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Oct 4, 2024 | 
city-journal.org | Solveig Gold
Wesleyan University’s campus was abuzz last week after student protesters, demanding divestment from the “U.S.–Israeli Empire,” occupied an administrative building and refused to leave until the police arrived and threatened arrest. This was a new development for Wesleyan, whose president Michael Roth had boasted about not calling the police during the past year’s protests.
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
firstthings.com | Solveig Gold
Hope springs eternal for university administrators. After declining to punish student protestors who flagrantly flouted institutional rules (and even local laws) last year, they nevertheless seem to think that they will be able to rein in disruptive protests this fall. They’re introducing new policies, strengthening old policies, explicitly informing students about the policies, and pledging to enforce them—because this time, you see, kids, they really mean it.
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Jun 13, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Dot Wordsworth |Owen Matthews |Solveig Gold
“You make the cotton easy to pick, Mame,” sang my husband with execrable delivery. “No,” I said, “You can’t sing things like that now. In any case, I was talking of BAME, not Mame.”The hit musical from 1966, starring Angela Lansbury, has only the most tangential relevance to the latest lurch in approved terminology for what we were encouraged to call Black and Minority Ethnic people until that term was expelled from polite conversation. Now the trendy label is global majority.
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Jun 12, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Solveig Gold |Europe Why |Mark Galeotti
A new Pew Research poll with some stunning findings challenges common critiques from centrist and moderate politicos that the so-called “culture war” is a distraction or even imaginary. On the contrary, the results show a massive cultural chasm between Biden and Trump supporters that helps explain why America seems so politically divided — and why compromise often feels impossible.
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Jun 12, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Solveig Gold |Europe Why |Mark Galeotti
“We are really by far the biggest winner this evening,” said Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), when the European election exit polls were published last week. But although the Netherlands was first to go to the polls — with strong indications that the far right would be victorious — his “win” fell short of the storming result of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which has sparked a political earthquake in France.
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Jun 12, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Solveig Gold |Amber Duke |Jonathan Spyer |Arieh Kovler
The skies above the AtlanticAs airplane doors and Boeing stock prices continue to fall, I think it’s time to tell the story of my iPhone and how it spent almost a week last October trapped inside the belly of a Boeing 767. A few hours into a United flight home from London, I was standing up to check on my then-five-month-old daughter, who was sleeping sweetly in the bassinet beside her father, when I felt my iPhone slip between the armrest and the window.
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Jun 12, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Solveig Gold
The skies above the AtlanticAs airplane doors and Boeing stock prices continue to fall, I think it’s time to tell the story of my iPhone and how it spent almost a week last October trapped inside the belly of a Boeing 767. A few hours into a United flight home from London, I was standing up to check on my then-five-month-old daughter, who was sleeping sweetly in the bassinet beside her father, when I felt my iPhone slip between the armrest and the window.
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May 15, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Amelia Butler-Gallie |Solveig Gold |Europe Why
If modern America were ever to have its own “the Great God Pan is Dead” moment, it would arrive in the form of Popeyes and KFC celebrating 4/20 as a marketing boon. After all, what better way is there to signal the end of counterculture than by chomping down on some discounted fried chicken? Devotees of the “4/20” marijuana festival, commemorated globally each year, have bemoaned a string of corporate sponsorship deals which are, they sniff, at odds with the event’s hallowed “hippie” origins.
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May 13, 2024 | 
firstthings.com | Solveig Gold
In the entrance of historic Nassau Hall at the heart of Princeton University is Memorial Atrium, designed in 1920 to commemorate the Princeton students and alumni killed in battle. Six hundred and forty-six names are inscribed on its walls, including seventy who died in the Civil War. As campus legend has it, thirty-five died fighting for the Union and thirty-five for the Confederacy.
But the memorial does not say.
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May 7, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Ross Clark |Solveig Gold |Europe Why
No-one seems to like tourists any more. Last week Venice introduced its $5 entry charge — which merely buys you the right to go into the city and be ripped off by cafés and restaurants. On Tenerife, residents have been marching and daubing slogans on the walls “tourist — go home.” So much for free movement. Meanwhile, in Japan, a village near Mount Fuji is so fed up with Instagrammers that it is erecting a giant screen to hide the mountain.
