As we enter our third Covid year, much of the world is getting back to normal. Denmark yesterday dropped most of its Covid restrictions and welcomed back “the life we knew before”. In the UK, face masks and Covid passports …
Putin’s next move
A couple of weeks ago, in a biting sleet wind, I visited the graveyard of the tiny village of Bohoniki in Poland’s far north east, home to Poland’s minuscule Tatar Muslim minority, descendents of the Mongol Golden Horde. On the …
How Biden can defeat China
In 1930, John Dos Passos wrote that America is many things: it is a “slice of a continent”, “the world’s greatest river valley”, and “a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts”. “But mostly,” he wrote in The …
Why pop can’t escape the Eighties
Last year, the Canadian musician Tamara Lindeman, who performs as the Weather Station, explained to Uncut that her new album Ignorance was influenced by pop, but not just any old pop: “Eighties pop music, which was, I think, the best …
Why is the Right so unattractive?
Political tribes enjoy attacking their opponents. It is what they do. Far less appealing is the idea of applying the same criticism to your own side. No doubt this stems from a desire not to give ammunition to one’s political …
The truth about the Women’s March
Five years after the Women’s March, it’s hard to remember how much changed in 2016: politics, seemingly overnight, became the most popular entertainment of the day.
It’s not that there hadn’t been things for Leftists to protest. But even as …
The rise of the literary noble savage
According to elite cultural consensus, the great villain in America is the white male, so it’s only logical that publishing would run the toxic literary bad boys off. But this hatred is only levelled at the American man. Other talents …
The Texas synagogue attack won’t be the last
“At one point, our attacker instructed us to get on our knees. I reared up in my chair, stared at him sternly… and mouthed ‘no’.”
It’s easy to read Jeffrey Cohen’s account of being held hostage in a Texan synagogue …
Why Biden has sacrificed Ukraine
Every January I think of eastern Ukraine. Wherever I am in the world, it’s never as cold as the winter months I spent there during the height of war between Kyiv and Moscow between 2014-2015. Technology stops working, your knees …
Parents are the new political tribe
Shortly after Glenn Youngkin was sworn in as governor of Virginia on Saturday, he issued a flurry of day-one executive orders. With those initial actions, the first Republican to win statewide in the Commonwealth since 2009 was true to the …
This is not how civil wars start
I moved recently to a remote part of Northern California, where in a couple weeks an election will decide whether or not allies of the local militia take control of the county government. It’s a fraught situation, in a part …
Kamala Harris was set up to fail
When I was a young girl in Somalia, I would listen to the grown-ups around me ask my brother: “What would you like to be when you grow up?” No one ever asked me this.
But I always interrupted. I …
Tribalism has come to the West
About a decade ago, when I worked for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), I had to force myself to go to lunch with a friend. I dreaded the meeting because I knew that she was going to try to convince …