Just days before the election, America’s destiny rests on that Valhalla of oddsmakers, Las Vegas. “If we win Nevada, we’re going to win the whole thing,” vowed Trump, and for once he was not exaggerating. Nevada not only holds the …
America’s future isn’t fascist
“Weird” does not begin to describe the American atmosphere at this moment. The media and internet seethe with talk of civil war; but everyone is going about their daily business. The weather is uncanny: temperatures in the Northeast, where I …
Bruce Springsteen is the last American liberal
Memories of 11 September, and the dark days that followed, are universal among geriatric American millennials. As a member of the generation that came of age in the Nineties and early 2000s, I can easily return to those early hours …
Why women love Ryan Murphy’s Monsters
Crass, titillating and (at best) casual with the truth, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story takes an instance of real-life cruelty and violence and twists it into oversexed entertainment. It implies an incestuous connection between the two brothers whose …
How the Mob went mainstream
As far back as he can remember, Michael Franzese always wanted to be a gangster. Just head online if you don’t believe me. There, across dozens of videos and thousands of views, the former caporegime in the Colombo crime family …
Donald Trump’s strange sincerity
The faster American culture spreads, the less foreigners seem to understand it. In October, the Irish novelist Anne Enright shared a few thoughts about the US elections. “[T]hese politics are playing out in some secret part of the American psyche,” …
When Trump fed the press a nothingburger
In his 1991 song “New Jack Hustler”, Ice T tells a tale that was already a gangsta rap cliche when the song was released — a narrator’s first-person story of his career as a successful seller of drugs, a busy …
Would you move to Mother Russia?
Last year, Tucker Carlson scandalised America by travelling to Russia and interviewing Vladimir Putin. As US viewers denounced the idea that one ought to speak to an enemy such as Putin, Tucker strolled around Moscow, filming himself taking the subway, …
How intersectionality killed feminism
You’d think that Suffs, a play about women’s suffrage, would be considered to be pretty progressive. It’s currently playing on Broadway, and has enjoyed broadly positive reviews from all the usual outlets. Yet earlier in the year, this most liberal …
Why Native Americans don’t vote
If voting is sacred, nobody told Ross John. “I’m not a voter in state and federal elections,” the 68-year-old businessman and Seneca nation citizen tells me, “because I’m not a US citizen.” Technically, John is an American. But his reaction …
The Democrat plan to censor America
The earthquake that struck Pompeii in 62AD was devastating. Houses were toppled, streets torn apart, and over 2000 people killed. The locals assumed that this was the whim of some intemperate god, rebuilt the city, and got on with their …
California’s woes were born in England
The more time you spend in California, the less sense its politics make. It’s progressive, of course. But the style of progressivism in the West Coast is distinct from that in the East, in roughly the same way that Silicon …
American capitalism is fatally flawed
America’s ability to build is now a matter of survival and recovery. It is a question of building not only factories in the Midwest or whole cities out of the wilderness, but also basic infrastructure in the aftermath of Hurricane …
How the City of Angels went to hell
A journey through Los Angeles, the adopted home of Vice President Kamala Harris, offers a masterclass in urban dysfunction. As you drive through the streets of the southside, and along Central Avenue, the historic main street of black LA, now …
America’s decline is inevitable
In 1968, the film Planet Of The Apes ended with the then-shocking shot of a half-submerged Statue of Liberty, revealing that the future dystopian world was none other than our own. The revelation has been part of Western consciousness for …