FROM THE MAGAZINE

July 2023

Spectator Editorial

How will the decline of cable news affect politics?

2024 is already shaping up to feel very different from previous, TV-news-dominated campaigns

By Spectator Editorial

From the Magazine

Diary

Reminders of the Cold War in Vienna and Budapest

Apparently an acquaintance has dubbed me the ‘Kremlinologist of the right’

By Jacob Heilbrunn

From the Magazine

Media

Can the 2024 election save cable news?

The two networks that a few decades ago changed the way the world consumes news are each facing oncoming storms

By Aidan McLaughlin

From the Magazine

Media

Tucker Carlson can live without Fox News. Can they live without him?

‘You can tell when someone’s lying to you or when someone’s shading the truth or trying to spin you’

By Chadwick Moore

From the Magazine

Europe

How the Ukraine war remade our world

Victory against Russia will always be just around the corner

By Daniel McCarthy

From the Magazine

Culture

Je suis Karen

In a country spinning out of control, we need Karens more than ever

By Kara Kennedy

From the Magazine

Politics

Markwayne Mullin: the Senate’s stoic brawler

‘If you do manage to get Mullin talking, he has a lot to say’

By Ben Domenech

From the Magazine

Business

Why conservative boycotts should terrify corporations

The Bud Light row has awoken a new kind of consumer activism on the right

By Amber Duke

From the Magazine

Business

Maine’s lobstermen are a dying breed

Excessive regulation is killing an age-old industry

By Teresa Mull

From the Magazine

Family

You can never escape the suburbs

How I learned to stop worrying and love the ’burbs

By Bridget Phetasy

From the Magazine

Politics

What happened to QAnon?

Still waiting for the storm

By Ben Sixsmith

From the Magazine

Europe

What did the Habsburgs ever do for us?

Eduard Habsburg thinks the world has a lot to learn from his imperial family

By Will Collins

From the Magazine

Education

In praise of encyclopedias

Two new books take on the amorphous subject of knowledge

By Peter W. Wood

From the Magazine

Health

Why today’s teenagers are so unhappy

Dr. Jean Twenge explains why we are right to worry about Gen Z

By Mary Wakefield

From the Magazine

Campaign 2024

The known unknowns of 2024

‘Trump can’t win,’ say his rivals. What makes them so sure?

By Roger Kimball

From the Magazine

Europe

The Polish miracle

How the Eastern European country grew powerful and prosperous

By John Pietro

From the Magazine

Education

How the ancients handled old age

Cicero’s dialogue on old age recommended remaining active both physically and mentally and regarding death as something to be welcomed

By Peter Jones

From the Magazine

Education

Why civics test scores are falling in American schools

For the next generation, history isn’t being rewritten. It’s being intentionally obscured

By Bethany Mandel

From the Magazine

Books + Arts

Books

The great late Yeats

A century ago, W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize. It was the start of a remarkable late era for the Irish poet

By Anne Margaret Daniel

From the Magazine

Book Review

Why is George Orwell so difficult to pin down?

The writer is an easy man to admire and sympathize with, but a hard one to like

By Alexander Larman

From the Magazine

Book Review

Lady Caroline Lamb and the frantic bed-hopping between the great houses of England

Antonia Fraser paints a convincing, shocking picture of upper-class mores in the late eighteenth century

By Harry Mount

From the Magazine

Book Review

Lorrie Moore explores the thin veil between life and death

It’s hard to find writers ancient or modern who have used language with a music, wit and tenderness comparable to Moore’s

By Margaret Mitchell

From the Magazine

Books

The troubled relationship between Mussolini and his son-in-law

Count Galeazzo Ciano’s career is uniquely revealing as an insight into the perils of joining the family business

By Christopher Sandford

From the Magazine

Book Review

Men at War examines homosexuality among World War Two soldiers

Luke Turner’s essential thesis is that the war opened up a brief time of sexual liberation for men

By Philip Womack

From the Magazine

Music

The history of a Britney Spears masterpiece

Blackout laid the foundation for the EDM revolution, Lady Gaga’s self-referential debut album and the rest of the past fifteen years of pop

By Mitchell Jackson

From the Magazine

Theater

Taking in Good Night, Oscar and New York, New York

Good Night, Oscar takes us back to a time when, for better or worse, both foibles and felonies were targets for humor

By Robert S. Erickson

From the Magazine

Art

What the Old Masters can teach us about contemporary life

In many of their most enduring images, the Old Masters did not shy away from asking ‘Why?’ in the face of suffering and trauma

By William Newton

From the Magazine

Art

The surreal life of Leonora Carrington

The artist and writer’s life is the story of the twentieth century in microcosm

By Francesca Peacock

From the Magazine

Food

Heidi Swanson, the whole food revolutionary

In an effort to lighten up my diet for the summer, I explored the 101 Cookbooks catalogue

By Mary Kate Skehan

From the Magazine

Life

High Life

Goodbye, my dear Low Life colleague

Jeremy Clarke was the patron saint of the poor but happy

By Taki

From the Magazine

Low Life

I’m not complaining about clocking out early

I am being soaped down by my wife and a Czech lady with raspberry hair — and with not the slightest suggestion of eroticism or intimacy

By Jeremy Clarke

From the Magazine

London Life

Literary festivals are no fun

Writers aren’t fun — they’re miserable egotists and that’s why we write

By Cosmo Landesman

From the Magazine

American Life

How the NCAA twisted women’s sports

It wasn’t supposed to be this way

By Bill Kauffman

From the Magazine

Prejudices

The Age of Unreason

It it is becoming plain that civilization cannot go on forever. Does this imply that it should never have existed at all?

By Chilton Williamson, Jr.

From the Magazine

Life

At home with Jacob Rees-Mogg

Jacob Rees-Mogg has, in recent years, become a caricature of a British conservative

By Kara Kennedy

From the Magazine

Place

Place

Return to The Hague

Revisiting the de facto Dutch capital blurs time and space

By Timothy Jacobson

From the Magazine

Place

Tears, tangles and tremendous views in Cape Town

In return for heavenly hospitality, astonishing scenery and laugh-until-you-cry moments, checking our priorities is a small price to pay

By Amy Rose Everett

From the Magazine

Food and Drink

Food

Alison Roman talks dessert

In her new book, Sweet Enough, Roman wants to free the home cook from the dessert ties that bind them

By Olivia Potts

From the Magazine

Drink

Where to drink in Miami

The only thing to interrupt the music is good conversation, good drinks, and the sound of the Brightline

By Nicholas Clairmont

From the Magazine

Food

A dispatch from the olive oil capital of the world

So unending is the expanse and relentlessness of Jaén’s olive groves, I might as well have been at sea

By James Jeffrey

From the Magazine

Food

The American tradition of barbecue is a long and storied one

Whoever thinks America’s great addition to world cuisine is fast food clearly hasn’t had a steak straight off the open-flame grill

By Hannah Moore

From the Magazine

Drink

A drinker’s diary

Highlights from a merry month

By Roger Kimball

From the Magazine

And Finally

And Finally

In defense of rats

We shouldn’t ignore the vast sacrifices they have made in the history of human flourishing

By Jon Day

From the Magazine

And Finally

Why is ‘NPC’ an insult?

The metaphor is an accusation of being a zombie or inhuman replicant, or of being caught in a world of lies

By Dot Wordsworth

From the Magazine