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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Deborah Ross |Ross Anderson |cocaineBy James Delingpole |Will Collins
Mickey 17 is the latest film from the South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho, who won an Oscar for Parasite and made Snowpiercer and Okja. It’s a dystopian sci-fi satire starring Robert Pattinson twice over (all will be explained) but while it initially kicks some decent ideas around, it eventually descends into a cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci comic caper with, as far as I could ascertain, nothing fresh to say. It’s not the biggest disappointment I’ve had in my life but it’s up there.
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2 months ago | 
theamericanconservative.com | Will Collins |Rod Dreher
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... In Western Ukraine, a country roughly the size of Texas, the signs of war are subtle but unmistakable. The Ukrainian frontier guards are mostly female, in contrast to the mixed Hungarian contingent at the border town of Záhony. At a hotel in Lviv, the largest city in the region, the concierge informs you that the hotel restaurant doubles as a bomb shelter with the air of someone who has long grown used to such pronouncements.
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Jan 1, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Will Collins |Katja Hoyer |Joseph Moreno |Ben Domenech
“Very fine people on both sides” was one of the first Trumpisms to enter our national lexicon. In the heady days of 2017, when Donald Trump’s presence in the White House was still a novelty and liberal resistance at its peak, the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia precipitated a full-blown political crisis.
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Dec 13, 2024 | 
washingtonexaminer.com | Will Collins
Death hasn’t diminished Tom Clancy’s output. Since the spy novelist’s death in 2013, a team of writers has churned out Clancy-branded thrillers at regular intervals. The new Dune television series is based not on Frank Herbert’s original novel but on a series of spinoffs written by Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert. The implacable logic of the Hollywood franchise, which prizes intellectual property over individual authorship, has lately been adopted by the publishing industry.
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Nov 29, 2024 | 
theamericanconservative.com | Will Collins |Catesby Leigh
Architecture
When Suburbia Was Weird
A modernist enclave in the nation’s capital celebrates its 75th anniversary.
Geography, not design, is the main determinant of housing prices in the Washington, DC, suburbs. A garish McMansion in the leafy inner ring will fetch far more than a charming bungalow out by Harper’s Ferry. If suburban Northern Virginia has an architectural signifier, it’s a faux-colonial style that vaguely evokes the region’s fading Southern character.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
washingtonexaminer.com | Will Collins
Quick, what issue unites Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom? You’d be hard-pressed to find many topics that the conservative stalwart and his progressive counterpart agree on, but the Florida and California governors have both signed bills that restrict phone use in public schools. Ohio, South Carolina, and several other states have recently followed suit. A rare moment of bipartisan comity seems poised to upend our previously lax approach to social media-addled children.
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Oct 10, 2024 | 
washingtonexaminer.com | Will Collins
In the space of a few decades, fantasy has transformed from a vaguely disreputable genre to a multibillion-dollar behemoth that touches everything from film to television to miniature wargaming. Gone are the days of misanthropes digging through stacks of tattered paperbacks in the back of used bookstores. Modern fantasy novels rate glossy covers, Hollywood adaptations, and chin-scratching considerations in prestige media. What happened?
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Lisa Haseldine |Monica Porter |Caleb Quinley |Will Collins
In what will surely come as a relief to the German chancellor Olaf Scholz, his SPD party has won this weekend’s state elections in Brandenburg. Securing themselves another term in power, the party squeaked past the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) with 30.7 percent of the vote. The AfD missed out by just 1.2 percentage points — less than 26,000 votes — with 29.5 percent of the vote, denying them the chance of a second victory at state level in three weeks.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Gavin Mortimer |Zoe Strimpel |Paul Wood |Will Collins
France can’t go on like this. The country, and its overseas territories, are in chaos. On Wednesday night two men in New Caledonia were shot dead by security forces after a confrontation on the Pacific Island. The insurgency began in May and shows no sign of abating with the rebels determined to gain their independence from France. In total, thirteen people have been killed and the damaged caused in the uprising is estimated to be €2.2 billion ($2.45 billion) and rising.
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Sep 14, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Mark Galeotti |Nicholas Farrell |Will Collins |Eliot Wilson
When is slower internet better than none at all? When are travel delays more serious a political challenge than threats of nuclear war? These questions acquired particular significance with the news that Stockholm’s Arlanda airport was temporarily closed this week when several drones intruded into its airspace. Investigations are still in progress, but the police are suggesting this was deliberate sabotage and suspicion is already falling on Moscow.
