spectator april 2022

FROM THE MAGAZINE

April 2022

Spectator Editorial

What is conservatism for?

The right is willing to entertain a bewildering range of possibilities these days

By Spectator Editorial

From the Magazine

Return to Hollywood

I think I’ve cornered the market in being a national conservative who actually knows anything about the entertainment industry

By Amanda Milius

From the Magazine

Europe

Marine Le Pen’s last stand?

Crunch time for the darling and demon of the French right

By Kapil Komireddi

From the Magazine

Business

The United States of Uber

What a delight when a driver tells you not to mask up

By Chadwick Moore

From the Magazine

Politics

Joe Biden is winning

Biden is nothing if not spectacularly persistent in the one cause that has animated his entire career

By John R. MacArthur

From the Magazine

Politics

Fight for the right

A symposium on the future of American conservatism

By The Spectator

From the Magazine

Internet

A state of virtual war

Most of us can’t tell the difference between high-quality video games and actual war

By Bridget Phetasy

From the Magazine

Culture

Hollywood, fist-fights and getting canceled

Joan Collins and Taki in conversation

By Joan Collins and Taki

From the Magazine

Education

Was Penelope really a ‘silenced’ woman?

She stands up to her suitors and they admire her trick to delay her marriage

By Peter Jones

From the Magazine

Science & Tech

How science fiction novels read the future

Science fiction can prepare us for what happens next

By Niall Ferguson

From the Magazine

COVID

I’m done being a crazy Covid lady

We can’t sustain this extreme fear forever

By Daniella Greenbaum Davis

From the Magazine

Culture

Why David Mamet went right

The playwright has undergone a conversion. He’s an apostate now

By Oliver Wiseman

From the Magazine

Europe

The last American tourist

How does it feel to be an American tourist in such a tourist-free world?

By Christopher Caldwell

From the Magazine

Books + Arts

Books

Waugh in Hollywood

Seventy-five years ago, Evelyn Waugh headed to Hollywood to sell Brideshead Revisited

By Alexander Larman

From the Magazine

Book Review

Fit to print

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War by Deborah Cohen reviewed

By Anne Sebba

From the Magazine

Book Review

Diversifying democracy

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk reviewed

By Christopher J. Scalia

From the Magazine

Books

Femmes fatales in fiction and life

American literature is intensely preoccupied with the beautiful female psychopath

By Susan Jonusas

From the Magazine

Book Review

A private life

Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 by Ludwig Wittgenstein, edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff, reviewed

By Micah Mattix

From the Magazine

Book Review

Beautiful and damned

Astrid Sees All by Natalie Standiford reviewed

By Philip Womack

From the Magazine

Books

Dirty realists

The beauty of dirty realism is that it captures regular life in all its stupefying, and sometimes transcendent, malaise

By Alex Perez

From the Magazine

Exhibitions

Holbein at the Morgan

Holbein’s heroes have arrived in New York City

By James Panero

From the Magazine

Music

England’s cowpat modernist

Ralph Vaughan Williams is caricatured as a populist purveyor of ‘folky-wolky’ melodies

By Richard Bratby

From the Magazine

Music

Messenger service

First Flight to Tokyo by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers reviewed

By Jacob Heilbrunn

From the Magazine

Theater

Michael Jackson on Broadway

MJ: The Musical reviewed

By Robert S. Erickson

From the Magazine

Film

Troubles in paradise

Belfast reviewed

By Alex Perez

From the Magazine

Film

Buster’s land stand

Buster Keaton is again of the moment

By Peter Tonguette

From the Magazine

Podcasts

Power couple

Cover Story: Power Trip and Power Corrupts reviewed

By Jessa Crispin

From the Magazine

Life

High Life

The joylessness of Joan Didion

The author took herself extremely seriously

By Taki

From the Magazine

Low Life

The healing power of medieval austerity

After a morning at a 15th-century priory, and lunch at the Café de France, I rejoined the ranks of the alive and well

By Jeremy Clarke

From the Magazine

London Life

The rise of the Busy People

The world needs busy people to keep turning — and someone has to pick up the tab

By Cosmo Landesman

From the Magazine

American Life

A eulogy for the Democrats of yore

Remember the last invigorating spasm before the body of the party achieved corpsehood?

By Bill Kauffman

From the Magazine

Prejudices

The ultimate human futility of sports

Sports would not have survived Classical Greece and the Roman Empire

By Chilton Williamson, Jr.

From the Magazine

Place

Place

Who killed Dicky?

A cold case in a hot place

By Aidan Hartley

From the Magazine

Place

Souvlaki with graffiti

Even the graffiti can’t undo the light over Athens. It bathes the city in a serene glow

By James Jeffrey

From the Magazine

Food and Drink

Food

The real food of Venice

The Venetians still love black food pulled from the lagoon that saved them

By Tanya Gold

From the Magazine

Food

Table talk

Unknowingly, my parents were playing a part in a rapidly disappearing American scene: families conversing civilly around a table

By Calla Jones Corner

From the Magazine

Food

Spring’s perfect roast

For Easter, why not plan a crown roast of lamb?

By Jane Stannus

From the Magazine

Drink

Tastes of paradise

Blue skies, periodic showers that freshen the verdure and intelligent governance from Ron DeSantis: no wonder they call it paradise

By Roger Kimball

From the Magazine

And Finally

And Finally

Cricket in Buenos Aires

In the nineteenth century, the sport was played across Latin America

By Andreas Campomar

From the Magazine

And Finally

What does ice cream have to do with ‘late capitalism’?

I dislike postmodernist architecture and big business being beastly to workers, but late capitalism seems to me quite a feeble cliché

By Dot Wordsworth

From the Magazine