearly undergone experiences that no swell of orchestral music could compensate for. If reports of Reiner’s murder are accurate, then it will be this film – not this year’s lackluster Spinal Tap sequel, or indeed anything else in his great, distinguished career – that will be remembered, for all the wrong reasons. Which is an undeserved end to what was a fine life – right up until its horrific ending.

  • 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.

  • The science of marriage

    “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” With this stern admonition, the Church has long been a fervent defender of marriage. But as religion has faded as a social force, so too has marriage. 

    Does it much matter if people choose to shack up together instead of tying the knot? What is lost if some men want to be incels or some women decide a husband is a bothersome surplus to their needs? The problem is that all lifestyles alternative to marriage serve to undermine it. And like other major social institutions, marriage is not some arbitrary cultural construct like a federal holiday. Rather, it rests on genetically shaped behaviors that evolution has written into the human genome because of their survival value. Suppress or subvert these behaviors and you risk consequences.

    Evolution’s imperatives are deeply laid. Step back just a few beats in evolutionary time, to when early humans were exploring the African savannahs, using their wits to evade stronger predators. The human skull needed to expand, but the mother’s pelvis was a limitation. To pass through it, babies had to be born with their heads still small, which meant prematurely. These helpless infants were more likely to survive if two parents were around, unlike with the other great apes where the mother alone raises the offspring. Evolution supported the human family unit with two clever biological innovations, also unknown among other apes. Female chimpanzees sport visible swellings when they are ready to conceive but ovulation in humans became largely concealed, so a man wanting to ensure his paternity had to stick around until the first signs of pregnancy. And to encourage further association, evolution arranged for women to be sexually receptive all the time, not just at estrus.

    The pair bond between man and woman induces both partners to share in the arduous task of raising children. It’s this set of genetically shaped behaviors that is formalized in the cultural institution of marriage. The nature of the pair bond was somewhat modified with the advent of polygamy in tribal and successor societies, where powerful men were able to accrue many wives. Genghis Khan, the world champion in this pursuit, labored prodigiously in the large harems he assembled throughout the lands he conquered – and some 16 million men today carry his Y chromosome. But polygamy is destabilizing. For some men to have many wives means that many men have none. Large numbers of wifeless young men, with no stake in society, create problems. The usual solution was to march them off to war with neighboring states. But warfare doesn’t always turn out as expected.

    Monogamy first came to prominence in ancient Greece and Rome, and was spread by the Church throughout the Roman empire. So successful was the one man/one woman principle to the formation of stable polities that it eventually became the custom across most of the world. Marriage and monogamy are both stabilizing measures developed by culture in support of the behaviors prescribed by evolution. The human family is the best social structure that evolution could contrive for raising children. What happens when we mess with this structure and the institution of marriage that supports it?

    The answer, not to be overdramatic, is extinction – or at least a road that leads directly there. In almost all countries outside of Africa, fertility is in rapid decline. The total fertility rate in both the US and UK has dropped more than 20 percent since 2010 and last year reached all-time lows of 1.60 children per woman’s lifetime (US) and 1.41 for British women. For a population to sustain itself at constant size, a fertility rate of 2.1 is required.

    Bad things happen to declining populations. A dwindling workforce has to support an ever-heavier burden of retirees. Tax rates rise, hope for the future falls. Defense is imperiled if the army cannot meet its recruitment goals. Once a population slips below a fertility rate of about 1.4 for 20 years or so, it reaches a point of no return: retirees consume the resources young families would need to raise more children. Marriage is the context in which people have children. Some 80 percent of children born in the US and UK are born to married parents. People who cohabit have far fewer children. Children fare best when both a mother and father share in their upbringing. The declining rate of marriage is one of a nexus of factors that have depressed fertility. People are starting families later, or stopping at one child. One reason is the expense of raising children. Another is that women are now better educated than men and can easily find jobs, often choosing careers over childcare.

    In World War One, women handed out white feathers on the street to men presumed too cowardly to risk their lives on the front line. Should men now be distributing white feathers to women who decline to bear children, a social duty just as crucial for society’s survival as is military service? Well, no. Women cannot ethically be dragooned into bearing more children than they want. But the obvious incentives just don’t seem to work. South Korea has put in place every pro-natalist policy you can think of, from direct cash payments to housing subsidies and government-funded matchmaking. Its fertility rate hit 0.72 in 2023 and is projected to fall as low as 0.65 this year. Last year, 150 schools in South Korea reported that they had no new first-year children. Unless childbearing is somehow made a more welcome choice for women, and marriage comes back into popularity, each future generation will be smaller than its predecessor.

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

  • A transatlantic party route

    A transatlantic party route

    Breaker Media, which has established itself as one of New York City’s foremost bean-spillers, hosted its first shindig at the West Village’s Super Burrito. Exuberant Aussie founder Lachlan Cartwright, an unashamedly old-school hack with a business card wedged in the brim of his fedora, mounted the bar and gave an impassioned speech: “I might as well have called this Broken Media because it’s almost broken me! But I’m having the time of my life.” So too were the guests as they guzzled martinis and snagged cigarettes from bowls on the tables. During one cig break, I had my fortune read by one of the party’s hired psychics. She said all the right things – “born under a lucky star, many children etc.” – but I was too distracted by a stilettoed, ankle-tagged Anna Delvey about to have her fortune read on the next table. Who’s conning whom?

    Uptown for a wine supper at the Brook Club hosted by Theo Osborne, younger brother of former British chancellor George. The guest speaker was former UK defense secretary Grant Shapps, who rose to toast the “special relationship.” He spoke of our precious democracies, our common foes and the importance of investment in defense. From the lady on my right, I heard a wild story about a woman who went for a boob job in Turkey, only to be told at her next doctor’s visit that one of her kidneys was missing. The woman on my left, meanwhile, asked me to guess her ancestry. Hoping I would fall into the trap and say “Asian,” she was startled when, having developed an obsession with the Comanche as a young boy, I correctly identified her as Native American. But I had my tribes wrong. The lady in question was a quarter Crow.

    Air Mail sang its swansong at the launch of the Tom Wolfe Prizes for Fiction and Reportage at the Waverly Inn, hosted by Air Mail founder, and Waverly owner, Graydon Carter. The prize recognizes young authors in the “new journalism” tradition pioneered by Wolfe, whom Carter described in his speech as “the most inventive writer since P.G. Wodehouse.” Seth Meyers emceed and the room was packed with familiar faces: Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Walter Isaacson. All the Air Mail/Vanity Fair gang were present – many commenting how this inaugural event felt oddly more like a farewell dinner, even though its acquisition by Puck, the newsletter start-up founded by former Graydon Carter staffer Jon Kelly, had yet to close. Since then, the $16 million deal has closed. According to Breaker, this means it is being sold at a loss. But that is not what is grating on Carter, who stepped down as part of the deal. What irks him is that Kelly is a former assistant. No master likes being gamed by his apprentice.

    The British Museum threw its inaugural Pink Ball last month. Fêted as London’s answer to New York’s Met Ball, it raised more than £2.5 million for the museum’s international partnerships. But not everyone was rosy about it. An Energy Embargo for Palestine activist who, passing as a waitress, interrupted British Museum chairman George Osborne’s speech to rail against its sponsorship deal with BP. Unfurling a banner reading “Drop BP now!” she squealed: “If the British Museum truly wants to confront its cultural legacy, it should look at the way it is actively upholding imperialism today.” Osborne handled the situation like any seasoned politician – “It is great to live in a democracy where we have a right to protest, etc.” – before the waitress was escorted out.

    I could have used some of George’s polish when I later had the chance to meet one of my heroes. I was having an amusing moment with Daphne Guinness – something I had said about the passage of time causing her to break into an operatic rendition of David Bowie’s 1972 “Five Years” – when she offered to introduce me to Mick Jagger. I couldn’t think of anything to say so I told Mick we had just been singing “Five Years.” “Right,” was his understandable response. What I should have told him was the story of how my father was once photographed sitting between him and Imran Khan at the 1996 Cricket World Cup final in Lahore; they had partied together the night before. The newspaper’s front-page photo caption the next day read “Mr. Imran Khan, Mr. Somebody and Mr. Mick Jagger.”

    While at dinner, I heard the sad news that Lady Annabel Goldsmith had died. Annabel lived a colorful life, marrying two larger-than-life characters in Mark Birley and Jimmy Goldsmith and raising five children. I had the pleasure of interviewing her years ago for a book I’m putting together about my grandfather, the conservationist John Aspinall. They remained great friends, despite an incident which might have destroyed their relationship. In 1970, Aspers took Annabel and her children into the tiger enclosure at his wild animal park, Howletts, in Kent, England. But on this occasion, the tigress Zorra was acting unpredictably and pounced on Annabel’s son Robin, locking her jaws around his face. After being wrenched free, Robin was rushed to hospital with half his face missing; he would have to undergo years of facial reconstruction surgery. When Annabel and I discussed this incident, I was astonished at how she harbored no feelings of blame. Instead, she took full responsibility for having listened to Aspers and not to her own maternal instinct. By all accounts, this was typical Annabel: resilient, uncomplaining, forgiving. RIP.

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

  • Why are we so obsessed with Hitler’s penis?

    We care about Adolf Hitler’s penis, as a society. Quite a lot, it seems. A British documentary claims, finally, to have solved the mystery of the Nazi leader’s schwanz – was it big or was it small? – and to have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the famous chant of “Hitler’s only got one ball,” a favorite among British soldiers, wasn’t just an idle insult.

    The key evidence is genetic: a blood-stained piece of fabric from the Hitler bunker. The documentary filmmakers tested it against a sample from one of Hitler’s closest living relatives to make sure the blood was his. And it was. That meant his genome could be sequenced and then analyzed for genetic clues about his personality, health and, of course, his manhood.

    A similar venture in 2014 failed when the disgraced historian David Irving sold filmmakers a strand of the Führer’s hair – only for it to turn out to be someone else’s. The documentary puts to bed some persistent myths about Hitler, not least of all the secret Jewish ancestry thing. Hitler was not secretly Jewish. But what about his penis? A missing nucleotide base suggests Hitler had Kallmann Syndrome, a condition that affects the onset and course of puberty and can lead to various forms of genital malformation, as well as lifelong low testosterone. Around10 percent of sufferers will have a micro-penis: a very small penis, typically less than 2.7 inches in length when erect. But none of this proves anything. It doesn’t prove Hitler had a micropenis or any other kind of physical anomaly, not even low testosterone. It just makes these things more probable.

    As we might expect, the documentary relies more on innuendo and supposition than hard fact. There is, at least, a medical report from the early 1920s that says Hitler had an undescended right testicle. Otherwise that’s it. The report was only discovered in 2010, so it can’t have been the basis of the famous chant. The film asks why Hitler would have asked to be cremated. Was he trying to hide something? The answer, actually, is that he made the request late in the war, after he saw the mess Italian partisans made of his old friend Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci. He didn’t want to suffer the same fate. But surely something must have been really bugging Hitler to make him so power-mad? Surely he must have been compensating for something to want to invade Czechoslovakia and then Poland, and then France and then Norway and then, fatefully, the Soviet Union? No normal man with a normal penis would want to do that.

    Here we reach the crux of the matter. I’m not about to launch a defense of Hitler and his virility. But I do think it’s worth asking, quite seriously, why we believe any of this matters. There is a “small penis theory of history,” and its target is always those who might once, before the advent of Leopold von Ranke, have been called “Great Men”: towering figures who, for good or ill, decided the fate of nations and whole epochs. This theory has a wide currency. You’ll hear it at middle-class dinner parties. You’ll read it in tabloid papers and “serious” books, too. Virtually every ruler, especially a ruler of a more dictatorial bent, is accused at some point of having a small penis. In our own time, Vladimir Putin has been; and, of course, Donald Trump, including by former porn star Stormy Daniels.

    Perhaps the most insidious variant of this tendency is something I call the gay interpretation of history. Rather like the Whig view of history, which sees everywhere and at all times a move towards the sunny uplands of “progress,” this degraded vision sees everywhere and at all times a move out of the closet into open homosexuality.

    Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Achilles and Patroclus, the Spartans at Thermopylae, cowboys, pirates, soldiers, martial artists – any male figure from history is liable to be branded a repressed homosexual.

    I was on the receiving end of such claims myself when I appeared in the 2022 Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men, which was about plummeting testosterone levels and some of the things young men are doing to reclaim their masculinity. Those things included lifting weights, cleaning up their diets, doing martial arts, shooting guns and just spending time with other like-minded young men. The trailer for the documentary, which featured a montage of these activities, was greeted with howls of derision in the media. Talking heads and celebrities, everyone from Stephen Colbert and Cenk Uygur to George Takei, announced virtually in unison that The End of Men was a barely concealed gay Nazi fever-dream.

    In his celebrated book The Four Loves, published in 1960, C.S. Lewis offered a withering rebuttal to the claim male friendship harbors a secret – or not-so-secret – sexual core. “Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact they have never had a friend,” he said.

    It’s easy to blame Freud, the man who did more than anyone else, perhaps, to place sexuality at the center of our understanding of, well, everything. Yet, as much as I don’t like the Viennese witch-doctor, I’m not sure that’s right. There’s a reductive tendency in western thought that stretches back longer than the early 20th century.

    We can say, though, with some certainty what the effects are. The reaction to The End of Men is a fine illustration: instead of empowering young men to improve their lives, society tells them to distrust their instincts and desires, to retreat from friendship and ambition and, for heaven’s sake, not to make a noise. “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful,” said Lewis; we make “men without chests.” Lewis meant that metaphorically, but it’s also true in the most literal sense. Men possess a psychological and emotional depth and a range of needs that can’t be reduced to the heat between their legs. The sooner we appreciate that, the sooner we’ll understand the best – and worst – of what men have to offer. Until then, our conception of men will remain small, shriveled and not much use for anything.

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

  • Tom Stoppard was himself to the end

    Tom Stoppard was himself to the end

    “Tom Stoppard is dead.” For anyone who cares for the theater, the English language, and especially for those of us who knew him, these words are as unthinkable as they are hard to bear. How can such a force of nature, such a generosity of spirit, such a voice of sanity, have fallen silent?

    And yet he has gone. To the end, his body emaciated by cancer, he was still the old Tom: self-deprecating but full of ideas and plans. He might have one more play inside him, he told me, but his fingers could no longer physically write and dictation somehow stopped the words from flowing. He was cared for by his magnificent wife Sabrina, who entertained us tirelessly.

    A few months ago he rang out of the blue, as he sometimes did, to talk about my father, Paul Johnson, who was his dear friend over many decades and to whom he dedicated Night and Day, his play about journalism. Tom had learned his trade as a local journalist and freedom of expression was his lifelong cause. And he mercilessly mocked those who took liberties with such freedom. As one character in that play remarks: “I don’t mind the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”

    This was the master of comedy who never let us forget that no life is without tragedy, yet that we are redeemed by love. He made the world laugh in our darkest days: from the existentialism of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to the anarchism of Jumpers and Travesties, from the epic grandeur of The Coast of Utopia to the intimate agonies of The Real Thing, the poetry of Arcadia, the physics of The Hard Problem and the dialectics of Rock n’ Roll.

    Tom’s last and most autobiographical play was Leopoldstadt, which depicts the fate of a Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 to 1955. Older fans had expected more laughs, but this was a subtler, less uproarious kind of humor. By the end, Stoppard had become the ironic Englishman.

    Ideas and mathematics, art and music pepper the conversation in Leopoldstadt, his last play and his only tragedy, as they do throughout his oeuvre. The adjective “Stoppardian” embraces everything from bittersweet nostalgia to verbal pyrotechnics, but there is nothing frivolous about his achievement. Stoppard’s legacy bears comparison with the greatest luminaries of the theatrical tradition that stretches from Shakespeare and Marlowe to Beckett and Pinter. Tom Stoppard knew that tyrants who long to be feared quake at the sound of laughter.

  • Trump blames Biden for shooting of National Guardsmen

    Trump blames Biden for shooting of National Guardsmen

    In response to the attack on Thanksgiving eve by a suspected Afghan national upon two West Virginia National Guardsmen, President Trump demanded a renewed effort to expel illegal immigrants. During a brief and uncompromising address from West Palm Beach that bore the rhetorical fingerprints of White House advisor Stephen Miller, Trump ripped into illegal immigration and former president Joe Biden.

    The President deemed the influx of refugees from Afghanistan and elsewhere the “single greatest national-security threats” facing America. Biden was a “disastrous president.” Trump reserved special scorn for his detractors who he said purport to protect constitutional liberties but are leaving America exposed to rampant criminality. One big problem for Trump, however, is that although the suspected shooter was “mass paroled” into the country and immigrated here in 2021, he was apparently approved for asylum in April 2025 – by the Trump administration.

    It was Biden, Trump implied, who, more than anyone else, was culpable for the descent of American cities into criminality. To listen to Trump it might have seemed as though Biden had flown in Afghans expressly for the purpose of targeting innocent Americans. Indeed, Trump averred that not only Afghans but also Somalis are pillaging America. He declared, “We must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here, or add benefit to our country.” Trump has already called for the termination of special status for Somalis living in Minnesota, a stance that he is likely to double down on.

    Throughout his speech, Trump’s rhetoric was sweeping. But Trump’s actual response – an additional 500 National Guardsmen to be deployed to the nation’s capital – was not. Trump, for example, could have declared that he intends to terminate Washington’s Home Rule and return to the days of yore when the federal government ran the district. Perhaps he envisions such a prospect.

    Trump’s critics are arguing that the same measures he took to impose law and order are creating the very havoc he decries. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer stated that the Guardsmen should “never have been” in Washington in the first place. The White House responded by calling her a “disgusting ghoul.” But others are voicing their disquiet with the stationing of federal troops in Washington as well.

    Their cautions will surely be portrayed by Trump and his advisers as an exercise in pusillanimity. The shooting took place near Farragut Square. In the center of the square is a prominent statue dedicated to the legendary Admiral David Farragut. Inscribed on the plinth of the statue is his credo, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” Will Trump follow suit?

  • When will the Beatles bandwagon end?

    When will the Beatles bandwagon end?

    The Beatles broke up in 1970, but you wouldn’t know it from the activity of the last few years. In no particular order, we have had an underwhelming valedictory single, “Now and Then,” raised from the dead thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence and Peter Jackson alike; an eight-hour – eight!– documentary, Get Back, resurrected from the footage of the Let It Be sessions; and now, an all-singing, all-dancing reissue on Disney+ of the Nineties Anthology documentary series, which has been promoted with the fourth volume of offcuts and rare tracks from the band’s career, appropriately titled Anthology 4.

    Even the biggest fan of the Beatles in the world – and I believe them to be the greatest band there has ever been – might be forgiven for feeling somewhat overwhelmed at this artistic necrophilia. Forty-five years after John Lennon was assassinated, the Beatles are now purely the preserve and creation of Paul McCartney, and the amiable but ruthless Liverpudlian has ensured that “his” band continues to be seen as a trendsetting, risk-taking enterprise. Hence this rag-tag assortment of 36 tracks, running a shade under two hours.

    In truth, anyone who has already purchased many of the reissued Beatles albums over the years, including Let It Be… Naked – McCartney stripping the band’s underwhelming final release of the Phil Spector overdubs – will have heard many of the tracks, meaning that only casual fans will find this wholly original. And I doubt that most casual fans will be especially bothered by the opportunity to hear, say, the orchestral arrangements for “I Am The Walrus” and “Something” – the latter of which sounds like really good film music and makes one salute George Martin’s skills as an arranger – or a third take version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

    The earlier material, meanwhile, is charming – such as the first take of “In My Life,” a song that only grows in poignancy and pathos as the years go by – but it also reminds the listener that over the decade or so that the Beatles were in operation, they had a remarkably swift trajectory from highly successful, polished pop music to daring, boundary-pushing experimentation that was nevertheless always rooted in the Tin Pan Alley-esque basics of great, classical songwriting savvy. It is nigh-on impossible to listen to the final three songs on Abbey Road and not be deeply affected by McCartney attempting to make his peace with a legacy that has, of course, defined his life and work ever since. No wonder he sang “Boy, you’re going to carry that weight a long time”; for the last 55 years, that weight has indeed been carried, through thick and thin alike.

    Anthology 4 will not be the last release of the Beatles. The nearly unlistenable experimental jam Carnival of Light has never been officially (or unofficially) released, and it seems likely that one day McCartney will set it free from its cage, and there are many hundreds of other versions of songs, takes, instrumentals and the like waiting to appear on Anthology 13 and the like. For the committed aficionado, who can have an hour-long argument about whether the sixth or eighth take of the studio version of “Hello Goodbye” is superior, this will be nothing less than nirvana.

    Yet I can’t help thinking – allied to the underwhelm of “Now and Then” – that, for the first time, the sheer accumulation of detail and trivia runs the risk of letting daylight in upon magic, and making the Beatles seem, well, ordinary – which is something that they never were, or never could be. Perhaps McCartney and Ringo, who are both awaiting the Sam Mendes-directed films about each member of the band – expected in 2028 – might be advised to step in and say, “Right lads, enough is enough”, and to let the whole, magnificent enterprise rest in dignity. You might even say that it was time to let it be.

  • They should never make another James Bond film

    They should never make another James Bond film

    The 25th and most recent entry in the James Bond franchise, No Time to Die, premiered over four years ago. Since then, there has nonetheless been Bond drama. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, and with it the rights to 007. But it took several more years to wrest producer control from Eon productions, run by the Broccoli family’s Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, scions of the filmic spy empire created by their father Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. (The family claims that the vegetable is named after them, their fortune having been founded by crossing rabe with cauliflower.)

    Most recently, writers for the long-delayed upcoming 26th Bond film, set to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, appear to be stumped, plotwise. According to an unnamed “source close to the production” who spoke to RadarOnline, “Writers are tearing their hair out.” At the end of No Time to Die, “Bond didn’t just vanish off a cliff or fake his death – he was blown to pieces on screen. Everyone agrees it was a massive mistake because Bond is supposed to be eternal. They are now stuck trying to find a believable way to resurrect him, and it is proving almost impossible.”

    It’s a conundrum for sure. Let me modestly suggest an obvious solution: Bond, having died, can stay dead. There should never be another Bond movie. He has lived his life and fulfilled his purpose.

    No Time to Die ended the internally coherent, five-film Daniel Craig saga neatly. Having long since run out of Ian Fleming novels to base movies on, the producers had taken to plumbing the lore of the franchise itself, inventing more backstory for a character so iconic that merely saving the world was not enough. For Craig’s Bond, that meant wrestling with an inability to form trusting, lasting relationships with women – given how many of his femmes turn out to be fatale – and adding baddies that turn out to have a connection to his childhood past, such as the reveal in Spectre (2015) that longtime series big bad Ernst Stavro Blofeld is Bond’s adoptive brother.

    No Time to Die, despite some criticism that it had made Bond “woke” by turning Q gay and having the 007 moniker taken up by a black woman, thus found the logical and indeed only way to level up the stakes for a hero who had already bedded 60 years’ worth of Earth’s most gorgeous women, driven the coolest cars, defused nukes, been to space, and helped defeat the Soviet empire: It made him a father. Its climactic scene sees 007 sacrificing himself for his little girl as he tells her mother over the radio, “Madeline, you have made the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Perfect, because she came from you.” Léa Seydoux’s Madeline assures him, in a stoic attempt to hide her heartbreak with flirtation, that “she does have your eyes.” Bond’s last words are “I know, I know.” Perhaps parents never really die.

    The genius of the James Bond character, and the reason it became the most iconic film franchise of all time, is that it fulfills two fantasies at once. The first is of a Britain that did not come undone after winning World War Two. The post-war Britain in which the novels appeared was still in an era of rationing, and it salved a great society’s wounded ego to imagine that her majesty’s agents were not only saving the world, but doing so while sipping Bollinger. The second is male wish-fulfillment. Put a suave man in a situation where competently applied violence is the answer, and he’ll have found his purpose – or so he imagines. Shake (not stir) these two fantasies together, and that’s why people love 007.

    No Time to Die had to deal with the baggage of 60 years of film audiences who had already seen Bond fulfill all those wishes, though. So it drew on the unfairly hated source text of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the sixth film, starring one-timer George Lazenby. In both No Time to Die and OHMSS, we see Bond undo a sinister biological-weapons plot and drive the same Aston Martin DBS to the same baleful Louis Armstrong song. We also see him break the canonical formula of self-contained stories to do some family formation, in this case getting married to Tracy Bond, who is then tragically gunned down in his arms.

    Whether or not the producers intended No Time to Die to be woke, it is a deeply conservative movie, a paean to the goodness of bourgeois values. Its message is ultimately that the best, highest calling of a man is not to be as good at seducing women as possible or at doing violence as possible, which is the thinking of a young man. No, it is to have a family, to be a husband and father, something no number of flings or amount of skill with a Walther PPKs could begin to approach. That is what gave the writers the artistic license to kill Bond at the end of No Time to Die. Our hero had finally actually, after all this time, figured out how to be a man.

  • Give Stellan Skarsgård an Oscar for Sentimental Value

    Give Stellan Skarsgård an Oscar for Sentimental Value

    Recently, a friend of mine found himself having a bad day for a reason I now forget. I made a lousy attempt to cheer him up. “Omnia in bonum,” I said to him – all things work together for good. The Latin phrase has served as a salve for me in hard times. Little did I know that I had just made things much worse. He was visibly shaken. I asked him what was wrong. I had unknowingly stirred memories of his parents’ difficult and traumatizing divorce, during which that same phrase had been used by them in a pointless attempt to assuage their children’s sadness.

    The idea that a phrase, a memory or an object can be simultaneously cursed for one person and blessed for another had never occurred to me. It has occurred to the Finnish filmmaker Joachim Trier. In his most recent feature, Sentimental Value, the Borg family home in Oslo is a haunted place for some and a beloved object for others. For some, it is imbued with the memory of a mother’s suicide; for others, with the happy memories of family life before a divorce. The house has a structural crack that threatens to bring down the entire edifice – much like the family.

    The film follows Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a once-celebrated film director, who, after the death of his former wife, attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) by making a movie based on the life and death of his own mother. He attempts to recruit Nora, now a successful but troublesome stage actress, to play the leading role. Once she refuses, he strives to find a suitable replacement, fixing on American superstar Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), although he has clearly written the role for Nora.

    Stellan Skarsgård stands out. His role as Gustav is a career best. The film, in more ways than one, falls on his shoulders. He’s an actor who’s become so ubiquitous that we seem to have forgotten how good he can be. Though he has in recent years taken to playing menacing villains, here he embodies a vulnerable, tortured artist.

    Trier, who first gained international acclaim for The Worst Person in the World (2021), is concerned with the nature of art as a medium for connection and understanding. Art is frequently promoted as an instrument for communion and empathy. Whether true or not, arguments in favor of this happy view regularly take the form of new-age gibberish. “True art is about empathy and bringing us into the world of others,” we’re told. But what does this process actually look like?

    After years of estrangement, Gustav’s attempts at reconnection – accompanied by seemingly trite and forced shows of affection – are viewed with suspicion by Agnes and rejected outright by Nora. “I recognize myself in you,” he tells his daughter. To which she replies that he does not even know her.

    Can we know someone as he truly is? Through the writing of his film’s script, Gustav strives to empathize and understand his mother’s depression and eventual suicide. “Why did she do it? What could she have possibly been thinking?” How does one reach such levels of despair? Gustav’s script depicts the beautiful prayer of a woman to a God she’s not even sure exists. She calls God into the dock, and receives only silence as a response. Unbeknownst to Gustav, this scene closely resembles Nora’s personal experience with depression, which eventually led to a suicide attempt.

    Compassion is a sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress. In art, however, as in life, compassion must go much deeper than mere awareness of another’s pain. It draws us to “suffer with” or to share in someone else’s passions. Through his journey to find answers to his own life, which was deeply affected by his mother’s depression and suicide, Gustav is unwittingly drawn into Nora’s own depression. After realizing that Rachel Kemp is not the right fit for the part, the future of the film is threatened. He has his own brush with despair, suffering as Nora has suffered, further deepening his connection to her.

    After reading the script, Nora accepts the role. Living out the script that Gustav has written makes her see the house as he does. Acting allows her to do what all art should do: to see the world through the author’s eyes. In this film, Gustav and Nora play out the roles of artist and spectator.

    And yet, the crack remains. It’s clear that art won’t completely seal the gap between father and daughter. Trier does not idealize the role of art. Fundamental differences between individuals are ever-present. Art cannot, as through magic, bridge all the gaps and fix all the cracks. Art initiates a process of offering consolation, if not resolution, which is all we can hope for. Through art, the family, like the house, though divided, still stands.