May 2021 Spectator Cover

FROM THE MAGAZINE

May 2021

Politics

Racism has become a kind of theory of everything

Biden’s presidency has done nothing to abate racial paranoia. On the contrary, it’s getting more feverish

By Tom Slater

From the Magazine

Education

The truth about beauty

Beauty speaks with such great immediacy because it touches something deep within us

By Roger Kimball

From the Magazine

Economics

How the right fell out of love with markets

Many of capitalism’s most vocal critics are now found on the American right

By Samuel Gregg

From the Magazine

Religion

How I became Hispanic

Learning to love my inner Latino

By Leon Hadar

From the Magazine

Russia

Putin and Biden need one another

The American and Russian presidents have been taking potshots at each other for at least a decade

By Owen Matthews

From the Magazine

Europe

Elena Ferrante’s Italian job

Ferrante was the Flaubert of the Pantsuit Nation, a harbinger of Hillary’s page-turning presidency

By Dominic Green

From the Magazine

Religion

Made of honor: the complexities of a COVID wedding

Attention-shy couples can elope guilt-free, while bridezillas get to be bossier than ever

By Mary Kate Skehan

From the Magazine

I’m leaving America with a lack of faith in its media

I’m leaving the big show, canceling my print subscriptions, packing up my DC apartment and chucking away all those unread back issues of the Atlantic

By Josh Glancy

From the Magazine

Politics

Who fears a society that hates itself?

Masochists of the West, unite!

By Lionel Shriver

From the Magazine

China

How China is stoking America’s racial tensions

A government that would never dream of allowing free elections in its own country mocks America’s democratic process

By Ian Williams

From the Magazine

Spectator Editorial

Grand Old Problem

The American right is ideologically confused

By Spectator Editorial

From the Magazine

Religion

Toxic trads

Nobody is saved by a ‘worldview’

By Grayson Quay

From the Magazine

Europe

France wakes up to Woke

Paris is a target-rich environment for excitable racial separatists and merchants of grievance

By Jonathan Miller

From the Magazine

Politics

The notorious MTG

Is Marjorie Taylor Greene really that bad?

By Amber Duke

From the Magazine

Business

Boycott corporate America!

It’s conservatives versus woke capitalism

By Matt Purple

From the Magazine

Politics

The strange death of the Democrats

The party will decline because it has a demographic problem

By Daniel McCarthy

From the Magazine

Books + Arts

Film

A film festival fiasco in Narrowsburg, New York

Castellano and Castaldo descended upon Narrowsburg with a gust of wind, declaring that they would open an acting school, start a film festival and make it ‘the Sundance of the East’

By Nicky Otis Smith

From the Magazine

Film

Korean film has mastered the supernatural horror genre

For those of us who have followed Korean film for many years, the triumph of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden or the living-dead series Kingdom on Netflix came as no surprise

By Lawrence Osborne

From the Magazine

Film

Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans

For Cousteau, scientific investigation, combined with the potential for good image-making, presented an unavoidable hazard to sea life

By James Panero

From the Magazine

Book Review

Is Sohrab Ahmari a Satanic ogre?

The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari reviewed

By Daniel McCarthy

From the Magazine

Music

A prog rock progress

Steven Wilson is going about becoming a pop musician entirely the wrong way

By Michael Hann

From the Magazine

Books

Berlin has always been a Faustian metropolis

A new history of east and west, best and worst

By William Cook

From the Magazine

Books

My war of words

The agony of watching friends succeed

By Cosmo Landesman

From the Magazine

Art

More than a Klan man

Philip Guston’s work shows the hopelessness, the struggle of making art

By Hermione Eyre

From the Magazine

Podcasts

School of hard Knox

As Amanda Knox walks listeners through the day of her arrest, it’s apparent she is still upset

By Emily Ferguson

From the Magazine

Music Review

I’m turning Japanese

In the Eighties, Japan had prosperity, optimism, loads of bizarre porn and the solace of technological gadgetry

By Luke Haines

From the Magazine

Book Review

Read all over

Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s ‘Girl Stunt Reporters’ by Kim Todd reviewed

By Katrina Gulliver

From the Magazine

Book Review

Devil in the details

Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall reviewed

By Jamie Collinson

From the Magazine

Book Review

Thomas Hennell should be more widely known

Thomas Hennell: The Land and the Mind by Jessica Kilburn reviewed

By Andrew Lambirth

From the Magazine

Book Review

The weeping wounds of Algeria

The Art of Losing and Tomorrow They Won’t Dare Murder Us reviewed

By Boyd Tonkin

From the Magazine

Life

Home

The rise of the celebrity politician

In his own mind, every celebrity fancies himself or herself as a Philosopher King- or Queen-in-Waiting

By Chilton Williamson, Jr.

From the Magazine

Place

Bath time

If you have lived in Bath since the beginning of the pandemic you might not have noticed the changes so viscerally

By Ben Sixsmith

From the Magazine

Home

What is true in life is true in baseball is true in politics

A circuit that was born in Batavia in 1939 died in Manhattan’s oppressive Time-Life Building

By Bill Kauffman

From the Magazine

Home

The marvels of the Connaught Hotel

Charles de Gaulle was a resident during World War Two

By Mark Mason

From the Magazine

Low Life

My reintroduction to the human race

Time and again in France I have found that the greater the offense the more easily one is forgiven

By Jeremy Clarke

From the Magazine

Protesting too much

The closer to the voters the people involved in making the laws, the better the chance of their general acceptance

By Peter Jones

From the Magazine

Home

The cure for everything

Unlike elsewhere, Kenya’s cities throng with life: crowded markets, gridlocked traffic, busy bars and shops

By Aidan Hartley

From the Magazine

High Life

Let the barbarians cancel whoever they like

Poor young Americans are now expected to uphold woke standards on their way to becoming total simpletons

By Taki

From the Magazine

Food and Drink

Food

Can the Mayr diet work at home?

It’s amazing, but when you chew something 60 times, a piece of broccoli starts to taste sumptuous, complex, irresistible

By Philip Hensher

From the Magazine

Food

The chowder crowd

A New England classic

By Calla Jones Corner

From the Magazine

Drink

A tale of two tapas

Vintners’ Punic victories

By Roger Kimball

From the Magazine

Food

Can I be vegetarian and conservative?

As a vegetarian on the right, I would argue that there is nothing ‘traditional’ about modern livestock production

By Ben Sixsmith

From the Magazine