America

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The dark side of chess players

Spinning a line Sir: Roger Alton is too enthusiastic about the Hundred tournament (Sport, 24 August) – I can’t recall another sport that has so successfully alienated its entire support base. Before the season ends, I encourage Roger to watch his local cricket team and ask for their thoughts about the Hundred. He will find that most are terribly unhappy. While it has attracted a few big names in the men’s, we have no Indian powerhouses and few Australian heavyweights; other franchises round the world are, simply put, outcompeting us. Overseas investment will inevitably increase the number of teams and widen the window of play into most of July, similar

Tuesday

Sam Leith

Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at. Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and

Wednesday

James Walton

Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed

Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away. Before the opening titles, we’d already heard from Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and the late Henry Kissinger. We’d also seen the lines drawn up as to how its bold subtitle might be answered. It is an authentically confusing programme, where any firm moral position doesn’t stay firm for long As Clinton put it, in 1945 a question emerged whose implications would dominate post-war US foreign policy: ‘Why didn’t we do more to try to prevent the transport of the Jews?’ The immediate response was the heartfelt yet potentially

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Will the real Kamala Harris please stand up?

About five minutes ago, the one Democrat more certain to lose to Donald Trump than Joe Biden was his widely ridiculed vice president. Party wonks despaired that their elderly candidate was handicapped by a veep whose prospective ascendence to the presidency terrified voters. Dems anguished about needing to sideline an unpopular ‘woman of colour’. Remember the many theories about how best to get shed of the woman – perhaps with the booby prize of a Supreme Court seat? Five minutes ago, Republicans gleefully celebrated that, by honouring the crude rubrics of identity politics, Democrats had burdened themselves with an incompetent diversity hire. I, too, briefly shrugged off Biden’s endorsement of

Tuesday

Madeleine Feeny

Absinthe and the casual fling: Ex-Wife, by Ursula Parrott, reviewed

‘Ex-wives like us illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men,’ quips Patricia, the flapper heroine of the American novelist Ursula Parrott’s 1929 bestseller, which, republished nearly a century later, reveals striking contemporary resonances. Both timeless and unmistakably of its time, this candid portrait of marital breakdown, and the life of a girl about town in Jazz Age New York, took the US by storm at a moment when dawning sexual liberties jostled with lingering Victorian values. Parrott married in 1923, before birth control was legal, and had a son in secret, against her husband’s wishes. She left him with her family, until

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The rootlessness that haunts the children of immigrants

As a child, Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. The only uniform the young Wong associated with his parent was the red blazer of Sampan Café, the Chinese take-away his father worked at in Virginia. China was seldom spoken of, with Wong getting only snatches and hints of what seemed like a painful family history – one the adults were keen to brush over. But, like many second-generation immigrants, Wong gravitated towards his father’s homeland in a bid to better understand the man. His parents’ silence only compounded the enigma. Wong attended Xi’s military parades in central Beijing, just as his

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Why Elon Musk is right to leave California

Not long before Joe Biden finally accepted defeat, Gavin Newsom, the 56-year-old governor of California, was on the stump for him in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, shirt undone two daring buttons, sleeves rolled up, silver hair gelled just so. Newsom, who is now being mentioned as Kamala Harris’s running mate, models himself on Bill Clinton. People who’ve worked with him say he practises Clintonian gestures in the mirror, though the look he’s achieved is more Harley Street gynaecologist. How can Gavin Newsom sleep knowing he’s encouraged children to think of their parents as the enemy? ‘If Donald Trump succeeds, God help us, we will roll back the last half-century,’ Newsom told

Yascha Mounk

How supporting Trump became cool

For the past decade, the basic lines of conflict in American public life seemed clear. Donald Trump was pitted against the establishment, the ‘basket of deplorables’ who supported him against the elites. The reality was more complicated. Yes, plenty of rich and powerful Americans supported Trump and plenty of poorer Americans on the fringes of society were against him. But in a certain section of society the disdain for Trump was unequivocal. Among the country’s elite – at Harvard and Stanford, at Google and Goldman, near the beaches of the Hamptons and the mountains around Aspen – anyone who defied the anti-Trump consensus could expect swift consequences for their social

Douglas Murray

Will we always have Paris?

There are times when you might be fooled into believing all is well. I had a moment of such weakness the other day when I saw our new Prime Minister welcoming his European counterparts to a summit at Blenheim Palace. When Keir Starmer came down the steps to greet King Charles, he even did a pretty good job of pretending he wasn’t just Airbnb-ing the place for a few days. At such points our country can look at peace. The English baroque architecture stood out against a blue sky and everything in England seemed to go on as it should. If the Olympics go off safely it will be because

Michael Wolff

The mystery of Melania Trump

While everybody at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was preoccupied with Donald Trump’s triumphal story after the assassination attempt and the prospect of near-certain victory in November, I dwelled on that low-rumble question of the 2024 election: where’s Melania? She had not made one campaign appearance, nor been at her husband’s side for his myriad courtroom dates. A theme of the proceedings was the adoration of Trump family members for their patriarch. From the stage, his sons and their wives extolled him as the greatest family man of all time. But no Melania. Finally, at the last moment on Thursday, when her husband had already left the VIP box,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The curious rise of Kamala Harris

I’m struck just in your presence,’ a news anchor gushed to Kamala Harris in January. The Vice President beamed, nodding for her interviewer to continue. ‘You hear candidates suggesting that a vote for President Biden, because of his age, is a vote for you.’ The reporter paused: ‘And that is hurled as an insult.’ Harris explained that this is the price women pay for professional success – in her case, rising from first female attorney general in California to state senator to Vice President of the United States. ‘I love my job,’ Harris concluded, wrapping up the kind of hard-hitting interview the media tends to throw her way. Insult or

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Does Donald fear Kamala?

On Monday, Donald J. Trump sent out an urgent campaign memo. ‘Joe Biden just dropped out of the race, and now, his replacement has just been announced,’ it said. ‘It’s me!’ How typically Donald. If Trump were worried about the sudden replacement of Biden with Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, he’d never show it. He’s already busy pointing towards polls that suggest ‘Lyin’ Kamala’ is the least popular vice president in history. He’s calling her ‘Dumb as a rock’ and emphasising her abysmal performance as Biden’s ‘border tsar’. Trump’s campaign staff, meanwhile, are insisting that they knew all along Harris would at some point be the

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Will Kamala Harris implode? With Alex Castellanos

36 min listen

Freddy Gray is joined by political consultant Alex Castellanos to discuss the candidacy of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ nominee for President and why, at this moment, she is the biggest threat to Donald Trump – but how long will that last? This was originally recorded for Spectator TV.  Produced by Natasha Feroze and Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

David Lammy’s Trump problem

There’s no shortage of people who have spent recent years comparing Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler. Among other places, the comparison has been made on magazine covers from America to Germany. Neither is it uncommon for people to say that Trump is planning to usher in an authoritarian state and is a Nazi, neo-Nazi or similar. After the attempted assassination of Trump last Saturday the people who went in for this sort of thing are in a certain bind. On the one hand they seem to sense that urging on the assassination of a political opponent is not a good look. On the other they can’t just reverse course and

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Meet the techno-optimists hoping to save the world

Future House is a weird private members’ club. There’s a mattress on the floor for napping, a bathtub designed to hold ice and bottled beers, a robot dog imported from China and a purple neon sign that reads: ‘Just F***ing Build Something.’ Around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, the place is rammed. ‘I missed the dotcom era, I’m not missing this one,’ someone says. ‘People need to stop moaning about artificial intelligence,’ says another. Future House, in an old coaching house in Hackney, is described on its website as ‘London’s techno-optimist members’ club’. Techno-optimism? Adherents believe that technological progress is the best way to fix the world’s problems. Techno-optimism is

James Heale James Heale

Meet the MAGA megafans

Milwaukee, Wisconsin If you want to see how Donald Trump has changed his party, look at what attendees wore to this week’s convention in Milwaukee. Gone are the days when Republicans plumped for preppy blazers and demure khakis; now the fashion is for ostentatious displays of red, white and blue. Even the red ‘MAGA’ baseball caps of 2016 have been eclipsed, replaced by this year’s must-have accessory of the cowboy hat – a classic symbol of rugged individualism. It’s a sartorial revolution, as well as a political one. ‘Everyone loves having their photo taken,’ says one press photographer. ‘It’s like Halloween’ Brash, flash and full of flair, Trump’s supporters wear

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump now unstoppable?

‘You’re gonna be so blessed,’ said Pastor James Roemke, doing a pretty good Donald Trump impersonation in the warm-up to his Benediction of the Republican National Convention on Monday. ‘You’re gonna be tired of being blessed, I guarantee it, believe me.’ Sitting in the stands with a bandage on his ear, Trump enjoyed the joke – a riff on his famous line from 2016 about ‘winning’. He smiled almost beatifically for the cameras. In the wake of the shooting, Trump has begun to sound, believe it or not, graceful and magnanimous It was poignant, too, because in his case it seemed so true: God, or some supernatural force beyond our understanding,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Why Trump forgave J.D. Vance

It shows a remarkable level of confidence from Donald Trump that he’s chosen for his running-mate the man who once called him ‘America’s Hitler’. J.D. Vance, the 39-year-old junior senator from Ohio, made the private comment in 2016, as he rose to fame off the back of his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy. The book recounts what it was like to grow up in a deprived rust-belt town, where his family and neighbours had ‘no college degree’ and ‘poverty’s the family tradition’. Vance escaped by joining the US Marine Corps, which included a tour in Iraq. Once home, his degrees from Ohio State University and Yale took him to California, where he

Tuesday

Boyd Tonkin

Portrait of an artistic provocateur: Blue Ruin, by Hari Kunzru, reviewed

Whatever happened to the likely lads and lasses of the East London art scene at the high noon of Cool Britannia? Hari Kunzru’s seventh novel, Blue Ruin, loads much else on to its ideas-rich plate – not least a pandemic yarn set in the panic-stricken spring of 2020. At its core, however, his plot traces contrasting afterlives from the Sensation generation. It reconnects three survivors – two male artists and the woman both loved – from a time when making conceptual art could feel like ‘a kind of social repair’, even a ‘utopian laboratory’. In his earlier career, Kunzru himself seemed to belong in a gilded group of younger British

Thursday

Melissa Kite

A visit to ye olde Ireland

The £80 million super-yacht with a helicopter on the upper deck sat in the harbour, and we sat outside the ice-cream parlour in an old banger that had broken down. Our dear next-door neighbour in Ireland had taken us to chi-chi Glengarriff in the Beara peninsula and had insisted on driving us, because she has her car crammed full of essential clobber, like her walking sticks and a shopping basket nicked from the local supermarket in which she stashes her supply of duty-free cigarettes. The sheep-shearing, diddly-dee Ireland they have, very cleverly, preserved for the Americans We made a motley crew, the builder boyfriend and me and this doughty Irish