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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Christopher Sandford |Niall Ferguson |Roger Kimball |Tim Rice
The Peaceable Kingdom probably isn’t the first place you would have looked for Kurt Cobain. Of all the ironies and confusions of his brief life, perhaps none was as pointed as his choosing to kill himself in a room overlooking that sign, announcing Seattle’s upscale Leschi neighborhood, with its sweeping views of Lake Washington and the snow-capped mountains beyond.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Chilton Williamson |Niall Ferguson |Roger Kimball |Tim Rice
Journalists have never been noted for originality in their choice of metaphor, so readers must be wearied by now of hearing that the world is on fire. Skeptics will observe that the flames have been more or less constant for well over a century, as the major powers and their allies, satellites and acolytes maneuver to establish, or reestablish, global power or hegemony. In fact, the present crisis extends well beyond the collapse of the international order that prevailed since 1945.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Philip Clark |Niall Ferguson |Roger Kimball |Tim Rice
In the mid-1950s, alongside his close friend and intimate confidant John Coltrane, the revered saxophonist Sonny Rollins completely revolutionized notions about how the tenor saxophone could function within modern jazz.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Roger Kimball |Niall Ferguson |Tim Rice |Matt McDonald
Just as night watchmen are constrained by duty to make their rounds, so are writers about wine. Sometimes the rounds are seasonal. Beaujolais Nouveau, for example, is released every year on the third Thursday of November at 12:01 a.m., just a few weeks after the September harvest. Gamay, the grape that makes Beaujolais, can be fresh, floral and ruby-like in this nymphet incarnation.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Marc Oestreich |Niall Ferguson |Roger Kimball |Tim Rice
At the turn of the twentieth century, Saturday Evening Post editor and Yale dropout George Lorimer bitingly summed up academia when he said “colleges don’t make fools, they only develop them.” On the heels of yet another multibillion-dollar Biden administration college bailout, it seems we haven’t learned the lesson: colleges might not make fools, but they’re certainly trying to make fools of us.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Birdie Hall |Niall Ferguson |Roger Kimball |Tim Rice
The most fastidious of us prepare for the marathon of our first labor and birth, but still fail to wrap our minds around the unpredictable onslaught of intense sensations that breastfeeding brings. I knew that only a genuine catastrophe would prevent me from birthing my baby at home with a midwife, and I didn’t leave the prospect of using formula as a feasible outcome in any possible world. Despite this, I had no idea that my initiation into breastfeeding would amount to psychospiritual martyrdom.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | James Delingpole |Niall Ferguson |Roger Kimball |Tim Rice
Here’s a frightening thought for those of you who remember the original Shōgun (1980), starring Richard Chamberlain as the Elizabethan navigator who ends up playing kingmaker amid the power struggles in the Japan of 1600. We are now further away in time from that series than that series was from the beginning of World War Two.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Cosmo Landesman |Niall Ferguson |Roger Kimball |Tim Rice
Recently, I was walking down a London street when on the pavement I spotted a worm. It was so motionless I wasn’t sure if it was alive or dead. Normally, I would have passed the worm by without a second thought. But I’d just been to my local park to do stretches, meditation, breathing exercises and to hug my favorite tree. Yes, I have become a tree hugger. I actually put my arms around the tree trunk — or as much as I can manage.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | William Newton |Niall Ferguson |Roger Kimball |Tim Rice
Five years have passed since a major fire swept through the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris on April 19, 2019, bringing down the church’s roof but sparing the rest of the building. In response, French president Emmanuel Macron immediately promised that the structure, which is owned by the state, would be rebuilt quickly, and more beautiful than before. He further promised that the cathedral would be ready to receive worshipers and visitors in time for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore |Niall Ferguson |Roger Kimball |Tim Rice
Merrily We Roll Along starts in 1976, at a party held by big-shot Hollywood producer Franklin Shepard, who is surrounded by stars (not least his second wife, a veteran Broadway siren, and his young lover, the nubile leading actress of his latest hit movie). It ends in 1957, with stars of a different kind: constellations in an inky sky that provoke awe and inspiration for a younger, more naive Frank, as he sits on a rooftop with friends Mary and Charlie, dreaming about their future.
