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1 month ago | 
quillette.com | Evan Morris |Steve Salerno |Adam Garfinkle |Jonathan Kay
To understand how biomedical scientists feel as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk aim their bazookas at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recall how you felt when the Taliban aimed their bazookas at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. âSenselessâ may be one word that springs to mind. âPermanentâ might be another. But the destruction of NIH is in many ways worse than the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
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1 month ago | 
quillette.com | Steve Salerno |Adam Garfinkle |Jonathan Kay |Greg Koabel
I was 23 the first time I heard the word spoken with real malice in my physical presence. This was, unmistakably, not the fraternal versionâthe one ending in the soft â-aâ that edgy black comics employ in their bonding moments with outgoing black presidents.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
quillette.com | John Lloyd |Benny Morris |Steve Salerno |Brian Stewart
A few hours after Donald Trump’s re-election as US president was confirmed, the former Democratic presidential candidate and governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, argued that the result would force Europe to grow up. “No question,” he told the BBC’s World at One, “Europe has to learn to stand on its own. The day of the United States setting the tone, especially in defence, is gone. This will put an enormous stress on the EU. The US is no longer going to be reliable to deal with Ukraine, with Russia. ...
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Benny Morris |Steve Salerno |Brian Stewart |Claire Lehmann
Introduction: My guest this week is Nick Osmond-Jones. Nick is a former researcher at the Office of the Ombudsperson in British Columbia, Canada. He resigned from his job because he felt that he was not able to speak out openly about what he saw as an increasingly censorious atmosphere of ideological social-justice lockstep.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Benny Morris |Steve Salerno |Brian Stewart |Claire Lehmann
When Israel’s October 1973 war ended, many commentators concluded that the Arabs’ Soviet-built surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) had “bent the wings” of the famed Israel Air Force (IAF), which six years earlier, in the Six Day War of June 1967, had completely demolished the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—and destroyed some Iraqi aircraft—in a single day.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Steve Salerno |Brian Stewart |Claire Lehmann |Kevin Mims
Sophia Corinne Salerno did not cry at her birth—and, at least in the two short years I knew her, seldom cried thereafter. She entered my life with eyes open and unblinking; from the first, she took her breaths with a calm self-possession that would prove invaluable in weathering the drawn-out nightmare of her parents’ uncoupling. It was Sophia’s misfortune to be born into a relationship whose principal players were united in just two things: their love for her and their contempt for one another.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Zoe Booth |Benny Morris |Steve Salerno |Brian Stewart
This was originally published in The Australian on 4 November 2024. The backlash to Lidia Thorpe’s hate-filled tirade against an elderly, cancer-stricken King has attracted all manner of opinion and headlines over the last fortnight. According to Nikki Gemmell’s piece in The Weekend Australian, (“When females speak out, they’re punished”, 1–2/11), it’s almost entirely about her gender. But the response to Thorpe’s latest outburst had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with character.
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Feb 6, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Julian Adorney |Richard Goldberg |Steve Salerno
Why have so many American leftists spent the last nine years dunking on Donald Trump’s supporters instead of seeking to understand them? With Trump likely to become the Republican nominee in this year’s U.S. presidential election, it’s a question worth asking. In many online spaces, Trump supporters are routinely dismissed as cult members and white supremacists consumed with misogyny. In the best case, the idea goes, they want to take America back to the 1950s.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Steve Salerno |Aaron Sarin |Norman Goda
America was founded in 1776 by men who believed that there were things worse than death—that principles enjoyed primacy over the sustenance of life for its own sake. They knew there was a good chance they would either die during their insurrection or be hanged later if they failed. Their letters and journals reveal that they worried about what punitive indignities the British might visit upon their families. But passivity was not an option.
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Oct 21, 2023 | 
quillette.com | John Lloyd |Steve Salerno |Aaron Sarin
The citizens of Poland have voted. A government that combined conservative Catholicism with “soft” Euroscepticism (they won’t leave the European Union but they despise it) will now likely be replaced by a government led by a passionate EU advocate. This will be as radical and wrenching as Donald Trump’s assumption of US power in 2017 after eight years of Barack Obama. Radical and wrenching political transformations are presently in vogue.
